Part of the Problem?

Life is so fertile these days –the stakes so high in this Andean Advent season. A good week within the Urus’ microcosm world felt like Dances with Wolves meets The King and I. Except unlike at the end of those movies, when I left, a million layers of hardly touched complexity and unknown depths of history remained.

Sometimes, I feel I’m trying to drink a sip of water from an ocean wave. It took a month to figure out the real name of the original Urus language…A MONTH, and that’s working with them in person and doing document research! The Urus are a people wronged by history and worse, wronged by historians and researchers like myself.

I permitted my own naive fascination with their leader at first, because curiosity usually leads me to very interesting places. (Besides, we must be kindred spirits; we both smashed our thumbnails the same week!)

But the further I dig, the more I find myself, necessarily assessing my own judgments and thoughts. I’m afraid of my own biases, but can’t escape them. Sometimes they’re questions of class: for example, I recently met the dirtiest child I’ve ever seen in my life. I was trying to entertain her with whatever I had in my bag, including gum and a camera. But couldn’t resist giving her some anti-bacterial hand gel. She wasn’t starving, she wasn’t sick, she wasn’t crying, she was fine – but she was dirty and I couldn’t take it… That’s me imposing my life on her and it may be something small, but what else am I doing?

At other times, I find myself in potential advocate positions, especially against other outsiders but am hesitant to interfere. I try to tell the leader my opinions, especially if the situation involves interaction with the outside world, but wonder what the difference is between my young, not-even-Bolivian opinion and that of the governor’s office or NGO trying to advise him. In these interactions, where I’m supposedly just observing, I often want to shout, “Don’t listen to that guy, he’s going to use you!” Or to the outsider, “Don’t preach their own history to them, you jerk!” Or to the governor’s office, “I don’t believe you or your stupid PowerPoint!” And to the Urus, anytime there is conflict, I want to cry out for peace amongst their tiny population, scared that any divisions will be exploited by “the world out there”.

I’m not disillusioned that I’ll save the Urus, but sometimes it’s very easy to get angry about their situation and worry about their future. But my biggest prayer is simply that I won’t add to the problem…