Going The Distance

Facebook status, 11.01.10: All I want for my birthday is a new clutch and a mennonite. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently not.

Imagine “Good Morning” hosted by Kelly Brook – the most popular live national television show, that the entire country watches before going to work. Imagine being asked to speak, live, to millions of people in your (rusty) second language. Now imagine that you are asked to wear over-sized green kawasaki motocross racing clothes…

That’s the way my birthday started today. We had struggled last night to find a load of clips from our time in bolivia, and on the road, and after about 2 hours of searching, we left an editor to it to finish the job. We sat on the pleather sofas in front of millions of Bolivians. Once the interview was underway, all was well: Bolivian Kelly Brook was distractingly gorgeous, and having been promised hair and make-up to no avail, Alanna felt outshone by Kelly’s surreal TV beauty. She needn’t have worried though, as I think the Bolivian public were distracted more by our outsized lime green super-hero costumes. We got the standard questions – why are you doing this (one I often ask myself at 3 in the morning when I awake, worrying about the non-appearance of our vital clutch plates) who’s stupid idea was it anyway (one Alanna often asks me when we’ve broken down, or had a run in with a chicken bus). And what is love after all this (one I rarely ask myself, because when I awake a 3 in the morning, or have a run-in with a chicken bus, I look to my right, and the answer is right asleep in the bed, or in the side-car) But the TV answer of course is “you’ll have to wait for the book to come out” – or if they’re insisting, then you say something about giving, about working hard, or about respect. There’s much more to it than that, but again, you’ll have to wait. In the middle of the interview, a small bag was brought out and Kelly presented me with a birthday present. A bottle of aftershave. Lovely. Cue the jokes about how much I smell after a long day on the road. And a kiss (on the cheek sadly) from the radiant Kelly. Golly. I took the opportunity in the middle of the interview to implore the bolivian nation to help me find my package; for the Bolivian Postal Service to deliver it to the Hotel Osira today for my birthday. I’m not sure if there was someone with true postal power watching, but I like to think that my TV plea did not go unheard. Kelly’s final question was “and will you have kids when you get back?” Classic. And cue the classic response: “Alanna says this trip is my baby, and when we get back we’ll have hers.” And with that we were ushered off to remove our frog-suits, pose with some models outside the studio, and receive the attention of the public pounding down the studio gates. The public took the form of a fella called Jorje, who runs a suzuki garage round the corner, and he saw the start of the programme with his wife. and rushed to meet us at the studio. He also runs a biking club for couples, and thought it would be fun to have a dinner for us (and fifteen couples) tomorrow night, as guests of honour. And with that, we hopped into our awaiting car, and began driving to Colonia Chihuahua, a Mennonite Colony a couple of hours east of Santa Cruz, where I could find half of my birthday present.

And on the way there, as I type, I received a phone call, *the* phone call, from the Hotel Osira, La Paz, where the package is due to arrive. “It’s here” they say “You’ll have to pay a $50 importation duty – but it’s here” At this point the tax doesn’t bother me, and my birthday is very nearly complete, by 11am in the morning. Perfect, the mechanic can get the package today, spend tomorrow repairing the bike, have dinner with our new found biking couple friends, and we can be back on thursday in time to leave town before the end of the week.

However, the hotel manager calls back, to explain that, as is often the way in Bolivia, things aren’t as easy as they should be. The hotel is not a registered importation company, paperwork that will take them days to complete – and the only person who can collect the package from the post office, is myself, in person. She’s going back to the post office herself this afternoon, to try and bribe them. But I don’t have much hope. Customs here are notoriously difficult (just ask our other biking friends who spent 3 weeks waiting for their tires to arrive from Miami).

We arrive at the the Colonia just in time for lunch. Elmer’s parents (Ben & Agnes) were expecting us next door, and we sat with the whole family, including Ben’s other 2 daughters, about 25, and their youngest son, 12 years old. We passed small talk over the chicken and rice, and established that Ben had brought the family to bolivia about 6 months after the colony had begun in 1989. Before then, they had been in Belize, where Ben had found his faith. SOon after lunch the various members of the family dispersed to their duties, and I set up the camera ontop of a stool on the table (my tripod is with the bike in La Paz). Agnes spoke a smattering of English, no Spanish, all “Low German” – an early Germanic language which apparently bears little resemblance to modern German (though as a non german speaker, it was hard to tell). Ben spoke a solid English, after spending time with British soldiers in Belize. It was with those drunken representative3s of my country that his story begins, in the 1970′s. He was spending a lot of time with them, drinking, smoking and generally behaving like a squaddie, when his sister suggested that perhaps he spent some time with her, to see her Christian way of life. He laughed at her, but gave her lifestyle a go, and by 4pm that first afternoon, he said Jesus had shattered his heart of stone, and replaced it with flesh. From then on, he had his faith. He asked for guidance to find the right woman, and sure enough Agnes “came along”. One year later, they were married, and they had their first child, Milton. His advice to us was to let Jesus into our lives. He too is shocked by the statistics he’s reading about german marriages – that more fail than begin. That in a world without God, marriages fall apart. This is not something that can be argued with. The statistics do indicate that marriage based on a strong christian faith are ten times less likely to fail (something like 5% of serious religious unions fail, as opposed to the famous 50% of the rest of the population). So that was pretty sound advice. Love, according to Ben, takes three forms. Passionate love, between man and woman, “love” of things, and of doing things, and the love of God. And the love of God is the purest of all, and the love that can make a marriage work.

And with that, we filmed them outside, as we do with all of our couples, though in their case they didn’t want to kiss. He was clear that it wasn’t that he didn’t love his wife, nor that he didn’t want to kiss her in front of us – it’s just that a public kiss (on TV) spoils the love. So onto Ben and Agnes’s son, Elmer, and his wife Maria.

They had just moved into their house, so their furniture was sparse. But they had a couple of chairs to sit on, and usefully a table and a stool to put the camera on… Their 2 little girls, Silvia and Emmy, were beautiful – wearing light blue dresses, with pigtails in their blonde hair, and running about the feet their parents, smiling and laughing all the while.In a similar way to his dad, Elmer asked God to help him find a wife. It was then he noticed the girl working in the store, a girl who had noticed him long before, and it was then that he plucked up the courage to talk to her – to get to know her. They both liked each other – and so Elmer asked Maria’s parents. Maria’s parents had come to this colony from a old-style colony further south here in Bolivia. One of the colonies that still has the traditional dress (overalls for the men, and bonnets for the ladies), and the traditional horse drawn machinery, without tires. Maria’s family had seen the decline of their colony, that the youth had frequently deserted the group, and that such strict ways could not survive in this era. They heard of the successful colony, Chihuahua, moved there, and accepted a more relaxed way of life (headscarves instead of bonnets, tractors instead of horses – though still a formal Christian lifestyle). Maria’s parents agreed to Elmer’s proposal, and soon enough they were married, in the Chihuahua Church, in a very simple ceremony with their parents and close family. For Elmer (Maria didn’t speak that much) his advice was to make sure that we share everything, good and bad. He translated a nice saying for us, for Low German – to say “A problem shared is a problem halved, but a happiness shared is a happiness doubled” And love,  again involved God. God is Love, and he hopes that by sharing the teachings of the bible with us, that we can share these thoughts with many more, and that many marriages will be helped with our project. I hope so too, Elmer, I hope so too.

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