Meet Saúl (or, Top Ten Reasons I Haven’t Written More Often)

Before I came to Bolivia I had plans for this blog, ambitious plans. I was going to write once a week, every two weeks max. I was going to offer a smorgasbord of insightful reflections, heartstring-pulling stories on the libraries program, and pithy social and political commentary.

One year and three months later, I see that I’ve written an average of once a month. Many of the reflections I’d been meaning to share (and some of which I did start typing out) remain unpublished. I’m behind on my libraries program ABCs (including the promised “coworkers” entry). And I haven’t posted anything related to Bolivian news headlines since last February.

But I have a good excuse—really. His name is Saúl.

So I’m taking this opportunity to kill three birds with one stone: make excuses for my sporadic blog activity, introduce you to the man I’m dating, and celebrate our six months’ “anniversary.”

The official start of our relationship was on July 30—a Sunday-afternoon conversation over Mexican food at a restaurant a few blocks from my house. But I’d rather tell you about Saturday the 29th, the day we spent most of an afternoon and all evening talking.

It was a cloudy, blustery day, one of the coldest of Santa Cruz’s winter last year. During the past week I’d had more encounters than usual with the guy who runs errands for the MCC office, whose name you may recall reading in the August 17 entry “G is for greetings.” I’d discovered that Saúl was my age, that he was going to night classes to get his law degree, and that he had an open, friendly manner that I found appealing. “I’d like to get to know him better—as a friend!” I remember clarifying to my friends Aida and Danitza, who had already started teasing me on his account.

The Friday of that week, the two of us had lunch together, prodded by another MCC matchmaker who saw us leaving the office at the same time. After peanut soup and a good conversation we talked about doing something together over the weekend but left things undefined. The next day Danitza invited me to go with her and another MCC friend to a parade celebrating the anniversary of the foundation of La Paz, Bolivia’s capital. “I’d love to,” I said; then, after a brief pause, “Do you mind if I invite someone else?” “Would that someone be Saúl?” she asked, with a knowing wink.

The four of us met in the main plaza downtown, then took a bus to the parade site. We bypassed the somewhat rickety-looking grandstands, opting to pay for plastic chairs further down the street. At first the four of us all talked together, but soon the group broke into conversational pairs: Evelyn and Danitza, Saúl and me.

He and I tapped our feet to the band music and watched the figures in devil masks dip and spin, and we talked. We marvelled together at the dancing of a small boy from the Afro-Boliviano contingent, descendants of slaves brought across the Atlantic in colonial times. We followed the swaying movements of wave after wave of women dressed in long skirts, bowler hats, and gold jewelry, and we talked. Danitza and Evelyn left around 7:00, but Saúl and I stayed on—we just didn’t seem to run out of things to talk about.

In the six months since that day we’ve had a lot more conversations—some of them heated, some frustrated by cultural differences. But we still keep finding things that endear us to each other, things that interest us both although we may see them from very different perspectives—more things to talk about.