Spinach

Volunteer Kate Cimini interviewed Judit Mamani about her graduation project.

__________________
I'm an hour early for our meeting when I run into Judit. She spots me as I wander past the cancha, the hardtop basketball court, however, and chases me down. She's a little bit of a thing, and I'd be surprised if she topped five feet or pushed one hundred pounds. She's never without a smile trapped in the corners of her mouth, and everyone who mentions her uniformly agrees that she's hermosa, a lovely person. Despite being one of the sunniest people to occupy this earth, she keeps an astute brain behind her eyes. Judit takes me down to the huerta where she both works and has her research project and as I follow her, Judit fills me in on her background.

Judit is the oldest of seven children. Her sister Adelina, too, is at the college. Judit comes from a family without much money, like many of the students here, so once she graduated from the Franciscan high school in Carmen Pampa (the same one that another of her sisters Guadalupe is attending), her father told her that if she wanted to continue her education she would have to find the means to pay for it herself. She understands completely, she adds, because with her father's salary as a miner it is difficult enough to support nine people, let alone pay for college. Judit continues that she found help in her high school English teacher, former volunteer Julie Balsman, who has helped supported Judit throughout her time at the college. However, in her final year as a thesis student at the UAC, and as a wife and mother as well as a student, Judit has been struggling to pay for both her thesis fieldwork and the rest of her bills.

We go over some of this information in the walk down to the huerta, and begin to segue into her thesis project. Judit first shows us what she calls her pre-ensayo, or her field test: these spinach plants are essentially practice plants, and what she does with them now will be used to inform how she deals with her actual research fieldwork.


Photo: Judit shows Kate her spinach plot.

She tells us her thesis topic is quite neatly summed up in her title, "Producción de espinaca con y sin carpa solar de tipo túnel con la aplicación de gallinaza y compost en la comunidad de Carmen Pampa" – Spinach production with a portable greenhouse and the application of chicken manure and compost in the community of Carmen Pampa. The type of spinach she is using for her thesis is Viroflay, a tall spinach whose leaves can be harvested multiple times. This plant that is rich in iron, calcium, and vitamins A, K, D and E, spinach is a plant that interested Judit very much. Should her research prove as valuable as she thinks, and should the community members include spinach into their diet, Bolivia could see a serious increase in its spinach production in the next few decades.

Many people in the Bolivia suffer from malnutrition, a condition that springs from a popular diet of starches, only occasionally meat, and not much for vegetables. Judit's bid to save her part of the world is wrapped up in the proper nutrition of the people around her. With her research, she is hoping to make it easier and less expensive to produce organic spinach, a crop that is frequently ignored around here. In addition to nutritional value, Judit tells us that in traditional medicine spinach is quite valuable as well, used to treat various maladies. Spinach is a very popular food to eat among the many tourists that visit Bolivia and La Paz, and is sold for a 15 bolivianos – about $2 – per pound in nearby Coroico. The biggest buyers of spinach in the area are hotels and restaurants that cater to relatively wealthy foreigners. If Judit can make spinach both easier and cheaper to produce, it will no longer be just the wealthy tourists eating spinach and reaping the benefits, but the whole country.

We wrap the interview with a tour of the college's organic garden, with our last stop at the plot that has been given to her for use in her research project. Thanks to a small grant from conBolivia, she will be able to buy the supplies she needs for her project. Her plot is rocky and untilled, piled high with weeds and spotted with bare patches, but it looks out over the community of Carmen Pampa and the cloud forest on the mountains beyond, and you can see the possibilities in Judit's eyes as she looks out toward the future.