Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz has an amazingly different feel then the Andean cities I have visited thus far. Being in the low lands the climate is more tropical... in other words very very hot which kept me dripping and sticky throughout the week. In the city you do not see the indigenous women in their bowler hats and polleras like you do in every other city I have visited in the Andes. The stores and restaurants that line the street have a much more luxurious presence and while ‘Evo si’ is spray painted along the streets of Cochabamba, ‘Autonomia’ is the popular phrase that dots the city and district of Santa Cruz.

On Monday after a morning flight to Santa Cruz we took a 6 hour bus ride to the more Amazonian area of Santa Cruz where an indigenous group, Guarayos, live. The town we stayed in was fascinating for many reasons but in particular for their construction of classical instruments, most popular among them, the violin. Over time the town has developed a hobby of playing classical music. A remote town on the outskirts of the Amazon in Bolivia gives a large classical concert every four years… there are so many awesome things in this country. Tuesday we traveled a little deeper into Amazon to visit an even more remote community of Guarayos. It was an hour or so bouncy bus ride and in the end we had to wade through a river before we reached the community, Curucuru. Curucuru was an amazing little village of 35 or so families that makes a living harvesting wood. For about an hour we listened to various members of the community explain how their village is run along with their plans to bring electricity into their village as well as portable water and more in the near future. In the end we asked them if they had any questions for us. Their first question was about what was going on in Bolivia right now. Our director Ismael brought them up to date with all the current events and news including the recent march in La Paz. I think it is a testimony to the remoteness of the village and diversity of Bolivia that a group of students from the United States were the ones bringing news about their native country. I also found this visit to be fascinating in looking at the differences between indigenous communities of the Andean and Amazonian region.

By Thursday we were back in the city of Santa Cruz. We spent the morning visiting massive sand dunes right outside the city which have formed in consequence of deforestation. On the way to the dunes we spent a good hour or so pushing our bus through the sandy road. At one point when group pushing and digging out of the tires seemed to be going no where, Lupe (our director Ismael’s wife) preformed this meditative redirection of energy thing on the bus. It seemed to work because after that point the bus had no trouble plowing through the sand. On Friday the meeting we had with an organization was canceled so the day was free to explore the city. I spent the day wandering around, sketching a bit in the plaza, and visiting a few museums including a really cool modern art museum.

I am now back at my Cochabamba home happy to be out of the heat. My host sisters are sitting on either side of me playing various Spanish songs and gauging my reactions… I must be giving good ones because they can’t stop laughing. They seem to think my preferred style of music is rather dull.