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We knew we were building trust when one person at the workshop
said "I apologize for this question, but I really have to
ask. We have had so many bad experiences with North Americans.
How can we trust this isn’t just another form of colonialism?"
Brad, Jean, and Del handled it beautifully. As Jean said later,
"I saw the same question spread across everyone’s face.
How can we trust when we’ve been hurt again and again before?"
The Aymara man who spoke, Felix, was clearly giving voice to
what many people feared to ask. And it wasn’t an attempt
to hurt. This is a group of people who are taking a real risk
in trusting us North Americans. As Jean noted, they have been
hurt again and again. Joining Hands is very much an adventure
in building trust. It’s an adventure because we have no way
of knowing how it will evolve. But both sides have agreed to take
that risk, take that leap of faith. As Jean told the group, "There
is nothing we can do to prove to you our intentions. We can only
ask that you give us a small amount of trust. Enough to begin."
I feel so privileged—and so inadequate—to be witnessing
these nervous steps toward each other, to be the person trying
to stand between until both worlds draw close enough together
so I can step back and let the relationship move on its own. Yet
I am not the perfect bridge, because I am also, by virtue of color
and citizenship, one who is not to be fully trusted. And I don’t
know in the end if I will have been worthy of Bolivians’
trust. My biggest fear, a huge looming fear that sometimes creeps
in and then runs on a massive, never-ending treadmill in my head
at night, is that I will fail this group, that I will break their
trust, that I will add to the countless lists of Northerners who
have violated that trust and only validated why people didn’t
trust in the first place.
But I also know I can only do my best, be as open, as genuine,
and, as they say here, as "transparent" as I can be.
We are just beginning.
In other news, one my closest Aymara friends, Rina, has just
graduated from San Andres Mayor University with a degree in agronomy.
She was the only cholita in the entire graduating class.
Rina graduated de pollera, that is, wearing traditional dress.
The term "cholita" refers to an indigenous Aymara woman
who still dresses in the full, layered skirts, bowler hat, long
black braids, and shawl worn by indigenous women who have moved
to the city from the countryside. And yet many women who enter
the university feel a great deal of pressure to leave the pollera
behind, adopting Western-style dress and trying to downplay their
heritage due to ongoing discrimination of indigenous peoples.
Rina is in her early forties and was the only Aymara woman dressed
de pollera in the graduating class. She wore her favorite skirt—deep
green and moss-colored stripes. After many, many months of struggle
to balance work, school, raising her family, and dealing with
the low expectations most hold for indigenous women, Rina walked
across the stage to the loudest applause and shouts of "
bravo!"
There are few indigenous women who have achieved what she has,
and yet she is part of something new and exciting for this country.
She, like many other Aymara women, is making the path by walking.
Susan Ellison
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