I´ve spent the last five days staying with a friend from Couchsurfing who is volunteering in the Peace Corps; he´s stationed in a community called Candado Grande, just north of the Bolivian-Argentinian border town of Bermejo. Here he is next to his house (see left). What a change for me, I really did get off the ¨gringo trail¨ here. Candado Grande is located in a little pocket of lush vegetation, as the elevation suddenly dips for a relatively small portion of this region. Thus, as I drove down there in my taxi, I went from desert where nothing but shrubbery grows, to rich, beautiful, leafy-green jungle.
During my time with Elliot, I got a first hand account of what it´s like to actually volunteer with the PC. He told me about the situation with NGOs that dump money into projects in the region, and how people from his community will sign up for them to get all the free stuff, but as soon as the project is over everything, falls apart because it was an unsustainable project to begin with. In addition, there´s also a lot of corruption, because these projects take serious dedication and commitment from the people involved, but they are given about 10% of the effort required to be successful. He told me a particularily funny (but also kind of sad) story about an NGO project from a few years back in which they built latreens for the community so the people wouldn´t crap on the streets, and they also built a library with books so the people could have access to information through reading. The NGO came back a few years after the building project had ended to check up on how everything had been going since. The library books had been moved inside the latreens, and the latreens were locked, because the community knew the books were valuable and didn´t want anything to happen to them. There were now people living inside the ¨library¨, and the people continued crapping outside the latreens just as they always had been. And apparently this is a pretty typical outcome for these kinds of NGO projects where people just come and build stuff or start a project without properly training the people or taking cultural differences into account while designing the projects.
There are a lot of projects we can do with good intentions, like go into an idigenous community and set up a library because theoretically it would be a good idea, but because of cultural differences and lack of sufficient infastructure, those projects are doomed to fail.
Then there is Elliot, a nice young american PC volunteer, who will be there for 2 years for the sole purpose of helping people in his community. He has training, he has specific skill sets he can teach people that would really help them out. But he doesn´t have money to hand out like the NGOs, so people are less inclined to go to him or listen to him, because he doesn´t have free stuff to give them. It was really interesting to learn this reality of the Peace Corps in this area. In the end, despite the walls he hits when trying to have classes or start new projects with people, he´s still glad he´s there. He ends up being more of a community therapist, someone people go to to vent problems or talk about their drama with someone who isn´t enmeshed in all of it.
We spent most of our time together doing relaxing things, like cooking food (elliot is an amazing vegetarian cook) and going for walks in the beautiful surroundings. Tuesday is mother´s day in Bolivia, so as kind of a prequel to that, they had a celebration yesterday in which a bunch of futból teams from outlying communities came to have a tournament in Candado Grande. We got stuck selling tickets for the food since no one else wanted to do it, but it ended up being really cool for me because I got to interact with all the people from the community as they came to buy tickets. The kids there are really cute, they all wanted to know how to say things like ¨Abigail¨ or ¨Gabriela¨ in ¨English¨. There are also a lot of interesting Bolivian customs that I wont go into too much (but for example like money can nEVer be thrown or placed down roughly at someone else otherwise its really insulting) that I got to experience first hand. We worked all day, and at night as people were starting to get really wasted and obnoxious Elliot and I snuck out and went home.
I think I realize now that the Peace Corps are not really for me. I dont think I have the patience and dedication that it would take to be a successful volunteer like elliot. But I´m really grateful for the time I got to spend with him to see everything I got to see. I´m taking a bus back to Salta today, just to spend the night, and then I head to Mendoza on Tuesday morning to wait for a little more than a week until I start working on the farm next monday.
Finally, I have a camera again. We (Micha and I) pieced together exactly when my camera went missing, and we realized he most likely left it in his jacket when we switched buses in Potosi, and as he left his jacket behind in the bus, he left my camera as well. He was nice enough to buy me a new camera to replace it, as such I am able to keep sharing my adventure with you visually. What a generous guy.
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