Día de la Tierra

I had planned to go to the People's Summit on Global Climate Change in Cochabamba to translate for the Asamblea Feminista, but was laid low by scarlet fever, which might sound glamorously 19th-century but is actually incredibly uncomfortable and disgusting. Consequently, I missed Evo's idiotic pronouncement, in an otherwise lucid and militant capitalism-bashing speech, that eating hormone-laden chicken would make men "deviantly" masculine, which all the Latin American newspapers reported as basically "Evo: Chicken will Make You Gay," and which, at least here, reduced all talk of the summit to a series of jokes about said chicken. So we have another slightly comic yet devastating example of one of my central theses (of course not originally articulated by me; see Michele Wallace, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, the article I translated for Silvia in Qui Parle [actually this is just the announcement of it, but it's almost out and I'm really excited], etc): that imperialist violent conceptions of masculinity never fail to screw up the most amazing and important moments of revolutionary struggle and potential social transformation.

Anyway, barely recovered, I spent Earth Day harvesting potatoes in Uni with Maestro and Silvi (Silvia's lovely employees with whom I originally bonded over our mutual awe at the level of chaos in the house) which was beautiful, much greener than before, though I missed the flowery, celebratory, non-physically-taxing phase when the rest of the colectiver@s went to decorate and bless the harvest. Probably because I have never farmed on a large scale before, I didn't remember that harvesting potatoes is almost as much work as planting them in the first place, though far superior because you get to see the fruits of your labor. In this case we'd waited a bit too long and many of the fruits (starches, whatever) were wormy, some filled with big fat spectacular worms who stood their ground inside the potatoes (or were exceptionally sticky) . But many were worm-free, and we harvested all of them. Silvi and Maestro have tricks for getting the worms out--you have to dry the potatoes in the sun and soak them with an herb whose name I can't say because there's the Aymara guttural "c" in it. At the end we also picked some peas and fava beans, which are very popular here.

Silvia was supposed to pick us up, but on the way her jeep had been bucking horribly (I had a combucha on my lap that she was taking to her brother, which made the experience more than a little nauseating), so we ended up having to walk almost a mile lugging huge sacks of potatoes and heavy tools, then ride a very slow bus back into the city. It was good though: we harvested our own organic food without mechanized devices; did so in the shadow of the fast-disappearing Illimani glacier, signaling the water shortage that millions of Bolivians are facing; and later used public transportation to lug everything back to the city. And I feel that much more ready to be able to fend for myself during the even-more-extreme global crisis that will surely come, since all the people who actually might be able to stop it, not to mention those who are causing it in the first place, continue to preoccupy themselves with stupid macho posturing.