Sounds

Above: The MCC office in Santa Cruz

Sounds are what I’m noticing most. Of all the new experiences traveling brings, the most immediate are the sensory: new sights, new smells, new foods to taste, new things to touch. But the sounds seem to weave themselves the most insistently through my days, this first week in Santa Cruz, starting before I open my eyes in the morning and persisting even after I’m too sleepy to feel the mattress under me at night: The knife-sharpener’s whistle outside the MCC office at around 8:00 a.m. The rumble of microbuses down cobblestone streets in the old part of town The swish and click of a mop over tile floors, punctuated by the flip-flop slap of the cleaning woman’s shoes Bolivians’ soft speech, with the rolled ll (which disappeared from most parts of the Spanish-speaking world long ago) and aspirated rr (Ellos becomes “elyos” and rama sounds like “zsama,” as in “Zsa Zsa Gabor.”) The Doppler-effect blare of hard, cheery music from the loudspeakers of passing campaign trucks, intimating a better life if Tuto (or Evo, or Doria Medina) is elected president next month The happy shouts of boys throwing paper airplanes (glad to have visitors to show off to) at the children’s home we visited yesterday (One of MCC´s volunteers is working there as a tutor, so it was one of the places some of us new volunteers have been visiting this week.) The nighttime symphony outside my window at my host family’s house—a telenovela (soap opera) at low volume, a called-out greeting on the other side of the gate, dogs barking, crickets chirping, cars shouldering past the puddles in the dirt road, the wind in the trees It’s strange to think that in a few months, these sounds will have become so much a part of my days—of me, actually—that I’ll hardly hear them anymore.