The right combination...

It's hard to understand why things happen the way they do. Life is such a complex combination of conditional circumstances that change in unexpected ways depending on what we bring and how we react to them. And when those circumstances overwhelm what we bring, our own reactions prove disappointing. I don't know what the "right" combination of circumstances is for me, even if I know what I bring. I don't know how or what will work well with my jumbled up coctail of personality traits, flaws and talents. Sometimes that not knowing leads to unhealthy combinations and I don't do so well and neither do the circumstances. So I guess it means waiting them out for a better day and hoping next time I choose better. But for now I just wish I was as invisible as these circumstances make me feel....

Learning Tour adventures

This past week has been quite the adventure. Sunday morning arrived the learning tour, greeted by a bright sunny Santa Cruz day. After a 26 hour journey and despite a 4 hour time difference, the 11 weary travelers were in good spirits. These fine folks from the West Coast came to see the fruit of their labor – they are folks who work to organize MCC relief sales in their regions and were coming to see the MCC work their hard work helps make possible.

After getting settled in and resting we were off to the Sunday afternoon market. By this point the sky warned of rain, but we were not to be deterred. The rains came down and the wind kicked up, we got wet, but still spirits were not dampened. After the market we were off to Alexander’s Café for dinner and a good cup of coffee. Folks then headed to a baptismal service at the local Mennonite church, arriving home to rest at 10 pm after a long, but good day.

Monday morning came bright and early. A quick jaunt off to the airport to pickup the one lost piece of luggage and then it was off the Guardería Samuelito to eat lunch with the staff and kids. Since it had rained quite heavily the day before, getting to our next stop was a bit of a challenge. We were headed to the Plan…and I wasn’t sure I had memorized every twist and turn of the micro route to get to where I needed to go and the micro driver head never been to where we were going. My faithful learning tour Laurie and I were a bit concerned, but once we got our bearings there was no stopping us! We arrived safely at San Silvestre just in time to learn about MCC’s Urban Program and then off to visit Centro Menno, the resource center for Bolivia’s more than 50,000 colony Mennonites. Dinner rolled around and time for the always helpful and interesting chat with veteran MCCer Phil Bender and then a bed time snack of coffee and cookies to end the day.

On the way to Moro Moro...

The following day, Tuesday, we were off bright and early in our little rented micro, headed to Moro Moro. The heavens smiled down on us with a gorgeous day to highlight the natural beauty of the already ostentatious scenery of mountainous green and brown earth tones and the occasional donkey, of course. A quick picnic in a small town plaza and back on the road we went. We were making excellent time with our fantastic driver at the helm…until we hit a 2 hour roadblock for construction. It gave us a chance to stretch our legs and get out of the micro after 6 hours in the micro. A couple of hours later, and numerous twisty-turns in the road, Moro Moro appeared through the misty fog. We arrived in Moro Moro just in time to get settled in and have a chili and baked potato dinner with the folks of MCC’s Rural Program.

A herd of goats joins us on the hike!

We awoke Wednesday to a rainy, cold day. The once dusty streets had converted into mud, but there was no stopping us from going further up the mountain to visit an MCC water project in the small village of La Senda. Our faithful little micro finally reached an impasse and we had no choice but to go the rest of the way on foot, a 40 minute hike through the mud and the rain. We arrived at La Senda and ducked out of the rain into the mud brick house to dry off and enjoy some home made wheat bread with a steaming hot cup of api (a purple corn drink with sugar and cinnamon). After a few hours we made our way back to La Abra where we had left our micro and after a first hand trial of MCC’s dry latrines we were off to Moro Moro once more for a quick lunch and then on to Samaipata.

A view from the driver's seat...

The road back to Samaipata, now quite muddy, was quite an adventure to navigate for our micro driver. The micro slipped around quite a bit on that precarious road, but gracias a Dios, with our heart rates a bit elevated, we made it safe and sound to Samaipata about 4 hours later.

Samaipata is an adorable little mountain town that has become home to many folks from other places, in large part because of its breath taking scenery and its paradise-like climate. We had the pleasure of staying at an organic farm with guest housing, called La Vispera.

The Gorgeous Gardens of La Vispera

La Vispera is a charming, idyllic place with gorgeous herb and vegetable gardens after my mother’s own heart. The owner, a very friendly Dutch gentleman named Pieter, was most gracious to us and the view was as good as the organic breakfast we were served the next morning. After coffee, a trek around the plaza and lunch, we headed up to the pre-incan ruins known as “El Fuerte” and then back on the road for the 3 hour drive to Santa Cruz. We arrived back safely last evening just in time to go eat some argentine steak at Los Lomitos (I had grilled vegetables and cheesy rice :).

El Fuerte

The view from El Fuerte

The adventure continued for the group today as they visited a Mennonite Colony and tomorrow they will be off to La Paz to visit a Ten Thousand Villages partner. My part of the adventure ended on Thursday evening, but it has been a real pleasure to share part of my week with such fine folks!

Ponderings on theodicy

Two weeks have past since my visit home and I am now feeling once again acclimated to life in Santa Cruz, but this time it is different. My soul feels more at rest these days, not just because the political tension has eased, but because my own tension of being in an unhealthy space for me is coming to a close. The proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel" is in sight and I have hope, even though my future is anything but certain, that something meaningful lies ahead.
Change is stressful, even good change, but I am looking forward to starting new again.

This past week has brought to mind theodicy - one of those big words for one of life's big questions: how do we understand God as good in a world where so many bad things happen? This was the question we were pondering this past week at Friday morning Bible study. The answer most often suggested was that we need to be faithful - that God is testing us.... But....if God is the one doing these things to us, then what is the point of satan?

I find it rather disturbing that we would rather attribute the bad things that happen to us in the world to God, who is good, than to the forces of evil... It seems we only relegate spiritual attacks to satan and God is responsible for the evil that happens to us in the physical realm....

This makes no sense to me. God did not test Job - God allowed Job to be tested...by satan. God did not kill Job's family or cause Job to be afflicted by disease - satan did. God restored Job's health and Job's family...

I struggle to wrap my brain around the idea that God kills people with disease and natural disasters and wars. I have even heard people say that Katrina was God's judgment - a thought I find both repulsive and offensive. If God punishes people for being sinful, then what atonement is there? What grace have we received?

God as the author of evil and harm in the world is nonsensical to me. I do not think "God does things to us" when bad things happen. We can't control so much of what does happen to us, because the choices others make will affect us and the choices we each make affect others and we live in a world that is not perfect...

I believe God sustains us and loves us and uses the hard times to make us stronger. I'm not convinced that everything that happens happens for a reason. I say this because sometimes people just do really stupid things - I think God in God's goodness can use our stupidities for good, but I don't think that means they were intended to occur by some pre-mapped out "plan" or "will" God has for us, because if that is the case then wouldn't we be little more than puppets in God's puppet show?

I think God's all powerfulness is perhaps best demonstrated in God's restraint and vulnerability... I know it sounds perhaps heretical to describe God as vulnerable, but I believe that when we hurt ourselves and others that causes God pain and God chooses to be vulnerable, to feel that pain by loving us enough to give us free will.

I posit the suffering in the world that we experience, the bad things that happen to good folks, is not the will of an all-powerful, judgmental God, but the very opposite - exactly what God never wanted to happen, but that God helps us through. So maybe we should give God the credit for getting us through the bad stuff and even re-creating the bad stuff into good, instead of blaming God for the evil and violence that often results from a collective human choice to love self more than the common good (at the root of violence is the self...), to love self more than God (satan did this...). Maybe it's time to blame evil for evil and to recognize that sometimes we contribute to our own suffering and the suffering of others by making less than stellar choices...

Bad things happen to good people...but why blame God for that?

An Update on Bolivian Politics...

Hi folks, so I promised a long overdue update on the situation here in Bolivia, and since Jim Shultz does a much better job then I - here is his article for you from a couple of weeks ago. Happy reading!
http://www.democracyctr.org/blog/

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Morales and Opposition Agree to a January 25 Vote on New Constitution

Just before 1pm – before a crowd 100,000 strong, that packed Plaza Murillo so tightly that even elbow room was scarce – President Evo Morales signed into law a measure setting a January vote on his party's embattled proposal for a new constitution.Approval of the law caps a process that began more than two years ago with election of delegates to a constitution-writing Constituent Assembly. That process ran through a national battle over how many votes should be required to approve it; violence over demands by Sucre that it be named the country's capital; a political showdown in a voter referendum last August; and finally a week of violence in September in Pando and Santa Cruz that left more than 30 people dead.The vote by Congress today was supported by more than 2/3 of its members and by Morales' MAS party along with the three major parties of the opposition, PODEMOS, UN, and MNR. The vote on the constitution is set for January 25, 2009.
[Here is a link to The Democracy Center's November 2007 briefing paper: Re-Founding Bolivia: A Nation's Struggle Over Constitutional Reform and other articles we've published on the constitutional reform process.]How did Bolivia Get Here?How did Bolivia – a nation so polarized that serious analysts spoke of 'civil war' – arrive at a place of such startling agreement (at least on the decision to hold a vote)? Three events were key.The first was the August 10 elections. Before then the political duel between Morales and his opponents, most notably the renegade governors, seemed roughly balanced. It was an election launched by one of Morales' fiercest opponents among the governors, Cochabamba's Manfred Reyes Villa. But when the votes were counted, 67% of Bolivia's electorate sided with the President and both Reyes Villa and the governor of La Paz, another Morales adversary, were trounced out of office.After months of the opposition talking tough it turned out that all their bluster had only solidified Morales' base more broadly behind him.The second event that led to today's agreement was Bolivia's own version of 9/11, the massacre on that date in Pando that left more than 30 campesino backers of Morales dead. Coming on the heels of opposition mobs in Santa Cruz torching and looting public buildings there, the opposition combined its loss at the polls with a loss of whatever moral authority it might have had up until then. The balance of political clout tilted quickly and heavily toward Morales.Finally, there is the intervention just after the Pando massacre of the other South American Presidents. Led by the two women, Cristina Fernandez of Argentina and Michelle Bachalet of Chile, the continent's leaders wasted no time in weighing in diplomatically. At a summit held in Chile with Morales at the center the Presidents made clear that he had their support, told opposition leaders to forget any dreams they might have had about independent deals to sell gas and oil from their departments, and called on all sides to negotiate.Those negotiations began in Cochabamba nearly a month ago and stretched into La Paz this week, given added urgency by a 200 kilometer march to the capital of tens of thousands of Morales supporters demanding a national vote on the constitution. Opponents had criticized the march as it headed toward La Paz, deeming it a violent mob.But as the multitudes camped overnight in the historic plaza at the steps of Congress, the sounds were not of smashing windows, but of music and song. A starker contrast could not be found between that scene and the one hosted by Morales opponents just over a year ago in Sucre, when they used violence to shut down the Constituent Assembly.What Did Evo Give Away?It will take a while to get the details on exactly what was negotiated in the last days in La Paz. At first glance it seems like plenty.Of the 411 articles in the proposed constitution, more than 100 were modified in some way according to Bolivian news reports. Opposition leader Jorge Quiroga of PODEMOS, Morales' chief opponent in the 2005 election, was boasting on CNN mid-afternoon that his party had secured more than 200 different changes. Among them are significant concessions from MAS on provisions dealing with the media and establishment of mechanisms for "social control" of public agencies, something that had been a key demand from Morales backers.Bolivian news reports also say that Morales has agreed to recognize and support the autonomy statutes approved in four departments. One newspaper, Los Tiempos, also reported that the key issue of land reform had been delegated to "future action." What that means precisely is more than unclear. The devil is in the details and the details have yet to be fully analyzed.The issue, however, that leapt to the forefront in the final negotiations was one simple to understand and close to the heart of the politicians on both sides – presidential re-election. Under Bolivia's current constitution presidents may not serve consecutive terms. It is five years than out, though they can seek to return to office five years later, as Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada did in 2002.Originally Morales and MAS wanted unlimited opportunities for re-election. That eventually got negotiated, in the document approved by the Constituent Assembly, down to letting the President seek just one additional term. But since it was not to include the five-year span Morales is currently serving, the chance at two additional terms translated out to the possibility of a Morales presidency through 2019, a poison scenario for the opposition.The compromise worked out this week, and the basis for Congress' approval, is a concession by Morales that the term Morales would seek would count. If approved in January, the new constitution would allow Morales to campaign for just one more consecutive term, in elections that would be held in December 2009. That limits Morales' potential presidential horizon to 2014, a substantial concession.Two Long RoadsBolivia's constitutional story is one of two long roads.The first is the one that led to today. The demand for a constituent assembly, which goes back decades in many indigenous communities in Bolivia, was envisioned originally as a process that excluded politicians and political parties. The idea was to create, at a national level, a process akin to community decision making at the local level. The people would be sovereign and the politicians and parties would have to sit on the sidelines and watch.That vision of things went out the window fast and early when, shortly after taking office in 2006, Morales and MAS had to negotiate with their opponents in Congress to win approval of a law convening the vote for delegates to that Assembly. In a deal mutually beneficial to politicians of all parties, they were not only let back into the process but put in charge of it. Candidates had to be affiliated with a political party to run, and the Assembly ended up looking pretty much like Congress, but with another name and a less-decorated meeting venue.The scrambled negotiations this month between Morales and the Congress put the political icing on a political cake. In the end it was not an Assembly of the people or a process of long deliberation that did the final sculpting of Bolivia's likely new Magna Carta. It was politicians acting in haste to cut a deal.The other long road is the one that comes next. In any nation, but in Bolivia especially, the distance between words on paper and actual changes in people's day-to-day lives is measured not in weeks or months but in years and decades. What difference a new constitution will make in terms of broader economic opportunity, deeper accountability of government, or greater social justice is unclear.Nevertheless, for those who have invested great hope and emotion in the fight for a constitution they want to call their own, today is a historic day in Bolivia. Given Morales' strong backing in August, it seems unlikely that he and his supporters will have trouble securing the simple majority support they will need in January. So the constitution approved by the Congress seems clearly headed for enactment.It is also a historic day for those who favor peace over conflict. Once again, after having looked over into the abyss, the nation has inched itself back onto the ledge. In Bolivia the "most dangerous road in the world" is not the one that foreigners dare on mountain bikes that stretches from La Paz to Coroico. The most dangerous road in Bolivia is the one that marks the route for political change. Today that road looks both a little more hopeful, and a little safer as well.