Bolivian Oblivian

Now I consider myself to be a pretty mellow, laid back sort of person. Not much really gets me too upset or bothered. I have even been called oblivious on several occasions (with the nick name Oblivia) to things that are going on around me. But Bolivians take it to a whole other level. Whether it´s the dogs barking and tearing each other apart in the middle of the night, children screaming and fighting, obnoxious drivers with their horns, water overflowing from the tank on top of the house for an entire day, a drunk passed out in the middle of the sidewalk... Bolivians just don´t seem to notice or get annoyed by these things.

Dogs can bark for hours at nothing and nobody will yell at them to shut up...ever! I have never heard anyone at my house yell at the dogs to be quite. And a spooked chicken can be running around going bizurk for an hour and nobody seems to mind. Where I´m about ready to kill the chicken myself. And I don´t want to say that Bolivian parents ignore their kids or anything, but jezz... their kids can be screaming or otherwise doing very obnoxious things like fighting with other kids or destroying something five feet away from their parents or teachers and they don´t yell at them to knock it off. And if they do yell at them it´s like half an hour later than you would expect it. One of the first experiences I had with my host family was one such instance. We were sitting around the table drinking tea and making small talk while Paulo my ten year old host brother is sawing a pen in half with a dinner knife. It was pretty distracting I kept looking from Paulo to Ana and back to Paulo waiting for her to tell him to quit it, but it never happened. This went on for like twenty minutes. Well... maybe Doña Ana is more oblivious than most, but I´ve witnessed plenty of other scenes like this. At the Internet place where I´m writing this the woman who works here often brings her little daughter and half the time the girl is pounding on the keyboards or drawing on the walls. And the mom does nothing. Even in the class rooms while the teacher is there the kids are wailing on each other and finally after ten minutes the teacher will tell them to cut it out. And as a side note, I´ve noticed that the kids are kind of aggressive here. I don´t really have that much experience with kids so I don´t really know how much rough housing is ¨normal¨, but it seems like the kids (the girls too) are always hitting or knocking each other down if not in an all out battle. It´s kind of disturbing.

Then there´s the drunks... while alcoholism is a families´s dirty little secret in the states, it´s very public here. It is not unusual at all to find someone passed out in the middle of the day using the sidewalk for a pillow. I have seen men laying awkwardly face down with their limbs twisted in weird positions, like they´ve just suffered from a narcoleptic attack while walking down the street. I have even seen a man passed out on a little bridge with the bike he was riding still between his legs and his pants pulled down to his knees. And you wouldn´t believe how many drunks I´ve seen walking around with wet pants. And when people pass them you don´t even seem to get the head shaking and finger pointing you would expect. They just simply walk over or around them. And when people get really smashed at parties there is no one telling the drunk guy to slow down, stop being an idiot or even to go home. ¨Oh he´s just drunk.¨

Then there´s the all the little things. Like the ridiculous use of the horn here. A cab driver looking for a passenger will honk at every person walking down the street. To those obviously not looking for a cab. Then when someone stops in front of someones house to pick them up they will honk obnoxiously until the person comes out. Not one or two soft honks but loud, long, repeated honks. There is a garbage truck that passes through the neighborhood at about six in the morning a few times a week. And the truck blasts it´s horn seriously every thirty seconds. And it is loud! You would think that one soft honk every block or so would do it seeing as it´s so damn early in the morning there is little other sound or movement going on. But no... every thirty seconds. And then there´s the sound of water splashing down the side of the house for an entire day, or a door banging in the wind...am I really the only one hearing these things?

I sometimes wonder if I´m getting more uptight over here or it´s just that I was less exposed to situations that seem so obviously annoying the states. Or maybe when I get back nothing will bother me at all! I guess I won´t really know until I go home.

**The whole point I was trying to get at here but didn´t have time to elaborate (I only had so many B´s on me) was that Bolivians have a much higher tolerance for behaviors or situations that, in my opinion, would annoy most Americans. They simply just don´t get worked up about things the way we would. In some respects I think this is a good thing. It´s true that we do spend too much time sweating the small stuff. But for others... especially the alcohol issue, I think it´s a really bad idea to be so indifferent. This is just something I´ve been thinking about lately. It is a generalization about one of the differences between Bolivians and Americans that I´ve observed and, with all generalizations, there are exceptions.