Rereading this blog I found several gaps and themes about my experience. I will cover the gaps first since gaps are something quite obvious that I want to have covered first.

Moving to a new country always sounds great until you try it. The idea of adventure, new foods, new people, new culture is always appealing. That carries over when people talk about their volunteering experience abroad. Most people talk about their volunteering experience by stating what an amazing experience they had, how everything went relatively positive for them and how sorry they felt for the community they were helping and how privilege they feel about living in a first world country.

While I didn’t do the latter and don’t plan on doing so for obvious reasons, I do want to break the silence about what volunteering abroad is really like. Volunteering abroad is difficult. I had intense homesickness and culture shock for the first two weeks of my time there. I was physically sick the majority of the time that I was in Bolivia. I got food poisoning 8 times in 10 weeks, as well as asthma and a cold. I also had a seizure on one of my planes back. I never got close to my first host family even though I tried quite a lot for the whole month that I was there. I had to move host families because I found my first host mom breaking into my room and stealing my belongings from my luggage. I was almost deported three times because of paperwork.

I didn’t talk about these things partially because I didn’t think they were relevant. I also didn’t want to give a very negative vibe to my experience in Bolivia, because I didn’t want to have people think that it was all negative. I didn’t talk about the positives as much either. I didn’t talk about how close I got to those I worked with, how every day we worked together I would laugh with them until tears started coming out of my eyes or how we would go out for llama some evenings after work to drink and hang out.

I found themes in this blog of feeling useless, but near the end I definitely wasn’t useless, because I managed to use what I learned throughout my time there as well as during my classes at Rice to create lactose free milk for neonates from scratch. Seeing this project succeed and be implemented proved that I actually made a legitimate impact in my project and that I wasn’t entirely wasting my time there. But I didn’t talk about it because it was near my time that I was leaving and I didn’t have much time or energy after to go into the details. Now that I think of it this blog is not at all an accurate reflection of my life in Bolivia, there were many things I should have written about that I didn’t because I was out of time and lack of resources. That was just the nature of my last couple weeks there.

My name is Gabriela Balicas and I am a senior from Duncan at Rice University. This summer I served with Projects Abroad  in Cochabamba, Bolivia for 10 weeks. I worked with disadvantaged children at Centro de Nutrición Infantil Albina, a nutritional clinic based in Cochabamba as part of the Nutrition Project. The aim of this project was to battle malnutrition in children of up to 5 years of age. In addition, I  worked to increase nutritional awareness in the community by holding workshops for the parents of the interned children. 

Here you can find some reflections I’ve had throughout this experience.

The Centro De Nutricion Alberto Patiño was founded back on September 4th, 2002 and is part of the Simon I Patiño Foundation. It was founded for the soul purpose of treating malnourished children. The center takes an interdisciplinary approach to the issue, with nutritionist, psychologists, doctors, and physical therapists working in the building to help the new students. Children interned in the center will be fed nutritious meals until they reach their goal weight. In addition, they receive psychomotor treatments to help them reach their proper stage development. Moreover, the center provides workshops are for the  parents about proper nutrition and with the aim of preventing re-admission of children and increasing social support.

This entire time I have talked about malnutrition in Bolivia without comparing it to the malnutrition we see in the USA, but it’s not entirely different. Malnutrition of different sorts is rampant amongst children in the USA, particularly through obesity. An overfed child can still be a dangerously malnourished child. In the USA the main way this problem is being addressed is through education about diet and exercise, a practice I have already partaken in on the regular. However in Bolivia, as far as I experienced, malnutrition is addressed mainly through hospitalization, rarely through education, if at all; And that’s a problem. If any of my beliefs before going to Bolivia have been strengthened, it’s that education is the single most important factor in fighting malnutrition. But the the contents and style of education provided changes between cultures, that is for sure.

What my time in Bolivia has helped clarify for me is that nutrition is something I practice every day in my life, not only because I can but because I love doing it. This experience has taught me that if I work in a field of nutrition be it clinical/sports/corporate I will not work a day in my life because I love what I am doing. And indeed, even though with Projects Abroad we call going to our placements “going to work” it really just felt like I was going out to have fun. And that was a beautiful feeling.

I hate this topic. I hate it because frankly its incredibly subjective; one expert might find a particular picture to be unethical while another might find it harmless. I hate it because photography is inherently a biased art and to pretend that you can be unbiased when capturing a scene is hypocritical.

That said,  I am attaching some photography here which I consider to be ethical.

PHOTO 1: CHOLITA IN THE HALLWAY

This photo was taken in a market called “La Cancha” which is a giant flee market that spans 50 blocks. In this picture you can see a woman dressed in traditional Bolivian garments in the “Cholita” style walking down the isle admiring the merchant’s goods. A candid photo that shows a snapshot of the everyday life for the merchants in this isle, nothing more nothing less.

PHOTO 2: ACTIVE CAPACITATION

This photo was taken during a workshop made for the children’s mom’s to learn relevant nutrition information. The moms stand playing close attention to the nutrition student while a child asks her mom for a snack. The photo is candid and relatively neutral and does not serve an ulterior purpose other than to present a scene from one of our workshop settings.

PHOTO 3: NUTRITION TEAM

This is a group picture I took with everyone in the nutrition team at the Nutrition Center. This picture was taken near the end of my time in Bolivia, and specifically with the people I spent the majority of my time working with. These are people I got to know on a personal level through both work and fun outings, not people who I worked with for one or two days and just took a picture to prove to the public that I spent time with. Therefor I cannot find an argument to make this picture seem unethical.

Who’s responsibility is it to alleviate malnutrition in Bolivia?

It’s a slightly complicated question. It’s not the volunteer’s responsibility. Nutritional deficiencies are not problems that can be fixed immediately, they are the type of problem that require significant time and attention both during and after treatment, both from a nutritionist perspective but also from a psychological and sociological one. A band of nutritionists alone cannot fix this epidemic, it takes legislation and a conscious social shift to create a change.

That is to say, it’s the Government’s responsibility to expand its existing programs for battling malnutrition and expanding it’s programs to reach not just the children who make it to the hospitals but also them in their homes and in their families where the malnutrition takes place. It starts with making a cultural shift to change the norm for women to start having children at ages 15 and 16 to ages where they will at least have a mothering instinct for their children once their born. It starts with creating a society with the mentality that it takes a village to raise a child, a social net in which children are taken care of not only by their mothers but by everyone in their social circle.

However, these are only scrambled thoughts that grew from my experience here. Even in speculation, I cannot help but to be hesitant in saying them because everything is more complicated on the inside and often feel naïve giving solutions when I only understand the situation from the outside.

I´ve been avoiding writing this blog for the longest time because I have yet to have had a full day in which I felt like I had a particularly productive day.

Perhaps its because I have no autonomy in what I do in my project. I do what I am told to do, I do what is needed of me. If I am not needed in a particular location I go somewhere else to make myself useful. I am always working while I am at the center, always doing what is needed of me. I suppose a particularly productive day would be one in which I am at work for an extended period of time and helping more and more people getting their work done. But even when I do that I don´t get any satisfactory feeling like I do when I have a particularly productive day at school. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the satisfactory feeling I get from getting a lot of work done at school is because that means that I am advancing in what I have to do on a weekly basis, but even if I have a really productive day at work that will not change how much work there is left to do the next day.

In the end though a productive day for me means helping an individual or group of individuals accomplish their tasks either on time or ahead of time. If that gets done, then I´ve done my job.

I had a particularly emotional day related to service recently. I didn´t write about it at the moment because I didn´t have internet access that day, but today I am sitting down to delineate exactly what was going through my mind.

Usually when I work with the kids I work with the younger ones, the ones who are not yet capable of communicating orally. That day in particular I spent the day working with older children who were perfectly capable of communicating with full, sentences, and I cannot understate how heartbreaking it is when you can completely understand what it is they are thinking and feeling at the time.

It first started with innocent play, throwing a ball, solving puzzles, and playing with a baby doll. As we were playing however, two nurses rushed out of the clinic with two babies in arms. One of the children asked me where I thought the children were going. Without really thinking, I stated that I thought they would be going to see their moms.

“I don´t think so. I think they´re going to the hospital.”

This child said this so blatantly and frankly, like it was just a fact of life. Like about how bears go into caves to hibernate or how birds migrate south to escape the cold. “They´ve just gotten really sick, they might die so they have to go to the hospital,” the child said as he continued to play with his toy truck.

Later, I was asked by the resident psychologist to help take the older kids outside to play. I was more than happy to do so. Seeing the kids running around on grass, swinging on swings, just being kids was so refreshing. Listening to them laugh and scream as they soaked up the sun and enjoyed life was a great moment of bliss.

“We take them out twice a week, to let them play so that they don´t get bored.”

30 minutes. Twice a week.

Thats all these kids got to play outside in a week.

That´s it.

Moreover, later, as I was listening to the psychologist talk about her research to other nurses and students in a round table, she stated something that was shaking me to my very core.

Many of the cases of malnutrition they had been seeing recently were more than anything just a result of neglect, that these moms would go out about their business and forget to feed their children for days.

For days, some of these kids did not obtain any food or water from their parents. Not because their mothers didn´t have a means with which to feed them, but because their moms simply didn´t feel a maternal instinct towards their children.

But who is to blame them? These moms were mostly teenagers. Some were no older than 15 years old. How can we expect them to have a maternal instinct for their children when they themselves are still children?

I cried because the situation of these children. I cried because even when they go home they will not receive proper care. I cried because nomatter how well these children are fed at the center their future will still be bleak. I cried because these children were born into a life that is against them.

It´s officially been 4.5 weeks since I first came to Bolivia. If asked to look back on the expectations of where I would be now in this internship vs. where I actually am, I would say I am miles from where I expected to be. I expected to be taking on more initiative about my project, but frankly I came in with unrealistic expectations. To think that I could just go to la cancha, a market spanning 50 blocks and convince the merchants there to give the food they were unable to sell for free to the center to feed the children after they left the center was blatantly naive. I have been to the Cancha more times than I can count now and I can attest that nothing is free here. While in CBB the sense of community is incredibly strong, the markets are another story. Profit, naturally, is the main thing in each merchant´s mind and any effort outside of that is a waste of their time in their eyes. That is, they have mouths to feed at home too. My other idea, sustainable farming, one of my more difficult ideas, is almost impossible given the time of the year and the fact that no one would be capable of willing to start and take care of it.

If anything, I am hoping to spend more time working with the nutrition students for the rest of my internship to help them make effective classes for the moms that will leave a lasting impact on them going into the future and make sure they learn what is necessary of them. Moreover, contributing new ideas for more ways to ensure that the moms are fully taking care of their kids with the instructions given to them by the nutritionist and making sure that they can translate their classes into their daily lives would be, if anything, the most that I can do with my time and resources that I have left here.

I feel more helpless after the conversation I had with my host mother. It´s one thing to educate, it´s another to fix an economic crisis. I am worried for the future of these children after they leave the center. I am worried for them to move on in life, to advance from their current economic state into a life of health and fullfilment. But frankly I don´t expect them to, and that´s heartbreaking.