Initial Memories

Just like biting into Proust´s madeleine, every random act in my life now seems to transport me back eight or ten months. When I was still in the thick of it.  Since I have many unscheduled hours in the day, time to commit to paper the memories that come randomly as I go about the day. 

Earlier I remembered an argument between Andrew Porter, Pat and me during Consolidation #1 (as unenthusiastic as I was during this when we found out that the whole week would be booked with lectures and Open Q&A group discussions, it really helped a lot. I remember getting more out of asking the fellow volunteers that had already gone through the shit moments of work and integration, learning about rose and fruit transplanting when in the pool, or learning how the ultimate, Quixotic goal was to get the beekeepers independent.)

But our argument was about what can be considered a hole, and whether the term asshole was a misnomer.  And naturally, with three guys this developed into a two hour debate.  And the emphasis was on assholes.

While this was not quite as fulfilling as the continuing debate over the existence of God--I am still surprised Andrew could be a philosophy major without having come to the same conclusion as me--it was the perfect safety valve.  I felt more reinvigorated and OK with the world after that than anything since then.

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The night before we left, I marveled everyone at the Wasi Masi by returning from El Germén, the german lady´s bakery, having spent the stack of my last bolivianos on fourteen of the rum-cream chocolate brownies.  They sometimes gave me the runs, but there existed nothing so exquisite in the entire departamento.  People wanted to pay me back, but since we knew at the time that a plane ticket was waiting for us in the morning, I only asked that somebody would get my fair for the bus ticket to the airport the next morning.  And I supplied a lot of welcome relief and physical pleasure by indulging in those.  If I´m correct, a few people tried to visit there but it had already closed later that night.  We watched TV and saw Sucre on the CNN En Español  & the national news, one building in particular a couple of blocks away.  I´m sure there was some violence near us, but it was nice to leave before it got bad in our area, so that my memory would be untarnished.

Still, in consistency with the Proust ´involuntary-memory-from-biting-the-madeleine´, each time I get a whiff of chocolate I pat my pocket to see if my passport is there ready to go (it´s not).