By hwscott
Right now, I am sitting in a hotel that was built in the 1600s, in one of the craziest (and highest) cities in the world, La Paz, Bolivia. In the past 24 hours, I've had about 3 hours sleep, traveled almost 4000 miles, ascended 13,000 feet, walked through a street fair, encountered a huge demonstration, and seen countless amazing political graffiti. This morning after we landed, the sun came up on Mt. Illimani in the distance, and as we drove away, we came up to the edge of the altiplano and looked down more than 5000 feet to the bottom of the city. We all couldn’t keep our mouths shut as we looked upon row after row of colorful houses and shacks clinging to the slopes, descending to the colonial/ modern skyscraper city center below.
Ok, so enough with the descriptors - this isn't technically supposed to be a travel blog. I have chosen to study with the SIT program in Bolivia, which is called Latin American Revolutionary Movements and Conflict Resolution. SIT has programs all over the world, and the structure includes a period of both intense classroom study and academic excursions around the country (in my case, also to Brazil to visit the landless workers movement), living in a homestay. This is followed by a month long period of independent study, concluding with a 35 page paper about our findings (in Spanish). I chose SIT because I wanted an experience abroad that would have an academic focus. I ended up in Bolivia because not many people study abroad here, and because I loved how the political the program sounded. I did not want a program that would shepherd me around, seeing the sights through a foreign lens. I wanted a program that would allow me to experience first hand the problems and hidden intentions behind US foreign policy. I hoped for a program that would look at the true complexity of revolutionary movements, as the title of my program implies. Here, I have so far found all of those things.
Due to the fact that the research portion of the program does not begin until the last month, it will be difficult to write this blog in terms of ongoing research. Therefore, I will try to write about the new insights I will be learning every day, all in the focus of my general research topic. Hopefully, by each blog post I will have narrowed down my research questions.
So what is my research topic? Generally, thus far my academic focus has been on studying the relationship between faith, politics, and poverty. I first became interested in this due to the contradictions between my own Catholic faith and my left leaning political views; in the United States, Catholicism often errs towards conservatism. Later, I discovered that this was not the case in all countries - in much of Latin America, a movement called Liberation Theology took off in the 1970s, which combined faith and revolutionary political movements in the poorer classes. After becoming interested in this movement, I began to study how the homeless in DC see the connection between their own faith and political views. Here in Bolivia, I hope to be able to bridge the focus of my program with this academic interest. At this point, I think my research topic will probably be about how those living in Bolivia see the role of the church in the recent political changes here. In the past, the church has often acted as a mediator between conservative governments and radical movements. The present is much different. Now that a radical movement has charge of the government, the president, Evo Morales, has begun to state that Bolivia is not a Catholic country, and that Catholicism is a colonial force (the latter of which is completely true). Yet, much of the population still say they are Catholic. I am interested in what the subjects of Morales, indigenous and non-indigenous, think of these policies.
Of course, my program topic could and probably will change. Until then, hasta luego!