From the moment
I landed in the altitude of La Paz, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. The
geography changed but I did not . The slow, sluggish line of impatient passengers waiting to clear customs
unraveled. The oppressive stale air
below the tin roof left us short of breath.
Nobody moved forward. We waited
without protest lethargic. too passive for anger. Suddenly, misgivings about my job as a Public Health
Intern for Catholic Charities overwhelmed me. I was landlocked. When I gave the
Immigration official my American passport, my hands trembled. My instincts
warned me to turn back before it was too late.
Although my new
colleagues met me at the airport, I could not shake the sensation that I was
unwelcome. My co-workers clearly
resented the obligation of greeting my flight. My boss, Catherine, annoyed at
having to shake my hand, escorted me to my hotel. Her obvious displeasure and
indifference to my ten hour flight seemed like a bad omen. Everything about my
arrival irritated her. As we began our descent along the only paved road into
the city, Catherine ignored me and chatted with a younger colleague who
accompanied her to the airport. I listened to them because it was
required.
Hand carved,
wooden, white crosses dotted the road’s edge
like paper narcissus, marking death. These primitive tombstones
intensified my foreboding, an unsettling reminder of fatality. I peered down
the ravine and didn’t see any bottom, that’s how steep the plunge over the edge
would be. The dismal, uninhabited perimeter of La Paz encroached me in fog,
like doom. The earthen, copper color of dirt slipped through the car windows.
leaving me caked with dust. This mud clung to my clothes, staying put. I felt
stained.
Children stood
along the highway like stalks of corn, swaying in unison. ten year old boys
with thick, uncombed hair swarmed our cars hawking coca leaves in green plastic
bags. Farmers chewed these leaves to ward off starvation. As we drove past dead
acres of untilled soil, I wondered what crops survived in this harsh climate; I
learned that only frozen, black potatoes shaped like lumps of coal grew in the
ground.
No matter where
I looked, I saw suffering. Bolivians wore
the face of poverty. Empty expressions
revealed endless misery. Even their skin wrinkled in defeat, withered, and
brittle as a lizard’s scales scorched from the desert. They slouched rather
than stand, shorter than American adults, but looked older from disrepair. They
didn’t live long or grow tall, inches of height stolen from malnutrition. Their
rare smiles revealed a railroad of rotting tracks of teeth.
Bolivia was
classified as a hardship post. Life here looked cruel and unsympathetic. Stalls
of produce decayed in the open-air markets, offering vegetables that no one
wanted to buy.
Indian women carried sick, feverish
infants on their backs, wrapped only in bundles of despair. These mothers
with ravenous, greedy claws begged for
money, feral from hunger . Their children bent them in half. Their babies’
noses leaked continuously without the hope of tissues. Their mucous solidified
into a line of snot, hardening into the shape of a birthmark. Newborns died
before their first bath, so keeping them clean seemed pointless. The Andean
topology of volcanoes and mountains trapped Bolivia in an impasse. We arrived then, in this place of sorrow.
As we pulled up
to my hotel, my new boss reminded me to come to work tomorrow and suggested I
wait for her in the lobby. She didn’t even say goodbye, eager to deposit me
like luggage on the sidewalk. I looked down at the sidewalks where curbs should
be. Sewage ran over the soles of my shoes. My first step was in shit. It was
everywhere.
My job was to improve
people’s health status and extend their life expectancy. After this drive from
the airport, I knew I would fail. I
didn’t even know where to begin. Most adults were illiterate and women died in childbirth as often as they survived.
Rural men worked as miners in Oruro, toiling underground for just a few dollars
a week. Life had little value in this country, the second poorest in the
Western Hemisphere.
Americans who worked
in Bolivia, were, by default, wealthy,
earning more in one month than most families in a year. That disparity kept me
permanently apologetic, guilty of the privilege that money bestows. After a
two-week stay in my comfortable, albeit sterile four star hotel, I rented an astonishing,
gracious apartment in a residential neighborhood that lead to the wealthy outskirts of town. It had three enormous
rooms, with a circular balcony that wrapped around the front of the building.
Each room provided wide, solid windows over the street, but there was nothing
to look at. Even the scenery looked impoverished; there was nothing to look at,
no people to watch, no place to go. The streets remained empty from morning
until night.. I spent the evening hours in my living room lighting a fire in
the white brick fireplace, building warmth.
The floor plan allowed ample room
for loneliness; somehow it found me in
every room. My constant loneliness started when I moved in and never left. I couldn’t escape isolation, or prevent
solitude.
Determined to
make the best of my unhappy situation, I enthusiastically joined running clubs,
aerobics classes, studied Portuguese, attended temple, played soccer, accepted
invitations, hosted dinners: anything to fill the vast, infinite plain of my
own company.
