"Puedo obtener una visa aqui, si?"

My first real words in a Spanish-speaking country: "I can get a visa here, yes?" Getting to Cochabamba took more than 24 hours, and I didn´t sleep many of them. There isn´t much to say about the three flights from Cincinnati to Dallas to Miami to La Paz, except that all of them were late.

On the last flight to La Paz, I found Kim in the seat next to me. Kim´s another ETHOS engineer fron UD who will be working in La Paz this summer. Her organization is Proleña, which is similar to CEDESOL since they also develop ecological cookers: woodstoves, solar cookers, et cetera.

We touched down in La Paz around 6:30 in the morning and then began a harrowing trip through customs. Actually, it wasn´t that bad, but I have a neruotic fear of burecracy which included, in this instance, fantasies of being stranded in the airport for weeks living off peanuts because I couldn´t get my entrance visa. That fear prompted the aforementioned question to an immigration official, who took me to a teller window where someone scrutinized my passport and application, looked at me cursorily, and said "cien dollares." I laid 5 twenties on the counter and he stamped my passport. Golden.

Going through customs was pretty breezy, too. No long interrogations in closed rooms in front of a firing squad of customs agents, as I had also fantasized. I was a little afraid of this because in my check bag was stowed the sway bar linkage mentioned in the last post, which is for Dave´s car. How do you explain to a customs agent that you´re bringing car parts into the country? If you´re of age, they expect cigars and liquor, but car parts? I mean, really. Luckily, customs wasn´t much of a problem. I picked up my bag from the carosuel, handed them the customs declaration (marked nada de jurada - nothing to declare) and walked straight through to the other side. That´s when I finally began to breathe. The sweet, free air of Bolivia.

At the airport we were met by Juan Carlos, Kim´s contact in La Paz, who took us to his city apartment where Kim would be staying. He and his wife entertained us for a few hours and breakfast, and we talked a little about Proleña, ETHOS, ecological stoves, and our purpose here. Over a tasty breakfast of rolls, butter, jam, and coffee.

Looking out over La Paz, we began talking about people, about the poor of the world and the economic and social systems which keep them there. I found Juan Carlos and myself in agreement about many things, especially how the consumptive living in the first world is literally doing that - consuming the planet, consuming our fellow men. There´s a Shel Silverstein poem that I recall about a boy who started eating and just wouldn´t stop. He just kept eating, and when he had eaten all the food in the world, he started eating his family, everyone else, the planet itself, then the universe, and then finally he ate himself until there was nothing leftof him. I think it´s at least a fairly appropriate metaphor for how we affluent people do things. We are consuming everything we can until, eventually, we end up consuming ourselves.

The technolgies which Proleña and CEDESOL work with in Bolivia are energy technologies aimed at improving people´s lives by doing the same work, only doing it better and using less resources. That´s why rocket stoves are designed to burn with amazing efficiency and consume as little firewood as possible. That´s why Kim and I are here - to apply our expertise to a little bit of the problem of consumption and sustinability and injustice that all of us face, but also to learn about ourselves and our place in the world. To learn a little humility.

You start learning humility quickly, particularly in a foreign country where you barely know the language and must accept kindness from strangers. After breakfast, Juan Carlos drove me to the bus terminal where he paid my fare, because I hadn´t changed currency yet. And then, once everyone had boarded and we started the eight-hour bus ride, I realized that I was the only gringo on the bus. For the very first time in my life, really, I was a minority. It was my first experience of a loneliness, reinforced by differences of culture and wealth and class, of being alone amongst people who know each other, but don´t know you and are not like you.

And yet, everyone I met was insufferably kind. The elderly man in the window seat next to me instructed me in Spanish, punctuated by gestures so I could understand, how to give the bus conductor a ticket. At the halfway rest stop in a town on the Altiplano a woman named Nevia, a student of English, took it upon herself to help me make sense of Bolivian currency and buy food at the cafe, thankfully, since I had eaten very little on the flights and slept very little and was desperately in need of food. Then she held with me a very pleasant, bilingual conversation in which her English was light-years ahead of my Spanish. As we pulled into Cochabamba, she gave me her business card and told me that if I needed help or anything, to call her. The kindness of strangers, unprompted by anything except compassion, the recognition that someone is not from here and in need - the experience of it is one of the most incredible experiences of human dignity I have ever had.

During the bus ride, I read the entire Hitchiker´s Guide to the Galaxy and tried to understand a little bit of Spanish comedies. At the station in Cochabamba, David, the American expatriate who has worked with CEDESOL for something like 30 years in Bolivia and for whom I bought the car parts, was waiting for me with his wife. Thankfully, blessedly, I had reached home base. He drove me for a tour of the city and then to the house I´m calling home for the next nine weeks or so.

I finally met Andrea, who´s only a little older than me and works in CEDESOL, and her mother and father. They offered me a welcome dinner and then showed me a shower and a bed, gratefully accepted. In another humbling experience, almost all conversation in the household is held in Spanish. I can understand some, respond very simply, but other than that not much. I´m hoping the intensive exposure will help me come along quickly. I´m going to have to work hard to study the language and become at least conversational very quickly. And that, my friends, is where I leave you, por que hay 11:30 por la mañana en las oficinas de CEDESOL y las personas son hablando en español, y tengo que escuchar. Because it´s 11:30 in the morning at the CEDESOL offices and people are speaking Spanish, and I need to listen.