Capinota

Much of Bolivia was once part of the Incan empire before the Spanish conquered it in the 16th century. The pattern of Spanish relations with the indigenous people was very different than that of the English in North America. Instead of killing all the natives wholesale and driving them off the land, the Spanish just impressed the ones who didn´t die from smallpox into forced labor. These encounters, as you may know, are the beginning of a long and successful history of entirely functional relations between Europeans and other cultures which continues to this day.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that a hybrid culture developed, part European, part native, in Bolivia as in other parts of the Iberian-conquered Americas. Over centuries of ethnic mixing, class division, revolutions, repressions, reforms, etc., Latin America simmered like a cultural stew. I find the music, people, and customs quite fascinating. Anyway, the upshot of that long discourse is that in Bolivia, there are actually four languages spoken: Spanish, Quechua, Aymara, and Guryani. Spanish, obviously, is the Latin American Spanish descended from colonial Spain. Quechua is the language of the Incan empire. Aymara is the language of the ancient indigenous kingdoms which the Incas conquered, and Guryani is the language of the tropical lowlands in the east. Take careful note, because although right now I´m going to leave you hanging, this language discussion actually is relevant to other parts of this post.

Sunday I traveled with the CEDESOL office staff to the village of Capinota, about 70 km (40 miles-ish) from Cochabamba. We also traveled with a team from the microenterprise Sobre la Roca ("Over the Rock," which is both a scriptural reference and a reference to the old three-stone cooking fire) to perform the bread and butter of distributing ecological cookstoves: demonstrations.

The point of a demonstration is to set up a bunch of stoves, cook stuff with them, feed curious onlookers with it, and then take down names as they line up to buy them. It´s slightly more complicated than that, but that´s the general idea. I helped set up one of the dual-burner rocket stoves, then helped Ruth, Dave´s wife and the owner of Sobre la Roca, make a dish called Pastel de Carne. In some parts of the world, this dish is called meatloaf. The recipe called for about a quart of ketchup and two dozen eggs, which I faithfully added to the bowl full of ground beef. Then, we separated it out into baking pans and put the Pastel de Carne into the solar box cookers we had set up around the plaza.

My next job was to hand out sheets of paper with the prices of the stoves to curious onlookers and answer any questions they asked me. Enter Drew the salesman, a job I was never particularly good at even when the clientele did speak my first language. I have never held a sales job. I sense something vaguely shady to working on commission. Luckily, I´m a volunteer so I don´t get commission, and my conscience doesn´t understand me when I speak Spanish.

About an hour into the sales session I spotted a woman looking curiously at one of the solar cookers. She was dressed in traditional campesino clothing: long dark pigtails, wide-brimmed hat, a particolored poncho and a long skirt. I went up to her, said "Perdon, señora" as politely as I could, gave her a sales sheet, and started my spiel. And I thought I was doing pretty well in Spanish with what I knew: este cocina no usa nada leña, this stove doesn´t use any firewood; usa solamente le energia del sol, it only uses the power of the sun; usualmente la comida cocina en uno y medio horas dependiente en el tipo de comida y el fuerzo del sol, usually the food cooks in 1 1/2 hours depending on the type of foor and the strength of the sun, et cetera, et cetera. I went on like this for two or three minutes, she wasn´t interrupting me with pesky questions that I didn´t have the vocabulary to answer, and I was too absorbed with forming cogent sentences in Spanish to really notice the blank look on her face. I was just about to drive my spiel home when she finally interrupted me and asked, "¿Sabes Quechua?" Do you know Quechua?

I think I froze in mid-sentence. I looked at Andrea, whom I hadn´t noticed come up. I think I looked like something that was about to be run over by a car. She looked at me, almost laughing out loud, and said, "Drew, that woman only speaks Quechua." Then she got Dora, who works at the Cedesol offices and knows Spanish and Quechua, to explain to the woman about solar cookers.

This is what I get for trying to learn Spanish.

I wasn´t the only victim of the Quechua language barrier, though. Later on, some of the people in the office were giving a presentation on the benefits of ecological cookers in Spanish in the town hall to a largely enraptured audience. The presentation was accompanied by a power point with lots of dramatic pictures, it was polished, it was professional. Andrea and I were in the courtyard outside, watching from the back because we had to take down stove orders from people going in and out. And then Andrea motioned me over and pointed to a woman slumped over in her chair, falling asleep. "She doesn´t understand a word they´re saying up there."

This is why one of the projects I´m working to secure funding for includes translators to translate educational materials on ecological cookers into Quechua, Aymara, and Guryani. Most often, the people who speak these indigenous languages live in the poor, remote rural areas where we go and have just the kind of problems we´re trying to help them fix. Cedesol and Sobre la Roca together have produced and distributed thousands of rocket stoves and solar cookers, but they´re trying to do more: combine the technology with education about how to manage kitchens in a sanitary way, how to use the stoves best to pasteurize water and reduce fuel expenses, and distribute more stoves. Cedesol and Sobre la Roca are smack in the middle of a process of industrial scale-up involving going from producing a few hundred stoves a month to producing over a thousand. One of our obstacles right now is the machine tool from the black lagoon, a beast CNC-controlled plasma cutter which is the machine shop equivalent, right now, of a bad-tempered donkey.

But more on that later.

Peace from Bolivia,
Drew