Kollas, Kambas and other tid-bits

I don’t think I’ve portrayed quite enough how absolutely beautiful this country is. When I see pictures in a book or magazine I become more awe-struck at the snapshots that I see daily. From the sun-baked cheeks to the bleeding red hills and dusty braids, it is the simplicity that I find beautiful. Looking out the windows of a bus and seeing a village blend into the hillside because its construction materials come directly from the hill itself, and only the bright colors of traditional dress stick out like adornments on a christmas tree. Sometimes the people seem tired and worn down, but only from the outside perspective. I walked with an 82 year old woman yesterday who was laughing and joking and walking right alongside our stride after she caught a ride in our pickup truck to a remote, remote village where she lived and where my site-mate needed to check on some wells that need hand-pumps. I couldn’t help but thinking, people live here? But this is a place older than history, and I almost feel intrusive wanting to hear the secrets that sweep through the abandoned homes and bare fields.

Here in Bolivia, there is strong regional pride. The people from Santa Cruz (Kambas) love their hot, humid tropics and their oil and gas wealth that they even want autonomy from the rest of the country they see as inferior. Similarly people from Cochabamba and Sucre regions think their climate is superior and are starting to separate even further from us in the highlands. And finally people from La Paz, Oruro and Potosi (Kollas), have been living there so long they could never adapt to the hotter tropics and continue their indigenous existence without hindrance from the complaints down below. This is the political explanation in a nutshell, turmoil between the Kambas below (mostly of mixed descent) and the Kollas above (mostly of indigenous descent). Whenever I go to Cochabamba people tell me...”Oh, I’m so sorry you have to live in that sad, cold, place” and I smile back and say, “It’s quite beautiful really, I love it” Some foreigners here recently told me they could never live in a place so extreme and dry, and it made me feel pretty tough. But, I’ll admit there are times when I too must escape the cold nights but when I come back I feel even more at home.

I saw a topographically correct relief map of South America in an exhibit at the Tiahuanaco ruins outside of La Paz awhile ago and when I think about it, it reminds me once again just how unique this region that I live in is. This profound elongated piece of paper-mache stuck out like a sore-thumb so far above the rest of the entire country and continent boasting its unique altitude (and of course I know how much geography shapes about peoples) that with such an altitude, the people have to be unique and I attest that they truly are. So when I go down to regions that indeed are lovely in their own right, I think also how different they are from where I live now, yet very similar to most of latin america and yet there is almost nowhere else in the world that is similar to my home now, and that is only part of the adventure of being here.

Something I’ve read and truly understood recently is the idea of herding cultures, stricken with poverty, surviving in desert climates where they are able to convert the nutrients within the spiny foliage through the digestive process of the herded animal. Nothing else would be able to keep the people alive and I understand why, to a very large extent, why vegetarianism is such a foreign and almost impossible concept for their culture here. One of the major reasons vegetarian foreigners are able to continue their vegetarian eating habits is through imported and/or industrialized influenced products. Not that I am advocating either way, but sometimes meat is the only thing on the menu...with your potato that is.