Cochabamba: Where My Heart Is

I spent five months in Proyecto Horizonte, and I am fairly sure I left a good part of my heart there when I left. It is a project full of love and dedicated employees and I really enjoyed becoming part of the team that drives Proyecto Horizonte. I worked in the healthcare centre, in the day care centre with five-year-olds, and with the women of Tantakuna (a group that provides social support to a group of women and supports microenterprises).

When I arrived in Cochabamba I was living with a Bolivian family, working alongside Bolivians and

spending much of my free time with volunteers who

spoke to me in Spanish. I spoke very little Spanish at this stage. That had to -- and eventually did -- change. Completely immersing myself in a foreign culture was a mind-blowing experience. One of the things that I loved about living and working in Cochabamba is the amount of interaction I had with strangers on a daily basis. That I was questioned about my family and love life by everyone from the woman I’m bartering with at the market when I bought my weekly groceries, to the elderly woman in traditional Bolivian clothing who I’d be crammed next to in a shared taxi on the way to Proyecto Horizonte every day. On the one hand their lives seemed so different to mine, but sometimes the similarities and connections I built were equally astounding. I have watched the consultation of a woman the same age as me -- 22 -- who was pregnant with her

second child, her first having died when it was less than one month old, and who has no schooling whatsoever. And to think that by some stroke of fate that I was born to my life in New Zealand not in

semi-rural Bolivia, that I am the university educated volunteer watching the consultation not someone who hasn’t even had the chance to go to primary school, is something that I will hopefully remember to treasure for a long time to come. It just seems that horrible things happen on a much more frequent basis when you are poor. But I was surprised time and again by the way that women return to work and continue their lives despite trials that seem inhumanly harsh.

At the same time there are a lot of great things to be said for the Bolivian way of life. They definitely take themselves and others -- in particular foreigners -- a little less seriously. It seems that every second week life is completely disrupted so that we could celebrate some event, such as the international day of the child, or the day that Bolivia lost the sea to Chile. This ability to celebrate life, or have a 3 hour lunch break in the middle of a working day, is something that I will definitely miss upon return home to New Zealand.

The work that Proyecto Horizonte does in supporting the neighbourhood and the improvements that have come out of this are incredibly impressive. But there is still so much more to do. There are still families who have difficulties paying the 15c a day it costs to send the children to school. Many of the parents are working in different districts of Bolivia or in Argentina or Spain to try and bring in desperately needed money for the family. The combination of absent parents and the high rate of domestic violence in Bolivia mean that for many children, their homes are not the safe or caring environments that they should be.

I completely fell in love with the children that I worked with. I think they generally returned the feelings, even if they might occasionally have punched me when I tried to discipline them. Leaving them was the hardest part of leaving my life in Cochabamba by a mile. A few months back I overheard one of my students telling another student, “if you don’t eat your crackers, you’re not going to be big like the Hannah”. I am glad to see that I have made some kind of difference, even if it is only as inspiration for Bolivian children to finish their snacks.

I would highly recommend volunteering at Proyecto Horizonte, and if anyone is thinking of doing so and has any questions feel free to get in contact with me.