Another post from Elizabeth Niels. Enjoy.
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If you ever wondered where the used clothes you’ve donated ended up, I’ve found them. There right here in Bolivia. In fact, I’ve even seen a Bolivian motorcyclist bombing down the mountainside wearing none other than a ragged old Green Bay Packers sweatshirt. It sure makes a girl from Oconomowoc, Wisconsin feel right at home.
With all the used American clothing floating around campus, the university where I teach РUniversidad Acad̩mica Campesina de Carmen Pampa (UAC-CP) Рlooks like any university in the United States. On the surface, the scene here is all very familiar. During the first week of school, new students and their parents walked timidly around campus lugging bags to dorms. Returning students greeted each other with hugs and handshakes. Other students lingered on balconies to titter about the commotion below. Groundskeepers looked after freshly planted flowers.
But looks are very deceiving here at beautiful UAC-CP. If you scratch the surface, UAC-CP isn't a thing like home. Unlike anything in Wisconsin, this university was created to educate Bolivia’s rural poor, a population of people that were enslaved until the 1950s. And when I say poor, I mean dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, kill-your-chicken-three-hours-before-dinner poor. Many of the families who send their kids to school here live on US$200 a year.
My buddy Enrique is a perfect example. Enrique and I got to be friends while painting the upper floor of my house. At 5'6", I tower over him.
Like all other students here at UAC-CP, Enrique lives in the dormitories with 19 roommates. Dorm rooms are cement-floored open spaces lined with bunk beds, more like a barracks than a dorm. They have no hot showers and only a small locker for personal belongings. But it's heaven for Enrique who slept in one room with his entire family before he came to UAC-CP. And no hot showers are no big deal -- chances are Enrique's never had a hot shower. Once when we went swimming in a nearby pool, I asked Enrique where he learned to swim so well. "I swam upstream in the river," he said proudly. That same river was his bath, toilet, laundry tub, garbage can and drinking water.
Poor nutrition is one of the reasons Enrique is so tiny. Good nutrition -– especially meat and dairy foods –- are impossibly expensive for many families here. Foods with high simple sugar content are the mainstay, and so, like many other UAC-CP students, Enrique's front teeth are lined with metal to prevent further rotting. Other teeth are missing. Enrique is fortunate to be enrolled in the UAC-CP food co-op where he gets enough to eat each day. Other students that are just slightly less poor than Enrique don't qualify and often go hungry. Deciding who gets to eat and who doesn't is a painful process for the leaders of the co-op.
And so, to make ends meet, most students work for the UAC-CP. Before Enrique came to work at my house, he maintained UAC-CP's goat pens once a week. His commute to the pens was a two hour walk down a mountainside -– and, of course, back up at the end of a long day of cutting grass with a machete. These days, Enrique also works in the UAC-CP slaughter pen and meat processing plant near my house where he butchers livestock. Recently, I watched as student workers routinely slaughtered an entire heard of goats. In response to my question about whether the students liked their bloody job, one shrugged, "Of course. It's work. It's good." Here students are happy to get any work, slaughterhouse or not. For each full day of work, Enrique and other students receive 30 Bolivianos, roughly $3.50.
The differences between UAC-CP and colleges in the Unites States could go on and on. Like most college campuses, UAC-CP buzzes with energy and laughter. It is a clean, safe refuge for kids like Enrique. It’s a vibrant place. But, unlike many universities in the Unites States, somehow the UAC-CP teams with something more. Maybe it's the pure energy of a unique population striving for something they never had before: an education and hope for a new and better life. Whatever it is, it has me constantly amazed.
Note: The experiences of Enrique are a composite reflection of a typical UAC-CP student.
