Paradoxes

A few weeks ago I attended a meeting that never was. Here’s what happened.

My work partner, Sandra, and I had travelled three and a half hours in a taxi shared with three other people and the driver, over winding roads that took us over the foothills into a green valley studded with small towns.

We pulled into the dusty streets of one of those towns as it was getting dark. Three women from the women’s concerns office of the provincial government met us at the lodging house on the main drag where we would spend the night. They had invited representatives from the town’s government to meet with us and discuss the possibility of a partnership between MCC and the tiny local library—the only one for miles around. The women told us that hundreds of schoolchildren from the remoter areas of the valley have to walk long distances to get the books their teachers indicate so they can do their homework.

The purpose of our visit was to explore the option of signing an agreement with the local authorities: MCC would provide training for the librarian and donate books for the shelves; the community would be responsible for raising money to buy an equal number of books and for paying a librarian chosen from among their numbers. This would mean the children of the town and surrounding area could find the books they needed without having to travel so far. Many of the libraries MCC has worked with over the years have also become the sites of community meetings, cultural activities, and more—this could be the start of something big, I remember thinking as we sat and discussed the possibilities.

The next morning was our meeting with the local government officials…or so we thought. We waited fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour—nothing. No one came.

What happened? The truth is, we don’t know. Maybe education isn’t a high priority for the current leaders of the town. Maybe political infighting is making this kind of project impossible for the time being. A woman we met in the street on our way back to the boarding house, the leader of a local trade guild, had her own interpretation: “Our government officials are just interested in collecting their salary,” she told us. “And the people don’t want to make waves—they stay silent.”

So how did we spend that hour’s wait—me, Sandra, and the women from the provincial government? Talking, mainly. Somehow we got on the subject of ironies and paradoxes; I think it was when someone was telling me about the inhabitants of Tarija, Bolivia’s southernmost province. (It seems tarijeños have a reputation for being easy-going—so easy-going that they seem to move in slow motion. The joke is that out of Tarija has come a famous race-car driver.) Here are a few we laughed over then, plus others I’ve noticed since:

Until the 1980s, Santa Cruz’s jail was at the end of one of the city’s main streets. The name of the street: Libertad—“Liberty.”

Each political party in Bolivia has its own theme color: blue for MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo, “Movement toward Socialism”), red for Podemos (a coalition of the country’s traditional political powerhouses), etc. The color of the workers’ revolutionary party? A pretty shade of pink.

The name of one of the candidates for diputado (representative) in the recent elections: “Choco” Moreno. In the local vernacular, choco is a nickname that means “blondie.” Moreno, besides being a common last name, also means “dark-haired.”

I saw a church along the highway that was called Iglesia de las Puertas Abiertas, “Church of the Open Doors.” You guessed it: it was closed.

Although we returned from our visit to the valley disappointed, maybe some good will come out of it that we can’t imagine just yet. Maybe our conversations with the representatives of the women’s concerns office will help deepen the relationship between their office and MCC, or lead to other opportunities elsewhere. Still, it was disheartening to see the urgent need for better educational opportunities in that place, and be unable to do anything about it.

Why is so often the case that where there is the most need, there is also the most apathy or resistance to change? Another paradox, I guess.