Adventures with Coffee and Colonialism

I have had lots of adventures with coffee. Bolivia is a coffee-producing country, so there is no shortage of good coffee here, and the one brand that I really like is also organic. But Bolivians do not tend to drink their own coffee; they drink Nescafe instant coffee. That's what they put in front of me in my house when I arrived, and many conversations with many people have confirmed that Nescafe instant is what almost everyone drinks.

Of course, when I travel, I always carry my little one-cup Melitta coffee maker, the kind you just have to pour boiling water through, and a supply of filters, so after one day of Nescafe, I introduced the real thing to my host family. They have fallen in love with their own coffee, and now I will need to leave my little coffee making device with them. Luckily, I have some friends who are sending replacements, because I prefer not to do without real coffee, and I have a feeling I will be needing to leave them all over South America.

I had an interesting, and revealing, conversation with the family I am staying with about their attachment to Nescafe. I said I could not understand why they would drink Nescafe when they have their own, much better, Bolivian coffee. Not only that, but Nescafe is more expensive. I said that Nestle is a multinational company, and they are...they are...I couldn't come up with the right word in Spanish. Lupe jumped in with ladrones, the Spanish word for thieves.

Yup, that's the right word. How else can you describe businesspeople who pay the producers next to nothing, pay the factory workers who process it next to nothing, and keep enormous riches for themselves?

But the bottom line is Bolivians think that North American and European products are better than their own. It is this weird sense of inferiority that connects with the race issues I mentioned in my last letter.

I just finished reading Nelson Mandela's autobiography, and he talks about the same thing. He says that Africans struggle with a sense of the inferiority of their own culture, and even of their own abilities, when compared to the European occupiers, and only when this is conquered can Africans really be liberated from colonial oppression. He says that he struggled with it himself, always assuming that what was British was better. I recall that Gandhi said the same thing in his autobiography.

What I say in response is, how can a culture whose main export is war, be superior?

On a lighter note, we are preparing for Carnival here. In some parts of Bolivia it is just an excuse to drink for 24 hours straight, like anywhere else. But the main Carnival festivities take place in Oruro, in the heartland of indigenous culture, and where I will be going with other language students. There the celebration is a big dance fest that depicts a battle between good and evil in a mixture of Catholic and indigenous religious symbols.

A main feature of Carnival is throwing water balloons at each other. I don't think this has much to do with religious symbolism; it is just an excuse to cut loose. The water balloon throwing started at the beginning of this month. People just randomly throw water balloons, called globos, at unsuspecting pedestrians anywhere in the city. In Cochabamba they use a Spanish verb that means to throw water balloons, globear. I have been hit a few times, but most times they miss. I am trying to have fun with it, but mostly it feels like dodging bombs in a war zone. Harmless bombs, but bombs just the same. It makes me wonder why people think this is fun.