Jewish Community News

News: September 2008

College student travels to Bolivia
By Rachel Rosenberg

    Bolivia is not a likely destination for a Jewish college student.  Chabad doesn’t even have a mission there.  But the opportunity to improve my Spanish language skills while striving to repair one little corner of the world led me to accept an internship at a daycare center run by the nuns of the order Siervas de la Madre de Dios in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city.  
    I arrived at Centro Infantil Los Pitufos (The Smurfs Children Center) as a “Youth and Education Intern,” a title that aptly fit my prior experience.  There I found a colorful daycare center run by a young and energetic nun, and filled with children who seemed to maintain their innocence despite the hardships their life of extreme poverty presented.  Jose, for example, was the fifth of six children. The sixth, his younger sister, had died in infancy of malnutrition.  Jose also suffered from malnutrition, and at 5 years old, even after an intervention from a Canadian doctor hired by the convent, still weighed only 11 kilos, and appeared the size of a two-year-old.  Six-year-old Roman’s emotional problems, caused by an abusive father who beat his alcoholic mother both in private and in public, inhibited his concentration and precluded educational success.  Four-year-old Santiago’s violent outbursts could be explained by his lack of privacy and personal space living in a single room with his 21-year-old parents and younger sister.  His living situation was not unusual, however; my nine coworkers could each afford to rent only one room for their entire families on their 350 Bolivianos ($50) per month government stipend.
    After the needs assessment I conducted with the help of Los Pitufos’ volunteer psychologist and my supervisor Hermana (Sister) Liliana, I realized that the only way I could make a lasting and sustainable impact on the daycare center was by morphing my “Youth and Education” position into new, uncharted territory: microenterprise.  In 1998, a group of nuns from Hermana Liliana’s order built a baking school in the basement of Los Pitufos and supplied it with industrial baking equipment.  But the machines eventually broke down and the Sisters could not afford to repair them so they had to close the school.  Located in an impoverished neighborhood that lacked access to a local bakery, these machines provided my chance to make a lasting impact on the neighborhood 10 de Diciembre in the zone of Pacata Alta.
    My primary, long-term goal was to create a sustainable source of income for Los Pitufos, enabling Hermana Liliana to realize dreams such as building an overhang to protect the children from the harsh sun during recreo (recess) and buying milk for the children.  (Los Pitufos currently relies on irregular donations of milk but cannot afford to buy it.)  But revitalizing the bakery would also immediately achieve three other goals: replacing the stale bread the children ate for breakfast and afternoon snack with fresh bread at no additional cost, providing a job and stable salary for at least one unemployed parent of a Los Pitufos child, and offering residents of the neighborhood affordable, high-quality bread for sale in a convenient location.
    These three goals have already been accomplished. In six tumultuous weeks, I spearheaded the revitalization of the bakery, aided immeasurably by Hermana Liliana and local volunteers Jenny Berzain-Rodriguez and Cesar Silva-Gonzalez. Three of us cleared out the baking room, which had been used as a depository for old furniture, and scrubbed the rat excrement from the floor. Finding a technician to repair the machines proved to be a difficult task because, according to rumors, the majority of Cochabambinan technicians have immigrated to Spain.  Without a phone book, we relied on word of mouth to locate some repairmen, but the first three we contacted who agreed to do the work never showed up.  Finally, a relative of my Bolivian host family took a look at the machines and repaired the oven, but informed us that our mixer had no motor.
    While we resolved the motor problem, we embarked on a long and frustrating search to find a baker.  More rumors held that all the local bakers had immigrated to Spain.  We finally found a 23-year-old community member who had attended Los Pitufos as a child and had been trained in Los Pitufos’ baking school years earlier.  Currently unemployed, “Miguel” agreed to be our baker.  We hired a helper for him, Enrique, a Los Pitufos parent and a former agronomist who was incapacitated by a work-related accident.  His wife subsequently abandoned him, leaving him with three children, ages 5, 7, and 9.  The combined effect of the accident, unemployment, and abandonment was month-long amnesia and low self-esteem, which employment in our bakery has helped to alleviate. 
    The first week, Miguel and Enrique showed up at 4 a.m. every morning to bake bread.  But the next week Miguel missed two days of work due to drinking.  He became unreliable and uncooperative.  Fortunately, in anticipation, I had contracted Don Walberto, chief baker of a large, local supermarket, to lead a week of training sessions. At the end of the week Don Walberto supervised as the two participants, Julia and Enrique, made batches of bread, and pronounced them ready to begin the following Monday.  That night our team of three women fired Miguel, an extremely difficult thing to do in a small, close-knit, macho community.  Julia happily took over Miguel’s job.
       During this stressful period, I found respite on Shabbat with Cochabamba’s tiny Jewish community.  Although Bolivia was one of the first countries to admit Jews fleeing the Holocaust, the Cochabamba Jewish population today numbers barely 70 and continues to dwindle.  Asociacion Israelita Cochabamba, however, is a beautiful old synagogue that was built in the 1940s.  The lay-led services are a blend of tradition and assimilation: men and women sit separately and the prayers are chanted in Hebrew, but Shabbat services are only held on Friday nights and the women wear pants.  The Mandelbaum family welcomed me into their home for Shabbat meals and told me about the challenges of leading any kind of Jewish life in Bolivia.  For example, kosher meat is unavailable, and their frum son and daughter-in-law, who were visiting from their home in Brazil, had to bring a two-week supply of kosher food with them.  I can proudly say, I am one of the few people who has eaten kosher chulent in Cochabamba!  However, while the Jews in Bolivia struggle to find kosher food, the people with whom I worked struggle to afford any food at all.
     Panaderia Los Pitufos is trying to alleviate hunger for one little neighborhood.  Together, Enrique and Julia produce 820 breads daily, Monday through Friday.  One hundred twenty of these breads feed the children and educators breakfast and an afternoon snack.  The other seven hundred rolls, pan tortillas and pan frances, are sold at 40 centavos each, 2/3 of the local market price.  Aspiring nuns from the convent donate their time to sell the bread, and it sells out daily.
     It is nice to be back in the United States where food is plentiful and I can shower without getting electric shocks.  But I am maintaining my ties to Los Pitufos and continue to serve as the administrator of the bakery.  I hope one day soon it will be on sounder financial footing so that unanticipated emergencies, like machine failure, do not derail this vital project.