I spent the next four hours desperately attempting to find a way out of Santa Cruz, but was not successful. I finally and reluctantly gave in to the eager plain-clothes gentleman and heeded his advice to travel to El Trompillo, the smaller and older airport in the city. He also told me which taxis would certainly not rob me, though the taxi driver still asked me if I would mind stopping by his house so he could add water to the car radiator. I politely and firmly declined. At Trompillo I bought an overpriced flight in the coziest plane I have ever been on, with an airline whose only strength is a perhaps unfortunately conscientious CEO. Luckily, my Bolivian friend was able to recommend a place to stay in the city, and the next morning I regained my confidence when I had finally boarded with my three fellow passengers (Update: one of them was John from the east coast, and I never repaid him the twenty bolivianos that he loaned me for the taxi ride from the airport in Sucre. If you’re reading this John, I apologize).

Once with my family in Sucre, I was able to reflect on my initial interactions in Santa Cruz, and it has only taken a few days to realize how uneven the language gains are. Certain things are already coming naturally, but I now realize that I may have declared “Mission Accomplished” prematurely when I began to think rudimentary thoughts in Spanish. There is still an incredible amount that does not come naturally according to my grammatical intuition, and much that I simply do not possess the vocabulary to express. I understand little of what my family says the first time they say it, but I am faring better in my classes, no doubt because my professor has experience talking to foreigners that initially understand little of what she says. I am still learning my way around the city and adjusting to life here, but already I am excited by the contextualization of everything I have been studying in my classes at Notre Dame.

It was an exciting week to arrive. I have already had the opportunity to see the president, Evo Morales, and his vice-president Álvaro García Linera, overseeing from the balcony of the Casa de Libertad the festivities celebrating the first call for independence from Spain in Latin America (which Quito also claims). The dark, booming military marches (e.g. Marcha Talacocha) that filled the Plaza 25 de Mayo, the date of the call for independence, must have put me in a political mood, and I later ventured to ask my family about Morales, leader of the party MAS (Movimiento a Socialismo). I quickly learned that they, like many in the conservative city, have little interest in him. I noted the familiar phenomenon of a flushing of the cheeks and increased rate of speech in response to the topic of politics, as in the United States, which made it difficult to truly appreciate the idiosyncrasies of their disapproval. I am looking forward to developing my conversational abilities in the remaining five weeks to delve deeper into all of this.

With my host family, a visit from tío Hugo, a socialist of autodidactic tendencies, has greatly increased the number of opportunities for conversation outside of my classes. We have had some interesting talks in which he dexterously has referred to certain libros lindos that have informed his thinking. We occasionally found ourselves speaking in different languages, apart from the shared use of Spanish that enabled the conversation, as I ventured to include insights from more theological territory, which he would quickly qualify in secular terms. We spoke of government and history and values, and I was surprised to find that we agreed upon many diagnoses of perceived “ills of society,” though we proposed different prescriptions. I was both very excited to be having these conversations, and disappointed that I was not yet competent to more adequately express myself or understand his more nuanced ideas.

I have had more confidence to go out into the community this week and engage people, from grandmotherly type shopkeepers to employees at three local gyms that my host siblings have recommended. After realizing that, while I can pretentiously harangue regarding materialism, I still cannot negotiate the pitfalls of transactional encounters in the central market, I have decided to talk more, and with more people. I now unashamedly strike up conversations with others waiting in line at the local supermarket, draw out small-talk with servers, and graciously receive new gastronomic vocabulary from the woman that takes my money at a local sandwich shop. Essentially, I am becoming my dad. I now recognize him as a natural language learner.

Rather than resemble this automatic process, I have noticed that in my family´s speech unknown words are starting to form from increasingly distinct sounds. Only after this process of repetitive perception of a word have I noticed that I am likely to remember it. Learning through conversation has been invaluable in another manner as well. Last semester, I often made flashcards for new verbs and other vocabulary that I encountered in literature or articles in the press, yet I still struggled to remember them. Now in my classes, after only the briefest explanation of a verb by my professor, I tend to remember how to use words I had been attempting to memorize for months.

Another tendency I have noticed is that of beginning to acquire situational understandings of words or phrases before truly being able to define them. An extreme case would be the use of pues, not only as a conjunction as it was originally used in Peninsular Spanish, nor as a verbal crutch translated as “well” in English (although those usages are common to Latin America), but to emphasize an affirmation (Si pues) or statement (Pero el presidente está preso de los cocaleros pues). This usage cannot easily be conveyed in English, and is not defined even by those that possess a natural command of it.

Speaking of presidents derided for their connections with cocaleros, or coca growers, this week I engaged in my first community interaction task, discussing the topic of Evo Morales and a movement that has been increasing the visibility of indigenous rights and culture on the national stage. Morales is self-styled Bolivia’s first Aymara president (Aymara and Quechua being the two most prominent indigenous languages of the country, each with an associated ethnic group), and although it is possible that he has stewarded many more pro-indigenous initiatives, I spoke with three people with whom I am in regular contact about some of the more visible ones (to be fair, I was warned that it would be difficult to find a strong defense of Morales in the conservative city of Sucre. In 2007, three university students died in protests against the perceived unjust proceedings of the constitutional assembly. A memorial in the cemetery celebrates them as patriots). Among these visible changes were the drafting of a new constitution, addition of the Wiphala emblem representative of the indigenous peoples of the Andes as a co-flag, and lastly the adoption of a new legal name for the country, Plurinational State of Bolivia, formerly Republic of Bolivia. The new constitution is an extraordinary and (perhaps extraordinarily) ideological document, equipped with a rejection of colonialism, republicanism, and neo-liberalism in its preamble, and recognizing each of the indigenous peoples that can be found within the nation’s borders. It enshrines their traditional values and laws, including the perhaps best known “three laws” of the Inca Empire: ama qhilla, ama llulla, ama suwa (don’t be lazy, don’t lie, don’t steal), and mandates that each department establish another official language in addition to Spanish.

One of the three opined that it was about time that Bolivia recognized its large indigenous population and their cultures, and acknowledged that the country had a more overtly racist past. She believed there was nothing to fear in promoting the values, cultures, and rights of these communities, as it rightly set the country apart, and that those defending another perception of the country were clinging to an image that yet never truly existed. One of the others I spoke with said he perceived that Morales was trying to radically and irreversibly change the culture and identity of the country, altering its name and recognizing indigenous values that he did not frankly want to endorse. As for the discussion of socialism, or “Andean capitalism” as the vice president has called the ideal, and the document´s rejection of all things North American, concern was expressed by all three. The most forward of the three maintained that Morales was trying to rapidly alter the Bolivian state and in a very bad way. Bolivia has always been a capitalist country, he argued, and should continue being such. Ironically, considering political rhetoric in the United States, even a few of the conservatives I spoke with accused self-proclaimed socialist Morales of not being sufficiently socialist, discrediting the populist mandate he has assumed. I remain fascinated.

To complete my second community interaction task, I recently spoke with my host siblings, uncles, aunts, and professor about two elements of slang I have heard recently: chala and re, as well as to what extent voseo exists in Bolivia. Chala, while literally meaning corn husk, is used in Sucre to signify cool or excellent, as in “qué chala.” According to some of the younger people with whom I spoke, it may be highly local, indeed properly unique to Sucre. According to these same sources, “re” is a prefix and intensifier (“re bueno”) that may have creeped into Bolivian speech from Argentina, where it is used in addition to various other countries. Finally, in Bolivia there is a hint of voseo, the use of the second person singular pronoun vos in place of tú, as is widespread in Argentina. My family, although they use the pronoun, insist that it is grammatically nonexistent in Sucre, and no alternative verb conjugations exist as they do enshrined in Argentina and in varying degrees of informality in other parts of Latin America. So far, people of all ages have recognized these examples, while chala is generally used only by younger sucrenses, re and vos can be used by middle-aged adults as well. The older adults in the family understood them, but never used them.

I have also been up to a few other things lately that have kept me speaking and practicing. Most importantly, I have been volunteering the past several weeks in the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría Gregorio Pacheco. I was very fortunate that my professor had volunteered in the psychiatric hospital in the past and was able to introduce the opportunity. I believe it had been some years since she had last visited, and yet she a number of the men and women living there remembered her well. While I initially imagined that I would be able to go once or twice a week, I am happy to be going three or four times per week now, conversing with increasingly familiar faces on the grounds, and getting to know some of the nurses and employees in the mixed house of both sexes, where I help with dinner and preparing the patients to go to bed.

There is one older man that I have somehow fallen into the habit of helping in his final routine of each day, and he typically waits for me after finishing his dinner. We talk on the way to the room he shares with two other gentleman, one of them that does not speak to me, the other a poet that may prefer feminine company. Already I have learned how to carefully remove his shoes and clothing so as not to agitate his arthritis as he speaks to me about growing up as a campesino (person from the country), the era of the patrones, and the Bolivian National Revolution that began in the early 1950s, resulting in agrarian reform, nationalization of tin mining, and universal suffrage that effectively increased the number of voters fivefold from 200,000 to 1,000,000. As he becomes sleepier, I have noticed that his speech is less and less intelligible to me. The other day when one of the nurses was helping the poet to bed, again he began this quiet and unintelligible speech. The nurse then began to answer in a still unintelligible language whose sounds I found so agreeable. “Quechua,” she told me, “his first language is Quechua.”

Reflective Journal Entry 5:

Postcard(s) from Abroad: