No, I Don´t Want to Buy Weavings. Potolo, Bolivia

More glorious camion rides later, in the minuscule village of Potolo, I discovered that I´m probably the first gringa ever to arrive there without the intent to stock up on indigenous weaving. I actually think they began to despise me, inviting me into their huts hungrily hoping I would buy buy buy like the slews of foreigners before me. The disappointment was widespread and it turned out to be an awkward day of wandering the same three earthen streets upsetting the population of this adobe oasis left and right with my reluctance to reach for a dollar filled wallet. The hounding demands of "Don´t you want to buy weaving" soon we´re followed by responses from passerbyers "No, she doesn´t want to buy anything". Then I felt, or hopefully imagined, the words behind their stare, "Well then what are you doing in our village gringa?". In disgust of myself, I paid one woman for a photo. After her endless begging for something, this is all I could imagine I wanted from her. Sadly, this was followed by another woman who, overhearing the conversation, insisted to me that she has traditional clothes to...she can go home and change...and then I can pay her for photos as well. Tourism is a wild beast of camera clad power dynamics.

By nightfall, I was sitting at Potolo´s only street stall, trying to eat away the horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach with a plate of fried chicken and mayonnaise. A feeling of otherness, undeserved riches, and sadness for the poverty of the homes I had been invited into. It wasn´t just their poverty, but the fact that "poverty" is far more than complex than simply material and, at the same time, nothing more than relative and perspective, and this relativity takes on a mangled face when their economy is propped up, and their self-worth surely diminished, by weaving-wanting, white tourists. And all of it is really nobody´s fault persay, just the way of things, and this is perhaps the saddest part. So I liberally squeezed out the mayonnaise while Jon Claude Van Dam fought the entire South Pacific in full-volume dubbed Spanish, and village boys gathered around one of the only TVs within hundreds of miles to cheer him on.