Another day

I am back in La Paz after a short stint in Buenos Aires. Some of my elation has faded, though I still feel incredibly comfortable here in my new home. My roommate and I tend to fall into conversation in the morning over a cup of coffee. We linger there, warming ourselves in the sun around the large table that dominates the room. Laurence has so much experience and so many interesting thoughts to share. I end up enthralled, shirking work, wanting the morning hours to extend indefinitely, the coffee, toast and dark Yungas honey to last just a little bit longer so we can stay like this for hours.

My other roommate, a red-headed archeologist bounces in and out of the house with intense energy. I think it is the loneliness of categorizing pottery shards for weeks at a time in the campo that give him his manic edge. Reminds me a bit of Ian…

The excitement of last night was the defrosting of the fridge, including hurling large chunks of ice out the window into the garden below. Andy took great pictures I’d like to send.

Buenos Aires is a city that is hard to describe. Honestly, I think it may have trouble living up to its reputation as a city of encanto and romance, birthplace of the sensual Tango, land of European immigrants (I kept my eye out for older Germans). In many respects, it is just another large cosmopolitan city like others. The streets are crowded, the shopping good. In general the people of Buenos Aires are warm and open to foreigners, especially relative to Bolivia. I feel a sort of guilt at being so at home here, in an area where racial and economic tensions are less obvious because many inhabitants are richer and whiter. Like in the States, this region of the world the tended towards genocide rather than intermarriage with indigenous groups. What a shameful reason to feel comfortable. Regardless, I kept trying to come up with ways to make it back there.

A movie, El cronólogo de la fuga, reminded me of other bitter histories of oppression, the disappeared of the 1970s. While I was vaguely familiar with the story of the disappeared, I had no idea that it was so recent. The disappearances occurred primarily 1976-1978, precisely around my birthday. A legacy of this time period was the occasional adoption of the prisoners’ babies by their torturers. People of precisely my age are still finding out that the people who raised them were not their parents. Apparently, the mothers of the disappeared still march around the Plaza 2^nd de Mayo (pronounced maijo) on Thursdays.

So, you might ask, what about my project?

argg.

I am working on it…