Pentirenda.

Human beings of all walks have a desire to learn more about the lives of their ancestors. We preserve our grandmothers diary and our great-grandmother’s hairpiece to feel more connected to our past. We make pilgrimages and we look up maiden names on geneology.com. We go so far as to call these connections our roots, as if without them we could not live.

Even living as an adopted daughter in a surrogate land, I have felt the pull to learn more about what Chimeo and its people “were”. I hear a great deal about what life was like before the assistance of an indigenous, socialist president, before the paved road to Santa Cruz: the houses were made of simple adobe and thatch, the only water was gotten from the river, and people only ate the maize they grew. Somehow, though, this was never enough. I wanted to record their stories and life histories and learn to make the foods only the grandmothers remember how to prepare. I wanted to speak Guarani fluently, even if it would only permit me to speak more freely with older women. Although most of Bolivia’s population that claims indigenous lineage, Spanish is the language of commerce. School kids learn both Spanish and the local indigenous language in school, be it Quechua or Guarani or Chiquitano or Weenhayek, but like most young people, they prefer modernity, and few really master the language of their grandmothers. I am just the same. Instead of studying Polish, the language of my grandmother, I chose the study Spanish, Portuguese, and the other languages of the Americas. Perhaps that’s where I saw my future.

Fittingly, when offered the opportunity to visit an isolated Guarani community where I was told the people still live like Chimeo’s great-grandmothers did, I jumped at the chance. This past month I spent a week in a community of twelve families called Pentirenda (Literally: “place of tobacco”.) I went with another volunteer, Connor, who is working with his local radio station and his Peace Corps-founded library to produce a documentary about the life of Guarani peoples today. The streets of his community, Muyupampa, are at the center of the Bolivian melting pot. On the cross roads between Sucre, Santa Cruz, and Yacuiba, women in Guarani tipoys and Quechua polleras buy their milk from the same university milk monger, while gas plant workers in orange jump suits share their vin-up and cola with ranchers, and waxing philosophically on their Chaqueno lifestyle. The community is also at the center of the land reform debate (Connor knows the controversial American rancher from the NYT article I sent out with my last update), and Guarani and mestizos in town have been known to come to blows on the issue. One of the purposes of their documentary, therefore, would be not only to record a rapidly disappearing lifestyle, but also to promote further intercultural understanding between community members.

On Tuesday we set off in the pick up of NorSud, one of the few organizations that works in the isolated communities we would visit. Three hours out on dirt roads, the engineers with NorSud stopped to inaugurate a new centro de acopio for the corn cooperative formed by some 50 Guarani families from the area. From there our team, being Connor, the head of the local radio station, and our translator, set off for Pentirenda on foot. Some twelve rivers and thirteen kilometers later, we arrived. The community is perched upon a dry, scraggly cliff, high above the thirteenth river. Upon arriving, visitors are welcomed to the genta guazu, or big house, which looks over the side of the cliff. We were well received, probably due to the instant credit our translator, who is also the towns only professor, provided us. Dona Olga, whom one might call the concierge of Pentirenda, seemed unfazed by us, which was surprising considering our size and whiteness. (Connor stands a gangly 6’8” tall. The kids in his site engage in fierce debate as to whether his species is actually gringo or giant.) We were immediately served chicha and we shared with them some bread we had brought. We put down our things and set to getting to know the community.

The genta guazu was much larger than the other houses, having about six rooms, and is the only one with a porch, cement floors and walls, and a tile roof. Our room was meagerly furnished with beds of bamboo, wood, and goat hide. From the front one can see the dry rolling cordillera, and from the back the adobe houses of Pentirenda’s twelve families. The genta guazu is much larger as it is the former home of the patron of Pentirenda, from whom the community purchased their land back about a decade ago. It seems to have been a pretty simple hand over. We were told that the patron disapproved of the amount of time some of the older boys were spending playing soccer, so he told them to leave. Once in town, they signed up for their obligatory year of military service called Cuartel, where they made all sorts of friends who were not born under the auspices of a patron. They informed the boys that if they could unite the community to buy their land from the patron, he would have to leave. So they did. They went home and convinced the leaders that this would be the best thing to do. Soon thereafter the patron and his family left for the greener pastures of Bolivia’s cities and rumor has it, the US. We didn’t really learn much about him aside from his first name. The community members were in agreement that he was “maldito,” a bad guy, but they also assured us that he never physically abused the men or women of the town. He spoke fluent Guarani, decided the hours of work as well as the names of all of the townspeople. One older woman, we were told, was somehow forgotten, and never given a name. In her 60s she was forced to choose a name in order to receive her social security benefits. She decided upon Mariana.

People said their lives are better now because of the increased freedom they experience, denoted by a single word in Guarani: Iyambae. They choose what they will sow, where they will sow it, and when they will reap. Their children can now study-within one year of the departure of their patron, the federal government built the community a one-room schoolhouse with the only bathroom in town and a salary for a professor. Although there are only two grades- third and fifth- students can choose to continue on to high school in a nearby town. Most do. The community is now visited twice each year by the “vinchuqueros”, a team of men who spray the adobe houses with pesticides to kill the cockroach-like bug that live inside adobe walls and carry a deadly disease called Chagas. The effects of the disease take decades to appear, so many do not know they are living with it until they are gravely ill and have already passed the congenital disease onto their children. Rates of incidence in some communities runs as high as 80%- I wouldn’t be surprised if Pentirenda were one of these communities. The best way to inhibit the entrance of vinchucas and the disease some of them carry into a community is to revoke adobe houses with cement and replace thatch roofs with tin or tile, or to sleep in a mosquito net. One of the largest public health pushes in Bolivia over the past decade is to install such healthy housing, but its isolation and years under a patron have left Pentirenda far behind. While today not a single home has seen these changes, community members are hopefully awaiting such a project, which should arrive in the next year or two.

While increased levels of education have been shown to increase quality of life indicators, it can have its drawbacks for communities such as Pentirenda. Children go off to learn more about the world, and many discover that they don’t want to spend their lives loading and unloading corn by the mule-load. No matter how dear the way the light hits the river below Pentirenda at that certain hour of the afternoon, the curiosity inherent in their youth will draw them to the cities and larger towns. Some will return, but many will stay, and their children may never learn their grandmother’s language.

On Friday we set off again for Muyupampa. As we made our way back across the twelve rivers, a cold southern wind ruddied our cheeks. We spoke about what we had learned that week, the people we had met, and the questions we still had about life in the community. In Iguembe, we borrowed an ax from one family and started a bonfire on the side of the road to pass the hours while we waited in hope of a passing automobile. At dusk we finally had some luck and were picked up by a friend of Connor’s from town. The men told jokes on the way home, but I was silent, contemplative. I couldn’t help but feel foolish and ethnocentric for my fixation upon Guarani life as it once was in Chimeo and as it still is in Pentirenda. Yes, there is a great deal to be learned from people who still live so close to the earth, but only keeping in mind that they, like the rest of us, only want to provide a better life for their children. In today’s world, this likely doesn’t involve sowing corn and peanuts by hand, but rather machinery and education, fertilizers and migration. I suppose that in the best of all worlds, a generation from now Pentirenda will be a lot like Chimeo. Most people will probably communicate in Spanish. There will be greater connectivity between the community and larger towns nearby. There will exist a water system and they will have electricity. More of their children will have high school degrees. They will still value their culture and a unique skill set of traditional medicine and survival in a harsh climate. As to what the future truly holds for Pentirenda, so often my only resolution here in Bolivia, is that only time will tell.