Realities

Charles Severin was born off the coast of Africa on the island Mauritius before becoming an accountant in Paris. Charles is one of those romantics who has spent four years saving money with which to travel the world without a return date. Charles always claims he doesn’t speak Spanish yet he single handedly set up English classes for three groups of children in the impoverished coastal town of Huarmey, Perú. Day after day I follow him around the dusty unpaved roads as we meet with locals to coordinate the logistics; I would observe the tarp huts with mud floors, yet including a television set, as this French man who “doesn’t speak Spanish” has an hour long conversation. I understand everything but can barely push a couple sentences out. He has big hopes for what he calls “…this world in which we are now seven billion people…” while being realistic to the qualms of our planet. Charles is also a total dork, sometimes attempting to speak Chinese to the Chinese Peruvian immigrants in restaurants; they were never amused. But he is an insightful, brilliant dork who is only God knows where now.

Ximena is significantly different than the majority of women in Bolivia. Ximena has an ex-husband, with whom she maintains a very cordial yet snide relationship. For instance, one day he drives us to the rock pools and Ximena insists, “We only speak German or English around him so he can’t understand.” in English through cupped hands as if it mattered, while her daughter Katya, my German roommate Laura and I are crammed in the backseat. Ximena owns where she lives with her mother and Katya, she also owns her own car and is the breadwinner of the house. Yet the only way she can afford it is to rent the upper unit to people from the U.S. and Europe, such as Laura and I. Ximena feels like a real, temporary host “mom” to me. She helps me set up a Spanish tutor, avoid paying exorbitant customs fees, and equips me with the brillo pad and bar of laundry bleach that are apparently required to treat my minor wounds. She somehow created an almost Western lifestyle momentarily in that year I was abroad, and in the poorest country I visited. I wonder sometimes if that fact is why my memories of her are so lovely, and if I am really that superficial. Then I remember how terrible living in that city, Santa Cruz, Bolivia actually was. A larger, even more sweltering Los Angeles if you can imagine it, whose only blessing was sufficient public transit. That city was certainly the biggest anomaly of my life.

Chris, if that’s his real name, is a Peruvian dude who speaks about four languages and tries to hook up tourists with whatever they’re looking for. I used to run into him in the closest city while I was staying in the Andes for a while. Six months and over 1,000 miles later, I literally run straight into him and his girlfriend Stephanie in the most crowed pedestrian street of Lima, population 8 million. We serendipitously decide to all hang out that night. It’s a Friday night but on Monday the residents of Lima are required to vote on several measures and for this reason it’s a dry weekend. Obviously Stephanie and I easily find an adorable old lady to sell us some beer through her barred window. Yet, Stephanie isn’t drinking because she is actually going to participate in voting and the city breathalyses the public beforehand. Chris was drinking that night because he paid a fine in order to avoid voting, which he did because apparently he has a warrant out for his arrest. I didn’t care to find out what for because at this point it’s dark and I am in a neighborhood where I should not roam the streets without a local. The rest of the night is a blur as they desperately try to teach me how to tango, and respectfully throw in the towel. At one point I hear Macklemore on the radio and have a very strange moment with myself. Before they wake up the next morning I catch the metro back to my hostel in “gringo-ville”.

Miguel and Lucia live in a big hut in the high jungle of Perú, where they have a small plot of land for harvesting platanos and yucca root. Miguel made this hut himself out of bamboo, sheet metal and fishing net. There are two solar panels that power a small dining room light at night and sometimes their tiny bedside TV. “Are you religious?” Miguel asks initially once I enter his hut, before anything else. My “no” comes out very quickly without a second thought. He chuckles “Neither are we really.” Yet Miguel frequently receives messages from God, which cause him to rise in the middle of the night and write for hours. He claims to be completely unaware of what he is writing until several days later. There are piles of these self-bound books. When he reads them later he says to himself, “Wow! How wonderful.” His wife, Lucia didn’t believe him at first. Yet now, when a young rural French farmer named Olivé enters her hut, the first question she asks is “Do you know God?” Like myself, Olivé responds quickly with a “no”. “Well he knows you, and he loves you.” She responds with a firm grip on his shoulder. While Lucia is expressing disappointment and saying goodbye to me, tears are brought to my eyes instantly. Which is exceptionally special because it was all in Spanish and the translation lapse, which had plagued me in the past, was gone in this moment. This is the first time I experience an instant emotional response in my second language. To this day I frequently think about how I am grateful for them.

Haroldused to be addicted to heroine; this is one of the first things I learn about him. I meet Haroldon a cargo boat in the jungle and he is one of the only other gringos I would see in the next five days. Haroldhad hitch hiked all the way from Patagonia to northern Perú and planned on going till Ecuador. This is why his Spanish sounds so super Argentinian. Traveling South America was one of his last real long adventures before he started attending medical school in SouthCarolina, where he was born. It would only be a couple more months for him till he’d be back, yet he’d already been abroad over a year. We share a splif on the deck next to about a dozen cattle in the blistering heat while he tells me about his extensive experimentation with drugs. I recognize that he must not feel fear the same way the majority does. He had at one point reached “the 3rd plateau of cough syrup”, an extremely psychedelic experience after drinking cough syrup for three days. Recently he has told me medical school is going very well; Haroldwill eventually help people who really need it one day.

Santiago is probably six years old. He has red hair though he is 100% Bolivian and does not have any other typical “red-headed” qualities. Santiago can spell his name. His younger brother has a beautiful smile and red hair. Their main source of protein is once a week they get spaghetti noodles or soup with chicken feet. They attend a social program every weekday designed to keep kids of the dirt streets of Santa Cruz’s slums and out of drugs. There isn’t much to do there, but there is always at least one cup of milk a day. Travelling Westerners volunteer here to try and fill an inexplicable moral void. Yet there are absolutely no resources or structure and most of them leave with a much different sense of reality.