Traveling to Bolivia was certainly a transformative experience. Bolivia is far enough from and different enough from the US that I felt as though I got to experience an entirely different world than I was used to, but there certainly were similarities as well. In both economic practices and cultural systems of belief, the US and Bolivia shared certain aspects. As would be with any country, there were periods of adjustment where I was certainly a fish out of water, but I had my methods of adaption. Overall, studying abroad enriched my collegiate academic experience.
As this was my first time out of the country, my mind was immediately tuned into “compare and contrast to the United States” mode. I wanted to take everything in to see how I could challenge my perceptions of what is “normal”.
Some things were obvious, such as using Celsius or 24-hour time. Thankfully, I can subtract 12 from a time easy enough, and my phone was still set to the time I was used to so that wasn’t a hard transition, but I’m still not quite accustomed to Celsius. I just began to accept that anything from 23-30 degrees was a comfortable temperature.
Of course, the exchange rate took a little adjusting to as well. I about had heart failure spending 10 bolivianos on water or 70 on food. By the end of the trip, however, I think I was more concerned that I would get back to America and start converting dollars to bolivianos.
Other comparisons between Bolivian and American culture I was more surprised to find myself thinking about. For example, the bathrooms. Yes, I spent a lot of time lamenting that I couldn’t flush toilet paper, but I spent a lot of time thinking about other bathroom things as well. Bolivia had an abundance of public restrooms, probably more so than the US, of which I was definitely appreciative. However, I found it curious that I had to pay for every public bathroom. Maybe I’m mistaking curiosity with annoyance for having to spend my money to use the bathroom, but I just found charging to use a restroom very capitalist, and I had considered Bolivia to be much more socialist than the US. A practice rooted in native beliefs, Bolivians believe in and practice to this day wealth redistribution to help ease the large gap between the rich and the poor. Charging for a bathroom seems to not quite match the practices of a country that believes their wealthiest should donate their earnings for public works. That practice would almost seem to be more aligned with the US’s customs since the US believes in charging for everything (university, healthcare, tips for service workers, etc.)
As mentioned, wealth distribution is practiced because it was a native belief. Bolivia has a large native population, and so it’s a good example for how native customs can be evolved into modern-day day life and how native life and modernity can coexist in the present-day. Bolivia certainly isn’t perfect; they’ve had their share of trying to discriminate against the indigenous (for example, literacy tests in order to vote), but it can be argued that they’re doing much better than the US. In major cities one can find both business people in suits and many indigenous people in very traditional dress, selling their agricultural or textile items and speaking in their native language. There’s also plenty of professors or business owners who choose to live modernly but may still fluently speak Quechuan or Aymara and practice important indigenous traditions. Indigenous beliefs are also seemingly well-known throughout the population. All of this is in stark contrast to the US, where it’s rare to see someone native in most of the country, let alone to see someone practice a Native American belief in the US. To see Native Americans live traditionally, one would have to go to the reservations, which is a whole other can of worms. Large numbers of Native Americans in traditional dress, speaking their native language certainly aren’t walking amongst other Americans in major US cities. The US decided long ago that natives and native life must be pushed aside and kept in a small corner of the US. Any Native American beliefs aren’t common knowledge in the US, let alone to have those beliefs be so widely accepted that they become incorporated into US law (as wealth redistribution has in Bolivia).
For a nonreligious person, I also spent a considerable amount of time comparing Bolivian and US religious beliefs. Specifically, I thought a lot about Christianity vs. native religions (because the US is very Christian-centric). Both did focus on an idea of humility; Christianity says humans are flawed and sin and need to repent. Native Bolivian beliefs have no concept of sin, but they do focus a lot on being gracious to Mother Earth for all that she has given and request many thanks to the Mother Earth.
I also noticed religious practices that many consider “Christian”, but were practiced first in native times. For example, when we set through a ritual performed by a kallawaya, there was a period of silence where we were expected to thank the Pachamama for all she has given. This, of course, is very similar to Christian prayer time (not that prayer is not present in some capacity in many religions). The kallawaya also, however, blessed us by dripping water on our heads. This is like Christian baptism, and is something many Christians view as unique to their religion.
Something I found that the US and Bolivia had in common was the moral vs. economic struggle of exploiting natural resources for profit. Natural gas is a huge part of Bolivia’s GDP, but it’s also a nonrenewable resource that destroys the ozone layer in its use and destroys the environment to obtain it. Even though nature is sacred to many native Bolivians, how can Bolivia just stop doing something that gives it so much money? This is a problem for the US too. Many rural Americans make their livelihood off coal mining. Many other rural Americans worked hard at their low-wage job for 30 years, and finally caught a break when a gas/oil well struck something on their property. It’s difficult for these people to nix the short-term benefits of living comfortably to think in the long-term for the environment.
It’s not fair to say that all Americans or Bolivians, however, put money over nature. There was a huge backlash in Bolivia when the government wanted to build a road through the TIPNIS National Park. Many Americans are also against drilling in National Parks or spoke loudly in opposition to the building of the Keystone Pipeline. As climate change grows to be more of a concern, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether those whose are in favor of environmental protection will get their say over those who support economic gains in the US or in Bolivia.
There were many times throughout my trip that I was thankful I knew the Spanish language as well as I did; I couldn’t imagine trying to communicate where I knew zero of the language. I could at least differentiate in restaurants which sign was for the women’s bathroom and which was for the men’s. I knew why the ground floor of every building was “PB”, and I knew to always get my water “sin gas”. I could count to ensure I got the correct change back from a store. If a menu only had Spanish, I could at least scan for the “pollo”. Still, I hadn’t learned any Spanish or spoken any Spanish since high school so I was quite rusty. I forgot basic vocab and verb tenses (that I had to pick right back up because they were kind of critical). Even when I was using Spanish daily, my speaking skills weren’t my strong suit. I would always think of what I wanted to say in English then have to translate it word by word in my head to Spanish. As might be expected, this took some time. I realized how slow my speech processing was when a lady in an elevator asked me “¿Qué tal?” and I just kind of stared at her blankly as I took seconds to realize 1) what she said and 2) remember what “¿Qué tal?” meant. In that time, the lady just got disgusted as she just assumed I was rude.
Thus, being in a region where it was mostly Spanish spoken, helped my speaking reaction time get considerably quicker. It’s still slow, but certain conversations that I would have frequently would lend me to spouting off quick responses and phrases (and, hopefully, in better accent. I was very frustrated when an ice cream store owner didn’t understand me saying “chocolate” in one of my first few days in Bolivia). At one point, I even found myself thinking of my daily journal in Spanish rather quickly (unfortunately, I had to stop and switch myself).
More due to safety than language barriers, I would generally always end up in a group with someone that was way more well-versed in the language than me. Therefore, sometimes I would get lazy and have them translate for me when I wasn’t getting the point (“I’m pointing right at the Neapolitan ice cream?!” “Robin, she’s saying it’s too hard for her to dip”) or I would just have them do all the speaking (“Nadia, can you call and order pizza, please?”).
Partially through the trip, I began to be afraid that I would run into someone who spoke exclusively Quechuan or Aymaran and be REALLY out of luck. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Any shop owner or the like whose native tongue may have been…native language at least knew enough Spanish to communicate with a customer (and probably actually knew way more Spanish than I did, truthfully).
Through my engagements with the Mount Scholars program, I was frequently reminded of Ohio State’s motto: education for citizenship. Education abroad, while maybe not specifically tied to my major, is vital for one of the other main manifest functions of college: building good citizens.
In this day and age, one is a citizen of the world in addition to being simply a citizen of a country, a city, or the like. Visiting another country is incredibly vital because it expands one’s horizons; it causes people to realize just how fluid things that once seemed concrete can be. Instead of thinking of “culture” with definitions that match one’s own experiences, traveling abroad can cause someone to realize that there are many different ways to approach a situation.
Traveling abroad is humbling. It could be very easy for me to get a white superiority complex as I traveled to one of the poorest countries in Latin America. There were all kinds of makeshift tents with rickety plastic chairs set beneath them where people would be selling their hard-earned produce for the equivalent of very few US cents. Certainly, I became hyperaware of just how rich the US was and just how many inventions that the US had acquired for convenience, but I had to work to remind myself that none of that made me inherently better than anyone in Bolivia. Just because I was a rich US kid didn’t mean I knew all the ins and outs of Bolivian culture – the customs, the crafts, the food, the music, etc. I needed to rely heavily on all these people working day in and day out in the hot Bolivian sun to teach me their way of life – after all, they are the experts on Bolivia. 
That was one of the theories we discussed in my service-learning class for Mount – to treat those who live a certain lifestyle every day as experts. Very few people would automatically think of a rural farmer with limited schooling as an expert on poverty, but experiential learning can sometimes teach worlds more than textbooks ever could, and that’s what studying abroad did for me. By physically going to another country and seeing the life that people on a complete other continent experience every day, I got a taste of what it’s like to see the world through their perspective and got to see the justification behind why they would develop a solution to a certain situation that may have been quite different than a solution I would have come up with in the United States.
Assuredly, as my major is food science, I gained knowledge that pertains to my specific field of study as well. I tried all kinds of different foods (of course), but I also gained insight into food market demands of Bolivia and Latin America and the variance in composition of Bolivian food products versus US food products (for example, most products I encountered utilized sugar as a sweetener instead of high fructose corn syrup. This is indicative that flavor ranks higher for Bolivian food producers than cost-effective methods that allow for mass production).
I also toured a coffee plantation and learned the steps involved in coffee manufacturing from the growth of the plant to the toasting of the beans. In addition, from that tour, I learned steps along the way that can degrade the quality of the coffee (again, quality of the product is more important that quantity output to Bolivians) that would be beneficial should I ever decide to work in a beverage business (for example, it’s a very specific color and texture of coffee bean that gets picked off the plant. If it’s too light in color or weight, it will not affect the human body as positively as another bean might).
In conclusion, I, undoubtedly, gained volumes from my time spent in Bolivia. Bolivia caused me to think a lot about what I took for granted as “absolute” in the US because Bolivians approached that aspect of life differently. I also noticed aspects of culture that can be the same in two places as different as the US and Bolivia. Adjusting to the differences of culture required some creativity, but I made it work. The struggle of any cultural adaption that may have been involved was heavily outweighed by the mass amounts of growth obtained from experiencing life in another country.
