2008 Woodie Awards
Ignatian Corner: Heartsick in La Paz, Bolivia
Tenaya Darlington
Issue date: 11/10/06 Section: Features
- Page 1 of 2 next >
When you fly into La Paz, one of the highest cities in the world, the elevation literally makes you feel like someone has dropped a brick on your heart. The plane lands and just as the flight attendants are telling you that you may unbuckle your seatbelt, you find yourself rooted, unable to breathe. You sip at the air, like a bee going for pollen, then slowly stand up and shuffle down the aisle carrying your duffel full of insect repellent, anti-malaria pills, hand sanitizer, and long underwear.
It's May, and we're in Bolivia as part of the The Faith-Justice Institute's Faculty and Staff Immersion program. For the past week, we've been riding through the country's most remote regions on various buses, stopping to visit schools the Jesuits have helped to set up as part of an organization called Fe y Alegria. Along the way, we've run over a python, watched school children butcher a cow for our lunch, and been humbled by the number of dark-eyed kids in flip-flops who have stared curiously at us with our warm coats and hiking boots.
Now, on the last leg of our journey, we're woozy - eight of us straggling behind Father Gerry McGlone, S.J. our fearless leader. "Notice what you feel," Padre Gerry keeps telling us during our daily reflection. "Notice your confusion and be reverent."
Once we step out of the airport, the Andes rise before of us. They are snow-capped and sun-bleached beige. There is something toy-like about them, as if they are constructed from cardboard. The city of La Paz is below us, a valley of jumbled buildings with electrical wires thick as cobwebs strung above the sidewalks. At night, when you gaze down, La Paz looks like a bowl of fireflies.
Tonight we stay with an order of nuns who bring us coca tea to help with the altitude, and in the morning we board a bus to visit a school in one of the country's worst ghettos. Through the windows of the bus, we see Quecha women in their signature wide skirts and small bowler caps, lugging baskets full of potatoes. And as we approach the edge of the city toward the location of the school, we see dogs roaming the streets, boarded up windows, barbed wire - all the familiar trappings of poverty but with more ruthlessness, more dust.
It's May, and we're in Bolivia as part of the The Faith-Justice Institute's Faculty and Staff Immersion program. For the past week, we've been riding through the country's most remote regions on various buses, stopping to visit schools the Jesuits have helped to set up as part of an organization called Fe y Alegria. Along the way, we've run over a python, watched school children butcher a cow for our lunch, and been humbled by the number of dark-eyed kids in flip-flops who have stared curiously at us with our warm coats and hiking boots.
Now, on the last leg of our journey, we're woozy - eight of us straggling behind Father Gerry McGlone, S.J. our fearless leader. "Notice what you feel," Padre Gerry keeps telling us during our daily reflection. "Notice your confusion and be reverent."
Once we step out of the airport, the Andes rise before of us. They are snow-capped and sun-bleached beige. There is something toy-like about them, as if they are constructed from cardboard. The city of La Paz is below us, a valley of jumbled buildings with electrical wires thick as cobwebs strung above the sidewalks. At night, when you gaze down, La Paz looks like a bowl of fireflies.
Tonight we stay with an order of nuns who bring us coca tea to help with the altitude, and in the morning we board a bus to visit a school in one of the country's worst ghettos. Through the windows of the bus, we see Quecha women in their signature wide skirts and small bowler caps, lugging baskets full of potatoes. And as we approach the edge of the city toward the location of the school, we see dogs roaming the streets, boarded up windows, barbed wire - all the familiar trappings of poverty but with more ruthlessness, more dust.
Be the first to comment on this story