By hwscott
Well, I've spent the last week backpacking around the south of the country of Bolivia. I went to Tarija, the wine growing region, billed as the highest vineyards in the world; to Sucre, the official capital of the country, called the "white city" for the beautiful all white colonial architecture; Potosi, the highest city in the world that essentially funded the Spanish empire with its silver mines that are still functioning today; and to the Salar de Uyuni, the beautiful world famous salt flats of Bolivia. Interestingly, I basically hit all the spots that my SIT program goes to on off years - the program switches off between two different focuses every semester. The focus for my semester was the conflicts around the TIPNIS indigenous reserve and the road the central government wants to build through it, as well as the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil. In the off years, the students in the program study the movements around the mines, as well as go to Argentina, passing through the salt flat on their way. As I was talking to my host dad, Alberto, after I got back, he remarked that I have seen and learned about more regions in Bolivia than most Bolivians. In all, I have been to 6 out of 9 departments (sort of like states) in the country.
The weirdest thing for me during this trip was the sensation of knowing more than most anyone else that I talked to about the country and cities we were in. Because I mostly stayed in cheap backpacker hostels for my trip, I met a lot of people my age from France, Sweden, Australia, Israel, and the States, just traveling through the country. I was doing the same, but I had had four months worth of intense background knowledge about where we were. Furthermore, while I wanted to make remarks about the difference between Cambas and Coillas, talk about the history of nationalization, revolution, and privatization in the mines in Potosi, or to share a bottle of Singani (the Bolivian liquor made out of grapes) with everyone, most people neither knew what I was talking about nor cared to know. They were simply there to see the sights and move on to Chile or Peru. It was almost as if I was experiencing reverse culture shock - exactly as I had been warned, that nobody would care about the details of what I had learned - except that I had yet to leave Bolivia. I suppose this is an achievement - I wasn't just a tourist, but rather actually knew the history and somewhat of the culture of places before I got there. I was able to have conversations in Spanish with the guides that went beyond their normal spiel, to their personal opinion and connections to what they were talking about and to their country.
This feeling was probably most rewarding and strong with the knowledge that I had already dug in depth into one city and produced a research paper on it - El Alto. I've already described in length the wrap-up to my research during this study abroad experience, but in regards to my last trip, knowing everything I did about El Alto, and about my time there just talking to people, I almost felt like I had a responsibility to make sure the tourists I met didn't leave Bolivia without having some sort of idea of the depth of every city we were in. My experience researching in El Alto gave me an idea of the depth of that every city has in Bolivia.
I think it would be extremely arrogant to try to claim that my research somehow directly helped El Alto or Villa Adela. Indeed, how could anyone with just four to six months in a new country claim to really have an impact on the community they work in? Possibly on the individual level. In that sense, while I don’t think I impacted El Alto, I really felt an impact in talking to people in this last week - having conversations with the guides that they don’t get to have every day from someone who knows a bit about Bolivia; doing my best to educate the other travelers. While I might have been annoying to some, others really seemed to appreciate the knowledge.
And so that's it. I'm writing this from the airport terminal in Miami, waiting for my connecting flight to San Francisco. I have left Bolivia, and left an amazing, life changing experience. Things that are freaking me out so far: how big and expensive everything is; everything is in English; toilet paper goes in the toilet; I keep saying "disculpe" every time I bump into someone and getting weird looks; terrible fruit. I spent about ten minutes just staring around a magazine store. The excessiveness and loneliness of this air-conditioned, huge airport is making me miss the closeness of the communities in El Alto, the simple but colorful architecture of Obermaier's churches, the natural grandness and crisp freezing temperatures of the high altitude Altiplano, with Mt. Illimani always in the distance. I already miss Bolivia so much.
Thank you to the Commitment to Community scholarship for helping to provide me with this experience that has impacted me so much academically and personally, and that I will never forget.