Bolivia Water For People; Mapping and Assessment, September 2007

From 30,000 feet, the Amazon Rain forest fills my window, stretching unbroken in all directions to the horizon, a level sea of green treetops, with towering clouds and several great rivers visible  meandering through it. An image of vast unknowable wildness: an lifetime stock of weird bugs and unvisited riverbanks!  I know there has been lots of rain forest lost, but on my flight to La Paz, Bolivia, I finally grasped how large the Amazon still is. And now, here come the Andes.

My first trip to South America in a decade has begun, as Water For People volunteers from US gather in LA Paz to conduct a 2-week program of mapping water and sanitation systems in the Altiplano of Bolivia. My pre-trip reading included background on the new socialist president Evo Morales, friend of the coca growing region, and depressing statistics on Bolivia, the poorest country in South America (now that is saying something). I saw Altiplano views of bare, stony ground and women in bowler hats, and read a fascinating history of recent Water Wars (2002), with real fighting, riots and deaths over water price hikes, and  burnt buses and "victory" for the little guys in the regional capital city we are going to: Cochabamba, Bolivia.

"Los Golondrinas Nunca Migran de Cochabamba"

The swallows never leave Cochabamba, the saying goes, because the weather there is perfect, always spring-like. There are 600,000 people here in a city I never heard of, and there are over 50 different overlapping, half-functional water systems. The Cochabamba Water Wars started when the government gave the city contract to Bechtel, who jacked up the rates and tried to build a big pipeline, pissing off the entire city. Luckily we will not be working there.Our group of US volunteers meet with each other, and with the folks from Bolivia-based Agua Para El Pueblo, and we are off, traveling in cars to the the high valley towns beyond Cochabamba, where our mapping work will be done. Spray-painted graffiti on the way says "Coca No Es Cocaina" and "Viva EVO!".

Our mission is for Water for People, a Denver-based US water group supported by North American water professionals.  Mapping and Assessment, Year One of a Five Year plan, is intended to identify, prioritize, and improve water and sanitation systems in this part of Bolivia. Lessons from decades of failed international water projects have contributed to the WFP approach of identifying capable communities, requiring their participation and partial funding, and partnering with local organizations and local government to try to have some follow-through. Agua Para el Pueblo is a well-run local NGO, with a core group of Bolivian engineers and planners, a track record of building water systems, running education programs, and sticking around to see how things work.  Our goal this trip is to visit, photograph, locate (with GPS waypoints) and collect information on the systems at 120+ communities, including the schools and hospitals. And for the US volunteers, you know, maybe also meet the people, learn and teach each other a little about the water system stuff we love,  and make some human connections on vacation that goes beyond ordering another beer at a resort pool. Of course, we will still be drinking beer at night, because we are geologists and engineers doing field work. Beer to us is like...the wind that moves the willows. 

"Hay Muchas Fiestas en Bolivia"

"There are many festivals in Bolivia". Our driver states this as we pass an impromtu street dance party, and proudly repeats this phrase so often on the 3-hour trip from Cochabamba to Villa Rivera, (the village where will will start mapping), we start giggling each time, and so he says it more. We hit a local chicken pretty hard, but the driver checks the mirror and keeps going: he shrugs, "Solo esta golpeado" . Chicken got up, so its not dinner yet. We arrive at the sparkling Hotel Carmelita, an island of organization and cleanliness created by Dona Maria, and meet the rest of the competent Agua Para El Pueblo staff and drivers. They are all about five foot tall, making us gringo 6-footers look like NBA players.

A whirlwind of energy this first morning, as we are all introduced, the workgroups are listed, teams form up and grab maps, lunches and water bottles, and everyone goes off to start mapping. We never did our group practice to standardize mapping procedures, (which will come back to haunt us), but the energy to do field work is not to be denied.

Over the next two weeks, images and moments accumulate as we move through our list of communities, and gain experience in the daily work of collecting information. This is a good group: friendly, competent, work-minded but fun, rolling with the changes, getting the data in. Field work requires discipline, to be correct and complete the first time, in the midst of the dust and confusion, and opportunities to recapture data are rare. I learn this when my crew drives three hours to redo a site from Day One where tmy GPS and camera was not working.

My Spanish phrases come easier after long field days driving, mapping and chatting with Freddi, Elvis and Abraham. They teach me a few Quechua phrases to make the bowler-hatted ladies crack a smile. Long vistas of dry stony hills, of ladies in a variety of formal hats driving herds of sheep from no place to nowhere, of gasping hikes at 12,000 foot elevation up to hidden concrete spring boxes, with an ancient local dude in shower slippers who is hiking twice as fast as me, with a giant ball of coca leaves in his mouth. I gotta get me some Coca, my tired oxygen-starved brain says. We move the cracked lid at one for a photo, and find a pair of dead doves floating inside the spring box, decomposed to a state near jelly. I climb in to remove them, and ask the local guy if people noticed the taste." Well, all the children have been sick" he says thoughtfully, looking at the gooey birds. My recommendation as an international water expert: Fix the lid, fella. We stand looking over the shimmering valley to the adobe houses far below. Water in a dry land is the single vital thing, the point where all concerns converge.

We are fed multiple lunches at the communities, sometimes 3 a day, of salty country cheese and boiled potatoes, water-swollen corn kernels eaten with fingers. Communities that are lobbying us for a good system break out the Guinea Pig and Chicha. At the dry-well village of Ichocollo, a crowd of 30 gathers to describe their need for a water system, then watch us eat roast guinea pig (a delicious rich meat taste, but the little feet w/claws take some getting used to in your hand). Each place and time guinea pig is served, one of the hosts takes me aside and tells me how great it is for sexual vitality. I have to take their word for it. but  I recognize the honor they do us by serving us their limited protein.

Old gap-grinned ladies in colorful shawls and leathery guys keep arriving in the courtyard compound as word spread of the visit. They bring forth the plastic bucket of Chicha, a sweet corn homebrew, and all praise it mightily ("this is the good stuff, the old-school homebrew, my Grandma's recipe, not the modern crap that you read about with grain alcohol added"). I can sense the moment calls for my participation, and after spilling a little for Pachamama, the earth goddess as Freddi taught me, I down the Chicha, glass after  glass, as the comunity nods in solemn, silent approval. The hostess,  Dona Isabella, a sprite of indeterminate age in black pigtails, grins each time and refills my glass from the plastic bucket. The Chicha has a pleasant corn malt taste, and is slightly electric, like fresh salsa that has been in the back of the fridge a little too long. Soon, my bladder is bursting, and my teeth and nose are numb. I think of the Mooseturd Pie story, and I do not complain. "It's good, though", I say, and no one gets my joke, just like at home.. Dona Isabella has clearly staked her community honor and chance of a future water supply on getting me blasted at this lunch. Finally, to prevent her from refilling my glass again, I place it high up in the rafters, where no one else can reach it, to much general laughter, and we make our escape. Ichocollo, you got my vote for a new well and water tank, and I told everyone at Water For People that.

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