Live Wide Open: A Trip to Bolivia

My university was not my favorite place. It was very dry academically, incredibly misogynistic, and super conservative. One of the few good things about it was the mini-semester we had in January. It was an opportunity to do interesting, out of the box, creative activities. My favorite was the winter term in Service. Now I know the image you may have in your head of the college girl do-gooder. I gotta say some of that is true. My desires and intentions were good, though, and we had an awesome anthropology professor who drilled our privilege and how to not act like assholes into us.

I was on the committee to help decide which trips we would take in January of 1995. As I poured through an abundance of programs asking for volunteers and financial assistance, I came across a really lovely program operating in Bolivia. The Bolivian government pays for medical school for their citizens in exchange for two years spent providing medical services and teaching basic skills in remote areas. This program we worked with helped build the small clinics in rural areas so the doctors would have a place to see people. We would provide hands to help build, money to buy supplies, public health educators to spread basic information, and doctors and dentists to treat immediate situations for the three weeks we were there. I really liked the organization, their mission, and their financial efficiency. I also liked that they put the community members at the center of the project. It was my favorite, and I pushed hard for it. It made the cut, and I also managed to draw a good enough lottery number that I was able to pick the Bolivia trip for my Winter Term. It was my first trip out of the United States.

These were taken in 1995, so they're pretty horrible, and the Belizean climate has taken a toll on them. Anyway, downtown La Paz

I was 19, turning 20 during the trip. La Paz is way the hell up in the mountains. The city sits in a big bowl. In the middle there are big, modern skyscrapers, and all around the sides of the bowl are shanty towns. Little houses of plywood, cardboard, tin, and cloth. I have heard things are better there now, but in those days it was incredibly poor. Like I said, I had never left the US. It was all pretty shocking. Starving and crippled children, packs of wild dogs, markets with raw meat covered in flies. These are things that don’t phase me now, but they threw me for a loop then. Still I loved it. I was already getting the travel bug. Nearly being run over by crazy bus drivers only made things more interesting.

Coming from Indiana, weighing in at about 900 ft of altitude, the adjustment to 15,000 ft was a pretty big jump, so we spent the first weekend just hanging out in La Paz and exploring. I was enamored with food and crafts and markets and colorful dress. In a marvelous turn of fate, my boyfriend was on the same trip, so we had an absolute blast mostly wandering the hilly streets and eating. We made quite a few new friends from our school, and we were all excited to get to work.

Also downtown La Paz

The trip from La Paz to Ancoraimes was basically terrifying. When you look at the roads, it’s hard to imagine how two cars will pass each other, much less how a car and a bus will pass each other. One look out the window to notice we were mere inches from a cliff was enough to convince me to spend most of the ride with eyes closed. It’s incredibly beautiful, though. There’s very little growing, as we were headed up above 16,000 ft, deep in the mountains. It was kind of like a mountainous desert. Even though it was summer it was still quite chilly, and you could still see snow on the peaks.

View of Ancoraimes from the hill behind the village. That's Lake Titicaca in the background.444

Ancoraimes was our base, and we were sleeping in the hospital there on the floor of the main room. The town is an incredibly charming mountain town situated near Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake on the world. Narrow rock streets lined with colorful little houses and surrounded by grassy and shrubby mountains frequented by wild mountain goats. Our hosts were gracious with delicious food and Coca tea, which is really tasty and comforting. This was where I first had quinoa, which is a wonderful discovery, though I was initially certain it was actually maggots.

Ancoraimes

I was on the construction crew which was split in half so we would be able to build health centers in two different villages. On our first morning we loaded up to go to our different locations. The medical/dental/public health team would visit a new village each day to see as many people as possible. When we arrived at the building site, even those of us who didn’t know anything about building knew that we had quite the project ahead of us. Far up in the Andes the soil is hard and filled with rocks and most definitely not flat. And when I say rocks what I really mean is boulders. Really big boulders.

So we began the very difficult work of digging up a foundation. As volunteers - excessively privileged volunteers at that - our job was grunt work. We were digging a trench in rocky soil. As we dug, we periodically came across a rock too big to easily dig out, so there were a couple people tasked to just handling the giant rocks, digging around and under until you found the other side.

The building site. See all those rocks?!

Once a section of trench was dug, the men of the community would take the small rocks and fit them together like pieces of a puzzle. Women weren’t allowed to do this because it’s seen as “skilled.” Women were, however, allowed to make the long trek to the riverside, usually with a baby wrapped on her back or belly or both and fill and carry 50 pound bags of sand up to the building site. It is what it is. I kept my culturally sensitive mouth shut.

Toward the end of the day, there was still one stubborn rock that was just too big to dig out. Through the series of translators, English to Spanish then Spanish to the indigenous language, we asked about the possibility of dynamite. No running water or indoor plumbing, but they had dynamite. Just goes to show how much the exterior landscape affects our lives. As the dynamite was fetched, the big storm that had been hanging over Lake Titicaca started to amble toward us. It looked fierce, but we were all excited about dynamite, so we decided to wait it out to see if it would pass in time to still get to blow shit up before the end of the day.

The brewing storm

As the rain came, I made a beeline with my boyfriend for the bus. I had missed the notice that we weren't supposed to get on the bus because the dentists were pulling teeth. So I hung out in the doorway content with half covered. Most of the rest of our crew was squished under a tarp on the building site, along with all the villagers. A couple sweethearts stood out in the rain to hold the tarp.

I really don’t know how high we were. I guess we were 16,000, maybe 17,000 feet. It’s way up there. And on an iron-rich mountain. Lightning struck close to the bus, and I jumped about 10 feet in the air. A friend waiting by the outhouse did the same, and we laughed at each other. The next strike was shortly after, and it was much louder. I don’t know if you've been really close to a lightning strike way up in the mountains, but it's every bit as loud as a gun shot. And this one was followed by screaming and panic. I heard loud and commanding voices tell people to get on the bus. As people came running to the bus hysterically, I heard over and over, “She’s dead! She’s dead! Oh my God I know she’s dead.” I didn’t dare ask questions. Some people were clearly injured, including a close friend who was crying hysterically. A whole bunch of people were praying.

Then I saw the doctor carry a limp body onto the bus and lay her down on the front seat. The sound of cpr on a dead body is awful. I can’t really describe it, but it will haunt me forever. It’s air being pushed into something it no longer belongs in, something that no longer has life. After 15 minutes they stopped, and we found out that in addition to our friend, a little baby from the village had also died. Our dear friend Elizabeth was holding the tarp, and I guess the little metal grommet thing was enough to attract the lightning. It went through her body and hit the ground with enough force that it sent two men right next to her flying into the air, seriously injuring one of them, and killed the baby sitting on his mother's lap right in front of her. All that ride back to the hospital, we heard the grief stricken wailing of that baby’s poor mother. We all felt awful they had tried to save our friend who couldn’t be saved just because she was a white girl. We all wished they had tried to save the baby instead. Of course who knows. Maybe that baby wouldn’t have made it either.

That night we sat in circle together and talked about whatever we needed to say. There was a Doctor there who had been a medic in Vietnam, and he told us that a lot of cultures would have her there lying in the middle so they could see her, talk to her, touch her face. He wanted us to know it was ok to go look at her if we needed to. I’ve basically always known that western culture isn’t really my jam, so I figured it would help me. And it was so healing to see her beautiful face and touch her hair and hear her voice in my ear and know that she was really gone and that it was really ok. I heard her tell me to go and live wide open. Should you ever find yourself in a situation of saying goodbye to someone who has died and hasn’t been chemicalized yet, I highly recommend it. As a side, I hope you also know embalming is not a requirement in most places, and skipping it is a gift to you, as well as the planet.

Also on that trip was a former best friend from my high school years. We had a nasty split my junior year in high school. I was so pissed when I found out she was going to the same college as me. When I found out she was coming on the Bolivia trip, I almost didn’t go. I mean to tell you I hated this bitch. She was on the public health team, so she wasn’t in the same village when it happened, and it wasn’t clear to the other teams exactly who it was that had died. Of course communication in 1995 rural Bolivia was pretty primitive. She came to me sobbing at the hospital and said I was the first person she thought of when she heard because she never could have forgiven herself if I had died with that hatred between us. I had thought of her too. Don’t let people die with that between you.

The decision was made to go home. There were those who wanted to finish the project, but there were so many of us who just needed to be home with our moms. The university left a substantial enough amount of money to make finishing the project easier. However, arranging hotel in La Paz and flights back to the US for 50 or 60 kids was no small task, so we spent the next day mostly waiting. It was my 20th birthday. We hiked and prayed and whittled a cross out of two small pieces of wood and made small crosses out of the shavings for everyone in the group. When my ex mother in law, who also was involved with that same organization through the company she worked for, Water for People, went to that very hospital in Ancoraimes, Bolivia ten years later, that cross was still there. They named the health center after Elizabeth and the baby.

When we got back to La Paz, we went to see Elizabeth one last time at the funeral home, where she looked really horrible. Bolivian embalming is a little bit next level. And as it turns out, getting a body out of a country is extra hard. Her parents were US military who taught at a military brat school on a US base in England, so they had to get approval and do shitloads of paperwork from both the US and English embassies. Then we did what college kids do the night before having to get up insanely early to catch a flight. We shotgunned beers in the bathtub and got really drunk and cried a lot. All these years later, it’s amazing to me how emotional it still is.

For so many years I was terrified by the sound of lightning. For the first couple years, it would often make me cry. My children have always known that this is one thing I absolutely don’t play about. When the lightning gets close, they have to come inside. Every time. No exceptions. They know not to argue. At this point, I can hear a storm, and as long as it's not too close, it’s a sweet sound. I still think of her almost every time. I think it has probably made me worry a little more about my children. One of the few times I have ever seen my mother cry in public was when I stepped off the plane. They can be gone in an instant. I have found ways of managing the fear. My favorite is to close my eyes and see each of them surrounded by an impenetrable bubble of light.

Most importantly I learned to live life right now. I learned very viscerally how quickly it can be gone with no warning. One day she was there, and we were planning to go get Indian food together when we got home. And then she was gone. Of course we all know this intellectually. But really understanding it on a deep level at 19 was a really big deal. Then there was the lesson about hate. Oh I still get pissed at people, but I know what a waste of life energy hate is. I know that when it comes down to it, we don’t really actually hate anyone.

We had a memorial service a few months later. Her parents and sister came over from England for it. Of course we all felt awful for them, and they were so glad to meet us and hear our stories. And we sang Morning Has Broken, which I never knew was actually in a hymnal until then because of course they’d never sing that in the baptist church. It still makes me cry almost every time. And it helps me remember to recommit to living full force this one, beautiful life.

Morning has Broken

Live wide open, y'all. Thanks for reading.