Did You Know You Can Wash Cheese?

Samaipata is finally beginning to feel like home. Or maybe I shouldn’t say “finally,” since I’ve only been in site not even two months yet. When I walk down the street people actually look at me and say hi, fewer taxi drivers whistle and yell at me from their cabs, and I run into people I know everywhere I go.

I am still in the “diagnostic” stage of my service. It is the first three months in site, where I am to lay back and work less, sit around and drink cokes more. My job is to get to know the community, create friendships, and build trust. It is harder than you think. It’s very strange to just go up to people you don’t know and pretty much thrust yourself into their lives.

Samaipata is a very touristy community. The locals are so used to seeing Europeans and a few North American tourists so they do not really care when a new face shows up in town. It was especially confusing for me. I am used to the usual “chinita” questions, but then I got to Samaipata and suddenly everyone thinks I’m Japanese. Turns out there is a Japanese family in town that has an organic foods business and from them, people learned to link an Asian face to Japanese origins. It’s actually pretty interesting. There’s a town not too far from here that is named Okinawa and is full of Japanese immigrants. I asked around and they said that after the Nagasaki and Hiroshima debacles, Bolivia offered assistance to the Japanese and gave them some money to come settle in Bolivia. But I digress…

I’m here and I’m Japanese and suddenly I’m something like, “HICA!!” as well. I was asked if I was “hica” all the time, and for the life of me I did not ever remember learning this word. The first few times I’d just nod and smile, and try to remember to go home and look up the word in the dictionary. Finally I ask someone what the heck they are talking about when they say “hica,” and I find that not only is it confusing enough that I am a Vietnamese-born American living in Bolivia and working for the U.S. government, but in the tiny town of Samaipata, population 4000, there is actually a Japanese equivalent of the Peace Corps who happens to have volunteers coming in the very near future. No wonder we’re all confused.

Continuing with the integration process, I have found that we have a mini-supermarket here in Samaipata. A French bakery just opened last week. German and Dutch owned restaurants, tourist services, hostals, and hotels can be found everywhere you look. A person can go without speaking Spanish at all around here. English is universal and everyone wants me to teach it to them. Apparently a new resort/hotel just opened up on the hill about a month ago, and the best description anyone can come up with for it is that it’s the “Disneyland of Samaipata.” I just trekked out there and they have horse-drawn carriages and a petting zoo with emus and llamas. It’s hilarious.

Though I can go weeks without uttering a word of Spanish, I really am trying to integrate. I think that I now have hard evidence that I am succeeding. To begin, I will give a little background explanation of the situation here in Bolivia. La Paz is the current capital of Bolivia. People from La Paz and the majority of the western region are known as “Collas.” I live in the department (or state) of Santa Cruz in the eastern part of the country where people are known as “Cambas.” These two groups, the Collas and Cambas, generally do not have good things to say about each other. The current government has been accused of worsening relationships between the two groups and you will hear incredibly racist things being thrown out from both groups. It is called racism because for the most part, Collas are of indigenous (poor) decent and Cambas are of Spanish (rich) decent, although now the lines are much more blurred and this is an overly simplified explanation. One of the Bolivians I talked to told me that hate generates hate, and many times people are raised to hate a certain group long after they have forgotten the reason for the hate. This is not just unique to Bolivia, huh?

At any rate, I have a friend here from La Paz who speaks English pretty much as well as I speak Spanish. He just moved here as well and since he loves to practice his English, after the first few weeks of me speaking Spanish and he speaking English, I got too confused and we go to the point where we’d just converse in English. The other day this guy realizes that I have not been speaking to him in Spanish at all and decides that we must revert back to Spanish so that I can practice more. I oblige and begin speaking in Spanish and look up to see a horrified look on his face. “What happened to you!” he asks me, “You have a CAMBA accent!” He is mortified and I am ecstatic that I have integrated to the point that I now speak with a Camba accent. Cambas basically speak a version of Spanish where they enunciate very poorly and never pronounce the “s” except at the beginning of the word. So something like, “La cosa es que él no quiere” becomes “la coa e que él no quiere, puej” because they leave out all “s” ’s and they add “puej” (pues) to the end of all phrases.

If you don’t have a clear of understanding of what this Spanish sounds like, take a sock, stuff it in your mouth, and speak. During training someone coined this accent “sock-in-the-mouth” Spanish and it’s rather accurate. The muddled sounds only gets worse the farther you go in the rural areas. But like I said, I’m integrating and it made my day when I realized I could understand every word of this sock-in-the-mouth Spanish. And not only that, I could speak it as well!!!

(My buddy was not so excited. He spent an entire night of trying to get me pronounce words “correctly.”)