The Dead Souls Arrive

This was a headline on the Saturday noon news. The day of the dead (November 2nd) has brought a great festival to all the cemeteries of Santa Cruz this weekend. Some, like my friends Irene and Idonlina, have traveled to their home towns to velar (to accompany) their loved ones who have passed on.
According to the teacher who teaches the sewing classes at our house, it’s also a dangerous time of the year, because people tend to die around that time. Last week she had the flu and she said her mom got especially worried and began lighting candles and praying for her.
There must be some kind of truth to this theory. On Sunday morning (the day of the dead) 4 people were buried in the cemetery beside our house, among them a neighbor of ours. I never actually met the woman, she was 93 and apparently never came out of her room. Both her daughter and her granddaughter participate in the sewing class, so we participated in the mass and the burial. This being the second time I’ve participated in a burial, I know that like many things in Bolivia, it involves sitting and waiting. As I sit I think about that moment when life as I know it will be no more, or even harder, of the time I may very well have to live whenever my own mama dies or my husband, or my friends, that space in time when your insides ache with memories.
On Sunday I took a stroll through our cemetery and found a hundred or so families, united. Depending where they come from, some have simple rice bread or empanadas, while others have huge spreads of doll-shaped breads, fruits or dishes of home-cooked meals. Some families had a quiet stillness about them. Only a few, like the 4 families whose loved ones so recently passed away, were actually crying.
I stopped by to chat with a friend, whose sister immediately put a glass of chicha (a traditional corn drink) and an empanada in my hand. “Oh yeah, he told me, “you just missed the band, it came over and we were dancing for awhile”. I looked over and sure enough there was a five-piece brass band making its way through the crowds of people. This same type of band often accompanies a funeral procession here.
This day is something I admire so much about this culture. When in North America do we ever take time away from our routines to think about those we have lost? We have one week of mourning (if that) and then all the rest of the grieving process is an individual one. I long for a space like this one to tend to those memories of people who have moved on from this world; a place to cry, a place to dance, a place to eat, and a place to share with others.

Sacrament and Sacrifice

We spent the last week preparing for the big anniversary party at the parish where we work. As I’ve mentioned before, birthdays are a very big deal here, and anniversaries are really just like birthdays, since they are birthdays of groups and beloved places. Our biggest participation included a traditional dance with the confirmation class. During many festivities here, groups of young people (and occasionally older people) get together and choose from a WIDE variety of traditional dances of Bolivia. Last year, we danced a “carnivalito” with our youth group (a bouncy dance from the eastern lowlands). This year the group was convinced it wanted to dance Tinku, a fascinating dance derived from a fighting ritual in the department of Potosi. This ritual takes place during different festivals, but especially over the 3rd and 4th of May, the celebration of the holy cross. While some say it was once a way of settling debts between tribes so as to prevent all-out war, the main idea is to spill blood as a sacrifice so that there may be a good harvest.
Because dancing is a requirement in every public school in Bolivia (yearly festivals are held in the schools where classes are graded on the dance they present), almost everyone has some knowledge of how the dance should go. Because of this, there are very specific steps that have developed and depending on the song in the genre, the choreography is different. For example, someone brought a CD with 15 Tinku songs, and as each song would begin, the women would begin dancing what they remembered seeing of that song. Unfortunately for us, everyone remembered about one quarter of the steps to each one. Much time was spent correcting each other and speculating what should go in the blanks. After 6 practices of such interactions, the last night before the dance, one of the boys brought two friends who were experts in Tinku. They divided us up between men and women, we worked for two hours (this dance is INCREDIBLY strenuous…I have thoughts of opening up a tinku studio someday…it could be a great weight-reducing system) and at the end, we had it together. The following day we met up (an hour later than we had said) on “balivian” street, which is known to everyone in santa cruz as the place to go to rent costumes. Having been given specific instructions by the expert, Raul, we went from shop to shop asking “do you have 8 costumes in fuchsia?” “will you give us at least 3 feathers for our hats?” “will you give us two sashes instead of just one?” “ do you have pants to fit a 6ft tall gringo?” After about a half hour of searching, we found our place. For about $3 USD each we were ready to go.
The night of the party was full of enthusiastic young people, all dressed up, practicing some last minute moves. Our dance went well, and at that last minute someone showed up with a fire-work like apparatus that emitted orange smoke. Unfortuntely, they set it off right under my feet which made breathing a bit of a challenge, but in the end the crowd LOVED the performance, which somehow made all the preparation worth it.
Stepping back from it, I find myself becoming introspective. What a strange way of celebrating church, with sequins, ribbons, smoke bombs and dances representing sacrifices made to mother earth. It’s definitely a stretch from my early Christian years in a little old country church in PA. But as I sat in mass and watched as small children came dancing in with bright green and white dresses and straw hats, the beautiful thing is that people are offering who they are to God…all that they are. So often in the evangelical church, members are encouraged to leave behind all that is culturally relavant to them, to take up the plain black suit, the white dress, and follow Jesus (well, Jesus’ North American Missionaries anyway). My life here is composed of such moments of walking (and dancing) beside Bolivians and then stepping back, trying to figure out which lens to look through, how to toss these questions around and to act in a way that my life is a more perfect offering…
There are a lot more fascinating things to learn about Tinku. The following are two you-tube clips. The first is a report on the actual ritual in Potosi and the second is of the dance (it’s not quite as good as we were, but it’ll do☺).
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=sTSTojpCZhs
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=kesJ3BM-TLM

A rainy day

this photo is of the closing party for a sewing class we hosted in our house that I was going to write about (as well as the new priest (top right hand corner) I´m excited to begin working with, but I¨ve been inspired by something more urgent.

I¨ve been doing some thinking lately about what it is that could sum up the Bolivian experience....in a country where 32 different languages are spoken and the Andes Mountains cut through the landscape...creating historical cultural differences..what is there that unites everyone. For me, it´s come down to something very simple.

Every day in Bolivia is so very fragile.

I´ve lived here almost two years now, and in a way I feel like I´ve taken about 10 years worth of risks I would´ve taken had I been in the U.S. Which is funny, because I am someone whose housing is payed for...who has a consistent food budget every month, who gets $75 on top of that to spend on whatever I want...so I am still not taking anywhere near the risks of my neighbors who face questions like, ´will I be able to get to work?¨¨Will I get fired if I show up late?¨¨Even if I arrive on time and leave on time, will they decide not to pay me anyway?¨¨Will the price of bread have risen again?¨ And many other questions that make up a daily fight to survive. The one thing that I can perceive that Bolivians have going for them in all of this is that everyone else around them (except for two north american volunteers and a few brasilian nuns)is balanced on the edge of this same abyss.
This morning, I have found a perfect example to illustrate this point. It is pouring down rain. We are waiting a twenty mintues for a micro along with six other people. One shows up with space for maybe two...we all manage to squeeze on. Three blocks later, a young kid with a rake (???) jumps off and another six grown people manage to make thier way on to the bus. Just as we arrive at a HUGE lake that once was a paved street, we stop to pick up a crowd of two mothers with babies and an elderly woman, short, round, and covered in plastic bags. I exchange a worried glance with the woman whose head is resting in my armpit, ¨no deberían subir¨she whispered (they shouldn´t even try it)...the two moms make it on..the elderly woman puts her hands out to take hold of the door. Everyone in the micro takes a deep breath. Even if she can manage to grab ahold of something on the bus, with one quick turn she could fall out. The bus driver begins to move on.
¨NOOO POR FAVOR!!¨ The woman screams...she then begins wailing in quechua..and the bus stops again. Now, my experience here tells me there are potentially two situations that could warrant such desparate behavior. 1. This woman is having a medical emergency and needs to get to the hospital. or 2. It is her co-madre´s birthday and they are out of coca-cola at her corner store. Whatever the woman´s situation, she begins to try to pull herself up onto the first step. All of the sudden, a woman points to chris and says, ¨you there, move further back...the old lady needs to get on¨. We all shuffle around, a few onlookers on the street give the woman a boost and a young girl of about ten years old gets behind her to protect her from the threat of falling out. We turn the corner and begin our cruise through the river. About five minutes later, I look to the front to find a crowd of young people...someone has given the woman thier very-valuable seat (if you are sitting down, not only are you safe from the risk of someone resting thier head in your armpit, you are safe from people sticking thier hands in your pocket and stealing your wallet or your cellphone).
It took us a record-long time to get to the office this morning...an hour and a half from door step to door step (instead of the normal 45 minutes)...but oh what a story to share with all of you.

Santa Cruz Flair and Hand Spun Wool

The other day in my crocheting class, our chatter turned for a moment to the political situation in Bolivia, sparked by the sounds of firecrackers getting closer and closer. “The Masistas are gathering, they have a cabildo tonight (town meeting)…they must be figuring out what to destroy next.” I’m usually very quiet during these times, but today for some odd reason (maybe my anger at how much the news manipulates the story according to its political leaning), I decided to offer my opinion, “but why would the masistas wreck their own market,” I said, “it’s got to be the cruzenistas…I think they want the military to come in so they have an excuse to have an armed conflict.” My friend (who’s from a small town near the boarder of Brasil) looked at me and said, “look at me…do you think I want a war???” (identifying herself among the cruzenistas….) another woman (who came to Santa Cruz from the Beni, a department just north of santa cruz) spoke “the highlanders should be thankful for what Santa Cruz has given them…a place to live and earn a living….” The teacher piped up, “well, I don’t think it’s that simple, for example I’m from Sucre but I’ve lived in Santa Cruz ten years…I don’t consider myself colla or camba (highlander or lowlander), and there are people from Santa Cruz living in Sucre. I think we’re all just a mix but the media tries to divide us more than we are in real life.” A woman responded, “yes, but when we go to other places, we don’t act like this….” Meanwhile, everyone was working away at their crocheting project, this week a hair tie made with a glitzy synthetic string imported from Brasil, except for me…I’d forgotten to bring elastic, so I took advantage of the fact that there’s a woman who knows how to spin wool…I bought some in Cochabamba last year, but when I tried to knit with it, it was lacking one more process to be knittable. This woman (a highlander) was the only one who hasn’t spoken by now….and as the yarn slips so smoothly between her fingers I asked her, “did you grow up with sheep?” And she answered in a very quiet voice, “yes, my mother had sheep.” As the conversation drifted on to the big Miss pageant coming up, I realized the tension of the country and how its imbedded in each person and the fear of the other…of who will throw the first stone…
Towards the end of the meeting, my friend from valle grande (western santa cruz) commented, “wow, Lindsey, you learned the trick!” I said, “yeah, it’s really easy, do you want to try it??” She looked at me smiling and told me no…that she wouldn’t want to mess it up.
I know that tonight Santa Cruz is full of these interactions…highlanders and lowlanders together..full of opportunity to be open to the other, or to continue with the rage provoked by images on the news (showing the same clip from three days ago).
A note for those who haven´t read much about Bolivia in the last few weeks, there is a good bit of conflict going on which I am trying to wrap my head around and am not quite confident enough to write about. If you´d like to read more on it though, here are two places I like to go:
www.democracyctr.org
www.ain-bolivia.org

Padrinos Americanos

The other day I was at my friends house making saltenas when her younger sister came rushing in and said, " oh, I have to get my letter written today." I assumed she was talking about doing some kind of transaction with the government, applying for a birth certificate, getting a vaccine card etc. But when she sat down to write it, she pulled out a picture of an elderly north american couple. Ah yes, I thought, it's a letter to her "padrinos americanos" (american godparents). We as northamericans understand this system under a different title. " For only 30 cents a day you too can make a difference in a young child's life...sponser a child today." All my life I grew up watching these comercals with images of young kids with swollen bellies being attended by white doctors...and now I am so blessed to see things from the other side....among struggling families fighting to stay alive and live with dignity...looking to the north from where this charity comes.
One day I was part of a conversation where two women were talking about the different benefits offered between two different padrino organizations....one only gives medical care and tutor help with homework, whereas the other one gives periodic food donations to the families. And at one point in the conversation one of them turned to me and said curiously, "why do north americans want to be godparents to our children...don't they have enough children of their own to help?" I was caught in a rather difficult place. How do you describe a land where people have enough money to take care of their families plus enough to give away to someone you don't know...a place where all your neighbors also have thier needs met and don't have to come and ask you to borrow money or food...a place where charity is a concept of having to look in far far away places to look for suffering. Such a thing doesn't exist here in Bolivia, and so I did my best to explain the good intentions of people with extra money and a conscious mind.
In the meantime, daniela's sister writes under the shade of the mango tree, about her school work, about her second child on the way, about the springtime (which in santa cruz means very hot and windy wheather), and she includes a picture of a "traditional" santa cruz scene, a man in a straw hat working in a field of sugar cane. And I am breathing into the gap of two very different worlds.

Tortilla Flat

John Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors (East of Eden is in the running for my favorite book of all time). Naturally, I was delighted to find in the MCC library a book by him that I had not yet read called Tortilla Flat. The book is a delightful tail of Mexican/Spanish/American vagabonds who live on the outskirts of the town of Monterrey California. Each chapter is almost like a short story in of itself where the 4 main characters scavange, cheat and steal and sit around making up virtuous justifications for such actions. All the characters are quite loveable which allows the reader to really identify with them, and personally had me thinking thoughts of how free they were to own virtually nothing and even more biblical thoughts like not storing treasures on earth, just worrying about today etc.
The very ironic thing is that on Friday we traveled to Montero to meet with “women without limits” (see second blog entry) and on our way home, stopped to get something to eat. It was a very normally chaotic scene as we sat down, including a man who dropped his change and was scrambling under our table to pick it up. We helped him gather his change only to find a minute later that my bag was missing. He was, like my lovable friends in tortilla flat, a robber, working to distract us while another person ever so carefully slid my bag out from the bench where it was placed beside me.
The good news is, ever since Chris got pick-pocketed on the bus a year ago, I no longer keep any money in any of the bags I carry. The bad news is, Tortilla Flat and the 30 pages I still had to read in it WERE in the bag. Here the only access we have to good old US classics are the MCC library, so they all take on a whole new value for us. A value which doesn’t translate to anyone who doesn’t read in English. So I suppose I could’ve searched the city’s garbage cans; or perhaps it lit someone’s fire that night for cooking…
It’s interesting to me the emotions one experiences when something is stolen. No matter what gets lost, you feel angry, violated, vengeful and maybe just a little bit stupid (had I only REALIZED he was trying to trick us!!!) But what stays with me is the question of what causes people to steal. I’m convinced it’s not simply laziness or the lack of initiative of finding an honest job. I see young people in Bolivia growing up in a place without hope. They watch their parents work 12 hour days 6 days a week, and it only earns them enough, in some cases, to stay alive. They might buy a piece of land, build a house or even buy a car taking out a loan, but all is very easily lost if that person gets sick or has an accient. There isn’t a whole lot of work that keeps one very motivated to be honest. Especially whenever you see friends or family members getting rich quickly by doing easier, more illegal things. All this leaves me with the determination to continue working with young people (frustrating as it may be) as well as a very lame satisfaction that I had no money in my bag. And it leaves the robbers with some bad luck (I’m sure they thought they’d get a lot from the gringa) and with the perpetual challenge of making a living in Bolivia.

making licorice?

After spending the past year and a half in Bolivia, I was surprised to find out that upon going back to the states, one of the most shocking things to me was food. There tended to be a lot more of it (and a lot more of people I passed on the streets as well) than I remembered and it seemed strange to me that try as I might, I just couldn´t manage to avoid corn syrup... it´s in EVERYTHING. So, I´m indulging my curiousity right now by reading ¨the omnivore´s dilemma¨ which talks a bit about the history of processed food and the strange empidemic of diet that US dwellers face today. In the meantime, however, I needed to bring back something for our beloved youth group here in Santa Cruz, so I decided to share with them part of a carepackage put together by a sunday school class at Chris´church. The treat, as you can tell by the picture, was a pack of twizzlers. ¨It´s something typical from our country,¨I told them as I indicated the directions for making a straw out of it. One of the nuns (actually from Argentina) piped up and said, ¨It´s really yummy and I like it because it´s not super-sweet. How do you make it?¨ I replied by simply laughing hard. Her comment helped me realize the reason for my reverse culture shock. All the typical treats here (and in Argentina I presume) are made by grandmothers, aunts, uncles and tend to be very tediously done and thus special. But long ago (afterall, licorice is an old fashioned candy as I understand it) we stopped making our special treats and have begun to rely on companies and laboratories to pump out all our sweet goodness. And since it´s chemically altered and mass produced, it´s cheap enough that we don´t even have to have a special occasion to eat it!
After laughing, I explained how it´s really just a bunch of chemicals and I don´t really know how they make it and it´s kind of a sad part of my country. Luckily, my mom still makes apple dumplings and monster cookies whenever I come home, and I do at least see and remember that part of life (though I must confess that Christmas is not the same for me without that crochetted boot filled with christmas tree peppermint nougats ($2 per bag at the dollar store)

micros

A strange thing has happened here. Of all of the interesting social movements going on in Bolivia, Santa Cruz has not exactly been at the forefront of any of them. But last week, we experienced a bit of a peoples’ uprising here in our neighborhood. It started when micro bus drivers decided to try once again to raise the price of riding the micro (one of several attempts in the past few months) from 1.5bs to 2bs (about .20 to .28).
On Tuesday Chris and I went out to the bus stop and found one of our friends Julia waiting there as well. We watched as a bus approaching us turned around in the middle of the street and let everyone off. I just figured it was a mecanical problem with the micro, but since Julia has a TV and we don’t, she knew better. She had seen on the news that they were going to try to raise the price. So we waited a few minutes while everyone from further down the road came walking up to the final stop of the buses. We then saw a micro going down a different street and circling around further down the road. The tactic, we believed, was not to pick up a crowd of people all at once. We decided to try a different micro line and as we walked away, we met up with a 53 (the line we had been waiting for) on a side street. I tried flagging it down and the driver yelled “where are you going? To the center? It’s 2bs per person. If you want to pay that, get in, if not, let me go.” Chris and I both looked at Julia, who just scoffed and kept walking. “They’ll never win.” Julia told us as we walked away. “ Everyone knows a micro driver is still making money on us all.”
(I suppose I have failed you all for not having written about micros before, because, even on a normal day, it’s never a dull experience. There are seats for about 20 and during peak hours (6-8am and 6-8pm) it’s nothing to have 50 people sitting, standing, plastered to the windows and each other, just trying to get to work. The general rule is that mothers with babies, very pregnant women and old ladies are supposed to get seats, but there’s a bit of a reputation for young men (who are commuting to and from 12 hour work days in most cases) to not be so courteous. There is also a rule that kids who don’t pay the full fair shouldn’t occupy a seat if a full-fare payer is standing up..again, they tend to hide in the back and wait for someone to call them out. Anyway, some of my favorite stories come from micro riding experiences).
Some drivers own their own micros, while other rent them. Apparently you have to pay between $100-$300 US to get into an associacion of drivers and once you’re in, you pay dues. According to Julia, her friend owns a micro and the man who rents it even after rent and all the other costs, can still make between 200 and 400bs a day ($27-54 US). The upper end being about a month’s wage for a maid. There is plenty of justification for a micro driver earning so much. There are plenty of risks involved, penalties to be paid if you’re late, and LONG days (sometimes up to 14 hrs), but you can understand how people are refusing to pay more money. Chris and I find ourselves a bit in the middle. We could easily pay the higher fare. If Julia weren’t with us, it’s hard to say what we would’ve done. But for now, it makes the most sense to support our friends whose economy is already too tightly stretched.

fun with pictures

without further adeu, a collage of photos.
our new dog princesa, for a princess, she's not all that fotogenic, but she has plenty of other princess like qualities:)
Luna in her favorite sleeping spot, on the other side of the window is where we sleep, so you can see how it's prime real estate for a protective dog
a little look at the rainy season, the road outside of our house
our mango tree, some basil and LOTS of weeds Luna, all grown up

salteñas

Just as I had the idea of sharing with you one of the sweetest things 20 cents can buy in Santa Cruz, I got an email from my sister and my niece who are looking for more pictures of our house and dogs, and less of food. So, in the interests of pleasing all parties, I will include a few photos here that are not part of today’s blog theme: a little thing folks here like to call salteñas.
Salteñas, I believe are something unique to Bolivia. They are a cute little meat pocket made with a beautiful color of dough, full of potatoes, peas, meat and broth. Each reigon has their own style of making them. Santa Cruz salteñas are especially juicy and full. MCC likes to initiate new volunteers by serving salteñas the first day you arrive. There is a serious trick to eating Santa Cruz salteñas without getting the juice all over you, which involves carefully biting off the tip and draining out as much juice as possible through the tiny hole. After we eat salteñas at MCC, you can sure tell a difference (as if you couldn’t already) between a native cruzeno pro and a novice by the little stains we sport for the rest of the day.
In Chris and I’s neighborhood, we have a woman who at just about 7:45 every morning passes by our house offering salteñas. Luckily, I believe hers are more of a style of Potosi (a city about 24 hrs. west of here); much dryer. There is a tiny bit of gravy you need to be careful with at the very bottom, but it’s quite manageable. They are smaller than the ones you buy in the center of town, but at 25 cents a piece, (the ones downtown are about 75 cents) they are more affordable as well…which means we find ourselves getting them about 3 or 4 mornings per week.

Housing

I went to see my friend Doña Beti (doña (pronounced don-ya) is the name that goes before every woman’s name to show respect) about making me a cake for my buddy’s birthday. (she is pictured here on the far right side).But here in Bolivia, just like in many fine countries in the world, conversation kind of wanders around what you came for, and you tend to go to it for awhile and then talk about other stuff, then come back (often at the gringos promptingJ). Anyway, in the midst of the meandering, it came up that Dona Beti is moving. Which is a sad thing, because she’s one of the crucial social hubs in the barrio and she keeps things moving, and even though she’s only moving about six blocks away, it will really change things. I asked her why and she said she’s been renting this place and has found another place to live “casero” (which means the shack or whatever is on the property is not suitable enough to actually charge rent, so you make an agreement with the owner to take care of the property, usually for one year at a time for no cost).
She then talked about looking into buying a lot here, and she said there are some in the next neighborhood over (which is less developed than ours and has more open spaces) for $3500. At first I thought she was talking about bolivianos (which would still be $500 or so), but she actually meant dollars. She said they would probably give it to her on credit. She said her friend bought one awhile back for $100. With the arrival of several thousands of people to Santa Cruz each year, housing prices have sky-rocketed. My friend whose grandparents live just off the first ring in the center of the city told me their house is worth $100,000. I’m sure her grandparents settled there when there was nothing but forest beyond the first ring and probably everything including the construction of the house cost less than $100. In the 1960s when MCC was setting up its office, everyone told them they were out in the middle of nowhere and that people would never be able to find it (just between the 1st and 2nd ring). Now, their property is right smack in the middle of it all (and with five buildings on it and a nice piece of yard in the middle, I’m sure it’s worth several hundred thousand dollars now)..
Of course this means good things for people like Loida’s grandparents and MCC and other visionary folks who were able to buy up early and could cash out now. But for Doña Beti, who has lived and worked in this neighborhood for the past twenty years, the dream of owning her own place is just slipping out of grasp. The really crazy thing for me to think about is that during the three years that Chris and I are here in Bolivia, I’ve calculated that all the money we have saved and smartly (with the advice of my brother-in-law/financial advisor) invested will make us about half of what it costs to buy one of those lots. We get paid just for being rich. My first reaction to that is the easiest “well, could we give her all we’re going to make on the interest.” Which would leave us still rich, having dona beti still paying a lifetime of payments on her place, a whole neighborhood in line for another one of our generous donations and a system that still makes rich richer and poor poorer. We have got to think of something better. Any ideas?

Reproductive Rights?

The photo is of Ana Maria, one of the mom’s in the nutrition group we work with. She is posed with her fifth child, the only girl. Ana Maria is always looking for money. Her kids walk around with mismatched flip-flops and snotty noses. Her husband works harvesting wood and comes home about twice a month and leaves her with about $6 USD until he comes back the next time. Sister Benedicta, one of the nuns who works at the chapel who sponsers the program, apparently would often bring up birth control in her visits to Maria when she had four children, proposing that perhaps four was enough. One of Ana Maria’s sons died last year of a flu that just wouldn’t go away. And before the sister could get her a date with a doctor to discuss some kind of birth control, Ana Maria was once again pregnant. This time sister benedicta was not going to let it happen again. She went and visited with Ana Maria in the hospital and talked with the nurses, who handed over some papers with a date to come back for an IUD.
But it still wasn’t quite so easy. The doctor had operated on a hernia that Ana Maria had aquired during her pregnancy, and according to Ana Maria, just tied her tubes while he was at it, so in her opinion, she didn’t need to get an IUD. Benedicta just assumed that she was lying because she was afraid of the IUD, so I went one day and visited her. “Oh, I’ve had one before,” she said, “it’s just that it gave me really bad cramps and I couldn’t go to my monthly check-ups because we lived out in the country. The doctor told me he tied my tubes, I don’t know why I’d need an IUD also.” The sister was not convinced. Her papers said come back in a month for the IUD, nothing else appeared in the care instructions. It is rumored that in order to do tube tying, the doctor must get the signature of the woman’s husband (which never happened). So, they took a trip to the doctor’s office to get the story. Apparently the doctor, upon hearing about Ana Maria’s life, took advantage of the fact that he was so close in the hernia surgery and just tied her all up at once. “And the papers, you ask”. Well, apparently the nurses filled them out upon talking with the Sister, unaware of what the doctor had already done.
I’m sure this story is not all that rare here, and in other places in the world. We tend to think about poverty and overpopulation being an issue of lack of access and bad information. But here, three blocks away from my sand filled street, there is a clinic that puts in IUDs for free. It seems though, there are problems in the administration, because I have heard horror stories of IUDs here, in one case a baby born with a T imprinted on his face (which I cannot confirm)! Anyway, I wonder what we should do when a mother is well informed of her options and still wants to continue having children. In the long run, I think the doctor did Ana Maria a favor. But in such a shady process of just using the power he had as a surgeon to decide the future of Ana Maria and her family, I’m not convinced it was the right thing. When it comes to a person’s will over their life, I don’t think it matters if it’s a doctor a nun or a northamerican volunteer with the best intentions, it isn’t our job to decide the fate of others.