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From: Athens News
Dated: 2/24/2003
By Lauren
Coyle
Athens NEWS Contributor
Daniell Matta,
currently Ohio University's Peace Corps recruiter, spent over
two years working with four small indigenous villages in the
impoverished yet lush valley region of southern Bolivia.
She is working on her master's at OU in international
development.
Matta said she was prepared for the rural
setting of Ingre, which is a six-hour bus ride from the
nearest town. What she did not expect to find was a sense of
contentment among the underprivileged Guarani with whom she
worked.
"The thing that struck me was that, despite the
fact that they are so poor, they are also very happy," Matta
recalled. "Their family's very important to them. They were
always joking around, getting together and having
parties."
Matta spent just over two years in the Peace
Corps, volunteering in four Guarani villages in southern
Bolivia. She worked within the small-business group, helping
out in Guarani community stores and assembling a library in
the non-Guarani village of Ingre.
Since the Guarani are
largely subsistence farmers who share and barter goods among
themselves, they were adjusting to the use of money, Matta
said. Each village had a small community shop that sold basic
goods. They set up the community stores in 1995 when they
gained liberation from the patron system -- a form of
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indentured servitude under which the Guarani worked for
white upper-class farmers in exchange for food, shelter and
clothing. According to Matta, the Guarani began banding
together to secure their rights in the '80s, and in the early
'90s they held a series of marches on LaPaz, the capital of
Bolivia.
"The agency that I was assigned to worked for
the Guarani. They helped them to get rights to their land and
helped them find funding to form these community stores,"
Matta said. "Because they were so far isolated, they couldn't
really buy products or goods. Everything was really expensive
because they had to bring it six hours from town."
The
Guarani in these small villages of 100-200 people sold their
main crops, corn and peanuts, once a year, and spent all of
their money right away, according to Matta. "The problem was
that they never used money under the patron system, because
the patron always provided for them," she said. "So they
didn't know how to manage money at all."
Without money,
the Guarani would have to buy things from the community store
on credit, Matta said. Often, the debts were never paid and
the community store would have to shut down.
"So, I
would try to give them different incentives to pay back their
credit, like giving them a bag of sugar or knocking off some
of their debt if they paid back a certain percentage," she
said. "I charged interest rates and helped keep inventory in
the stores. I also worked with families to help them plan
budgets."
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Matta found spare time to launch a library project
in Ingre. She went door to door, asking the community what
they thought they needed. The consensus was textbooks. "Most
kids didn't have access to textbooks. Only one or two kids in
the class could afford a textbook," she said. "So the teachers
would have to assign group homework, so they could all
share."
Matta obtained a $5,000 grant through the Peace
Corps to start the library. The community already had a
building for it, so she set out to buy books. "I ended up
doing a three-week book-buying tour of Bolivia. I went to all
the major cities and bought books," she said.
She
returned to Ingre and organized the library, shelving books
according to subject matter. She helped form a library
committee, composed of parents and teachers. "We opened the
library and I was working in it, because we didn't have a
salary for a librarian," Matta said. "So I talked a lot with
the mayor from the other town, and we finally got a salary for
a librarian. Someone was going to start that job after I was
gone. The library was turned over to the committee when I
left."
Matta discovered that, although the Guarani
communities got along with one another, tension existed
between the Guarani and non-Guarani communities. "When I was
working on the library project in Ingre, which is non-Guarani,
the Guarani would ask me why I was helping them," she said.
"The people in Ingre would ask me why I was helping the
Guarani, saying they're lazy and won't pay back
(Continued on page 11)
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