September 06, 2007

Discovering San Antonio

San Antonio de Lomerio is a remote community, hidden away in the rolling hills and dry tropical forest of the Chiquitania. It is hard to find for good reason. Sixty years ago, indigenous Chiquitanos escaped from the slavery system of the missions to form a free community. They went as far away as possible from any of the mission towns, into the heart of the backcountry. We were lucky that our guide (the daughter of the mayor) knew the road.

The ethnic group is known as the Monkox, and they are now trying both to preserve their culture and promote their town as a tourist destination. It will be a challenge; the road is rugged, the distances long, and the infrastructure nascent. Apart from the albergues for visitors (comfortable), there are only a handful of bare stores. Food is not exactly a point of attraction (if you like chicken and rice and chicken and rice, you'll like San Antonio). But for a traveler who wants to experience life in the Bolivian countryside and local art and music, it is a fascinating visit. One of the highlights of the stay was a concert by young musicians playing original Chiquitano instruments and songs. Everywhere, the houses are hand-painted with ochres from the earth.

 

I went there with Claudia Mercado to check out their handicrafts. The group built its own Handicraft House (they constructed it in two days during a minga, the communal work tradition). And we were enchanted by their natural dyes: luscious organic colors that captured the colors of the countryside. We spent the next few days learning with them how to make the dyes, and then developing some possible products.  I don't want to give away all of their secrets, but here is a little peek at their extraordinary natural dye process.

We first headed went to the forest to look for materials. Here Don Lorenzo is cutting tree bark that makes a luscious brown/red dye.

This tuber looks like a sweet potato and makes a vivid yellow dye.

Plants and fruits are used too. Our hands were stained blue for a week after scraping this fruit for the dying process.

 

 

We boiled the materials.

 

 

And prepared the raw cotton thread.

Then we boiled the thread with the organic materials.

And then we dried the thread. Here is the final product, drying on top of a loom. The variation in tone depends on the amount of time in the boiling pot with the material.

 

After drying, the thread is ready for the loom. The group has made beautiful weavings from the natural dyes; we hope to be able to import their products.

There is another reason that we want to work with this group. Steve Lotti was a Peace Corp volunteer in the town several years ago. I knew Steve, and he was very dedicated to the group of artisans (he helped them build their workshop and sell their products). After completing his service in 2005, on his way home, he and his mother died in a plane crash in Peru. I want to continue the work that he started.

 

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September 05, 2007

The dingy bag becomes a beautiful tote

I returned to Santa Cruz last week with an armful of weavings from Salvatierra.  One of the objectives of this trip to Bolivia was to create a new group of products based on the Salvatierra hammocks.  The products should appeal to a high-end market that appreciates unique cultures, wants hand-made products, demands excellent design and supports fair trade.

 

Unfortunately, I only had a dingy canvas tote bag to show what I wanted (see the previous entry for a photo).

Fortunately, Claudia Mercado agreed to take on the project.  She is an exceptionally talented Bolivian designer with a superb sense of style.  And she enjoys working with communities.  She took that dingy canvas bag and created a lovely leather tote using the Salvatierra weavings. 

 

Here is the final product.  It is excellently designed and crafted:  a roomy tote made from the Salvatierra weaving, Bolivian textured leather, lined, with interior pockets and a magnetic snap. I will be returning to the US with this prototype and others to test the market.

 

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August 26, 2007

Getting to Work

Josefina, the president of the weaving cooperative, reviews the designs for the new products that we'll be developing. That might look like a dingy canvas tote bag in her hand, but it is actually a carefully engineered, sophisticated R&D prototype for a killer beach bag.
Brigida and Pastora check the colors of the thread against the designs. We've learned together how to create drawings that are easy for everyone to understand and that generate consistent results. As a part of this process, the women have learned to work with measuring tapes and use the color code numbers used by the thread manufacturers.
Everyone helps out.
Making looms....
Installing looms....
The women put me to work too.  I learn how to spin the thread onto the loom...
And then Josefina takes over for the important work...
The women work on the prototypes at home for several days.
Santiago and I check in with them to see how it is going...
They work carefully and make great progress....
Santiago carefully reviews every detail with Adela, pointing out how each product can be improved. 
We check the dimensions of the product, the faithfulness to the design and the quality of the weaving.
Then we all review the costs and decide on prices for the products together.  By the end of the week, we have samples of three new product lines, in four different color combinations. And they are gorgeous.
Then they finally let me play.

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The Road to Salvatierra

The road to Salvatierra is dusty orange in the dry season, and muddy orange in the rainy season.

My "Super Bronco" bicycle.  Paid for by the US State Department.  Red, white and blue, with a basket in front perfectly designed for carrying thread to the Salvatierra weavers.

The perfect fuel for bicycling to Salvatierra.

The Super Bronco can swim.

The Super Bronco.  Now super broken. 

 

 Salvatierra!!

 

 

 

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August 18, 2007

Missing the Forest for the Trees

The bus trip to Guarayos was full of sounds that I remembered:  the cacophonic sing-song of “cunapé caliente” at the bridge over the Rio Grande, where women take advantage of the logjam of trucks and buses to hawk their famous gooey yucca pastries.  The bridge was built in the 1950s by USAID as a railroad trestle over the river.  It is now shared by trains and traffic. Because the bridge is still only one lane, everyone has to take turns.  Long turns, given that the bridge is a mile long. The wait can be five minutes or two hours. 

Bridge over the Rio GrandeWhen we finally started rolling, the calls for cunapés faded under the clankety-clank-clank-boom as we roll over wood planks; boards are laid between the rails for truck and bus tires.  They are temporary and wobbly.  The bridge is a terror; it strains to support the economic flow of the main artery of the agricultural heartland of Santa Cruz:  cattle, soy, rice, and wood travel from the north day and night.  Then a surprise to my right:  a new bridge under construction. 

A man gets stands up and hawks a miracle cure-all for diabetes, gout and stomach aches.  A child laughs, then bawls.  The bus grinds along.

The rolling hills of Guarayos from the highwayAfter about three hours, the dry flat plain breaks into the rolling hills of Guarayos.  Sunflower fields become cattle pasture, peppered with palm trees.  We make a few stops; in Yotau the children call out “aceite de cusi!” and wave bottles of the local palm oil at the passengers.  They sell well: the oil is supposed to make thick hair supple and shiny.

As the sun falls into the horizon, swollen and red, we arrive in Ascension de Guarayos, the provincial capital.  I try not to spend too much time in Ascension.  I visit a few friends, hug the families that adopted me when I was there as a volunteer, buy a bicycle and climb on the next bus to Urubichá.  Formerly a sleepy village on a dirt road, Ascension has become a filthy, loud highway town.  Karaoke machines blast out of chicken joints. Drunks stumble along the road into teenage whorehouses. Motorcycles whine, trucks roar. And the sawmills scream all night as they turn the trees into dust and money.

Ten years ago, Guarayos was 95% forest.  Now, forest cover is about 70% and declining rapidly.  The agricultural frontier is chasing the forest away:  Russians, Mennonites and Brazilians are flocking to the region to rent or buy land, deforest it and satisfy the global demand for soy and rice. (Land is cheap because corrupt indigenous leaders are selling it under the table.) The global maw is also chewing wood.  When I arrived in Guarayos in 2002, there were four sawmills. The machinery was rickety and old, held together with paper clips and spit. Now there are nineteen well equipped sawmills running twenty four hours a day. 

It was a shocking transformation since last year.  Everywhere people are cutting down mahogany trees and selling them for a pittance. I heard prices as low as $7 per tree (a legal sale would be $300-$500 per tree, depending on the size).  Logging trucks rumble through Urubichá all day.  In Salvatierra, where motorized vehicles were a rarity– the whine of a motorcycle would bring kids running out of their houses to see it – I was startled almost every night by logging trucks passing through the village.

There had always been some illegal logging in Guarayos, but a fabric of control had been holding most of it back.  That fabric had ripped in only a year.  What happened?  When I was Guarayos this past week, I asked many people.  The communities blame the small-time illegal loggers, called pirateros or pirates.  “They come into the communities and take advantage of poor people.”

The pirates say the big logging companies are at fault:  “We get all of the blame, but the big companies are the ones who are really stealing all of the mahogany because they have the money to take it out fast, and hide it behind legal logging.  They are making money; why can’t we?”

Others blame the government forestry agency:  “When we go there to ask for their help, they tell us that we have to pay to fill the gas tanks in their trucks and find people to help them.  Are we supposed to do their job for them?”

Some point fingers at the development agencies who financed community forestry projects:  “They built logging roads and trained people how to cut down trees.  Then they abandoned the projects. They set the stage for illegal logging.”

Everyone blames the law:  “Legal logging is bureaucratic and expensive.  It requires thousands of dollars just to get a forestry engineer to write a forest management plan.  Who can afford that?”

These are all problems that have been mounting.  But the underlying force that is catalyzing the illegal logging is a wrenching transition in the local economy from subsistence to consumer.  This transition was catalyzed when electricity came to Urubichá in 2004 (Urubichá is the closest town to Salvatierra). With electricity came TVs.  And all the other stuff that you can buy if you have electricity. People wanted that stuff.  They wanted it immediately.  How to pay for the stuff?  How to pay the electricity bills?  With few jobs and little industry in the region, the only way to get money fast was to sell their trees.  And once a few people started -- and no one stopped them -- everyone else did too.

Salvatierra is twenty kilometers past Urubichá, at the end of the road.  Salvatierra doesn’t have electricity, but the stuff cycle is spinning there too. A year ago everyone traveled by bicycle in Salvatierra.  Then the first motorcycle appeared (one of the corrupt leaders of the forest management plan used the community’s money to buy a moto for himself). So everybody else wanted a motorcycle too. People don’t make much money in Salvatierra; it is mostly a subsistence economy. So the only thing to do was to sell the only thing of value: the mahogany.  On the black market.  For a fraction of the legal price. 

The same thing is happening all over Guarayos.  Trees are turning into motorcycles. 

Obviously people should be able to choose how they make a living and what they do with their money.  But the money won't last long, and it is being wasted on cheap consumer goods.  Josefina told me a story about an elderly woman in Salvatierra who passed away a month ago.  The sawmill in Urubichá was so busy cutting mahogany that it wouldn’t stop to cut the cheaper wood used for coffins (ochoo).  Her family had to bury her in an old hammock.  “It was shameful. People are too busy thinking about making money. What are they going to do when the mahogany is gone in a couple of years?  They will be just as poor as they were before.  They’ll have nothing.  They won’t even have any wood left for chairs to sit on.”

 

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August 16, 2007

Wild Salvatierra Brownies

The classic recipe, created by a chicken, a dog, a small child, a village and a Gringita.

  • One patty of chocolate from Salvatierra’s wild chocolate trees (or 4 squares of supermarket baking chocolate)
  • ¾ cup of “butter”
  • 2 cups of sugar
  • 1 teaspoon of vanilla
  • 3 eggs (2 if using crocodile eggs)
  • 1 cup of flour
  • 1 cup of Brazil nuts, crushed into little pieces with a rock
  • ½ cup of guaparu berries (dried cherries or cranberries work too)
  • 20 liters of pure cane alcohol

Stoke up the kitchen fire, place the cooking stone in the center.  Preheat the clay oven by filling it with firewood and lighting it (make sure the dog isn’t in the oven this time). In a smoke-scorched dented old pot, melt the chocolate and “butter” (lard) over the kitchen fire. When melted, remove from heat, stir with a stick, and add sugar and vanilla. Find another stick since the first one probably broke. Fish the pieces of broken stick out of the pot. Stir in eggs. Stir hard and for a while. Recruit young child to stir, convincing him it is a “fun game.”  

Add flour without breaking stick again, stirring, stirring, stirring. Shoo chicken away from the nuts, stir into batter (nuts, not chicken).  Add berries, and don’t let child stir anymore since he will be sticking his hand in the pot and licking the batter in gulps.

Find a square metal 20 liter can of pure cane alcohol.  Cut and dismantle it to form a 9”x13” baking pan.  Save alcohol for village drunken bash.  Grease pan with “butter”.  Fill with batter.  Shoo away chicken, child and dog.  Clean coals out of oven with long pole, brush clean with palm leaves (fire has heated oven enough when the palm leaves combust). Put pan in oven.  Brownies are done when entire village is surrounding oven because of delicious smell.

 

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Es Mejor Dar Que Recibir

 

 

"It's better to give than to take."

This message is scrawled on the wall of the Santa Cruz bus terminal.  I pass it every time I head out to Salvatierra.  The first time I saw it, I had just arrived as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 2002. I was moved by the message, and inspired:  wasn't that what I wanted to do, why I was here in Bolivia? To give... my time, my experience, my skills?

Oh my.  I quickly realized that I was the one with a lot to learn. I arrived in Salvatierra with the sophistication of a child. I had to be taught the very basics: how to wash clothes in the river by banging them with a paddle, how not to fall into the latrine, why I must drag my feet when I wade across the river to avoid stepping on a stingray.  I couldn't even talk.  The people of Salvatierra did a lot of giving; I did a lot of taking. 

It was at least a year before I wasn’t a burden on the community and could actually offer anything of value.  By then, the message in the bus terminal had taken on another meaning about giving and taking.

Salvatierra is in an area called Guarayos.  Guarayos is mostly indigenous, inhabited by the Guarayos people (sensibly).  It is also heavily forested.  These two qualities made it extremely attractive to international development projects; for development agencies nothing is hotter than indigenous rights and forest conservation.  As a result, Guarayos was crawling with aid projects.  Land Cruisers rumbled down the streets, the restaurants at noon in Ascension de Guarayos were filled with professionals wearing smart polo shirts with logos of international organizations; the same Land Cruisers were parked outside of the bars at night.

Some of these projects – in health, education, forestry, etc. – were great. And there were talented, dedicated people working in Guarayos.  But most projects were terrible wastes of time and money.  People didn’t care.  As long as the money flowed in from the Americans, the Dutch, the Germans, everybody was happy:  free meals, hotel rooms, trips in the Land Cruisers, trips to Santa Cruz, nice salaries, high status.  Boring trainings, useless reports, arrogant attitudes, unfinished projects.

Giving, giving, taking, taking.  There was no incentive to get anything done.  Why work yourself out of a job?

This troubled me so much that I abandoned the development agency that I was working with.  I decided to do my own thing with the communities, following my own conscience.

That is, in part, why Salvatierra Imports is important to me.  There’s no giving or taking because it isn’t a development project; it’s a business.  We work together, we do things fairly, we make great stuff, we sell it, we all benefit.

Are all development projects a waste?  Of course not.  Maybe things were particularly bad in Guarayos.  And not all good works can, or should, be handled by private enterprise.  But when we want to do good, maybe we should think a little bit about what it means to give, and to take.

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