First Field Trip

Last week I went on our first big school field trip. I guess we did go on that one trip to the dairy farm, but this was the first BIG field trip. One week out in the village of Tallija in the mountains 4000 meters above sea level. Tallija is an Aymara village that has been around since before the Spanish conquest and they still live the same way as their ancestors did. Everything they have, make, and use comes from the resources around them. Of course, they do have radios and use some modern clothes, and electricity came in 2004, and the government built them a concrete soccer court just like the ones you see all over Bolivia. The world out there is finally coming in after so many years of their refusal to come out. In fact, the community is now divided into two populations. Tallija is the traditional community, and then there is Confital where many people have moved because it is along the side of the highway. This has also brought some division in the comunity between the people that want to "modernize" and those who don't. Also, Confital receives all the development programs and organizations because it is easier to get to, so they have the school and the medical post too.

So why did we travel so far to this place and stay there a week? We did a 6-day workshop our Swiss professor designed called "Supporting Local Innovations" where we partnered with a group of locals-- men, women, young, old-- to try to identify problems and potentials in the community. We were not there to do any projects, but rather to come alongside the community to try to see where there were areas they could improve their community in. Interestingly, Tallija happens to be a community where Food for the Hungry is actively involved so I also got to see first hand the effects of their work and the impressions that the community had of them. It was a great week where everyone involved learned a lot. I learned more about how to be a partner in development rather than a "leader" or "in charge," and how to facilitate group activities that get people to interact, talk, and think for themselves. It was cool to see how our diverse knowledges and backgrounds could come together to find problems and solutions.

I won't go into all the details of the workshop, but I will tell you I saw some awesome stuff, I made some friends, and learned. The village is in the middle of some huge rock formations, which the people around there call the "City of Stone." Legend has it that it was once a huge city built by an Inca who later cursed the city because of its sinfulness, turning it into stone. We slept in the schoolroom, where we also had our meetings, and we ate in the Catholic church. The building is there, but the Church itself has been absent for quite some time. The inside looked like a storeroom in an old museum, with ancient wooden crosses and broken images of Jesus and Mary.

The people were wonderful. A little hard to open up, but great once they did. They welcomed us with music and a K'oa, which is a burnt sacrifice to Pachamama, and the last night we had "culture night" where they played and drank until about 3am. We got to spend one day out walking all day with my group since we were doing our work on soil conservation and we got to see all kinds of things. It is amazing how well they know that land. There is not one square foot that does not have a name, not one animal that they don't know who it belongs to, not one plant they do not know the names of and their uses. The women can weave like nobody's business too. It was neat to get out and see a little bit of what rural Bolivia is like. It was even more amazing to realize that these people have been here for so many hundreds of years living and dying in that one place with hardly any change. And I have a feeling when our country and the rest of the "developed" world collapses due to war or bad farming or pollution or whatever, these people will continue with their lives just as they always have. It makes you wonder who is the "developed" one after all.