ONE: Lucy Pickles

Lucy Pickles

A challenge I’ve overcome: Starting to face the difficult things from my past

A dream for my future: to speak Spanish better

A hope for the global village: An end to global poverty.

Lucy Pickles – hilarious, deep-thinker, hugely intelligent and passionate about social justice and inclusion, brilliant musician,  EFL teacher and adventurous traveller  -wow, what an incredible friend!  Lucy is one of the keen long distance cycling crew, a friend I met back in 2009 on the first of my rides fundraising with UK charity Macmillan Cancer Support.  It was on that cycle-camping trip that woke up one morning and it suddenly clicked, woa, you could travel the world like this! Lucy and I daydreamed all morning of a long-distant independent trip.  A year later in February 2010 I was setting out from the UK at the start of another 14 day Macmillan trip from Panama to Nicaragua, and from there set off on my own cycling north on a route that took me through the whole of Central America.  As it turned out Lucy couldn’t join me on the cycle but was living in Belize at the time, so I was able to stay with her as I passed through.  And in Cochabamba, our two separate Latin American journeys have happily crossed paths again.  Yay!

Lucy is in Cochaba,ba because she has been volunteering with Tearfund since January, working as a team-leader with a group of young British volunteers supporting local groups in running activity workshops with school age children from vulnerable backgrounds.  Apparently the posting's been pretty challenging; mainly because of the difficult behaviour of one particular volunteer who eventually had to be sent home early.   Also because Lucy's felt dissatisfied with the quality of work the unskilled volunteers are able to offer, and so feels uncomfortable about the vast amounts of money being spent by the British government on this particular initiative under the guise of ‘international development’.  Lucy believes the volunteers gain far more from the exchange than the organisation in Bolivia, who she believes would achieve almost the same outcomes in their work with or without the volunteers. 

Although these issues are tough, and it is not the experience Lucy anticipated, it's perhaps also exactly these types of tough or disappointing experiences that we learn the most from and that end up defining more clearly our own viewpoints and ethics.  I certainly look back at my first volunteering placement with ProWorld Service Corps in Urubamba, Peru in 2005, as being a very formative experience.  The six weeks I spent there was certainly massively enjoyable and positive in terms of self-development, and I also believe that the kids I ran art workshops with enjoyed the sessions and the access to the art materials we provided.  But I was disappointed to realise that there was little continuity in the projects we worked on, as they functioned mainly in the US University holiday period, after which the majority of volunteers went home and the projects in Urubamba ground to a halt.  I was also surprised to see the majority of our hard-earned cash go straight into the US rather than into the local community.

As well as being my first volunteering experience, that trip to Peru was also where love for Latin America began.  It was also the first time I touched Bolivian soil when we spent one weekend visiting Lago Titicaca.  That was a flying visit like this one, so I'm glad to know that as long as all goes to plan I'll have the chance to get to know Bolivia more in depth at the end of the year when I come back to Cochabamba for three months for the Sustainable Bolivia arts residency.   That was actually an opportunity I came across because of this placement of Lucy's with Tearfund, (so thanks Lucy!), and have also been able to pass on to friend and fellow artist Camilla Brendon, who'll be handing over to me at the beginning of September.

So it was a delight to spend that first night in Bolivia sharing pizza with Lucy, her warm company and wry comic ways particularly welcome in bringing me back from a slight low tired point to one of laughter and feeling on my feet in the new country.  We met again early Tuesday morning in a luxury cafe, ‘Casablanca’ where despite the Wi-Fi we never did quite manage to Skype our close friend and third member of this particular musketeer clan, Siobhan. ;-(

 

We did spend hours and hours intensely chatting though, about Lucy’s placement, intuition, psychology, the potential of self-healing and understanding through art therapeutic techniques and the importance of having compassion for oneself and well as others.  Alongside all the deep chat there was also a huge lot of laughter, particularly because of the combination of Lucy’s wry humour with my having only slept a couple of hours the night before (entirely my own doing – I was up all the night catching up on editing and writing!) ...plus the presence of a third entity in the form of a boiled egg that Lucy had brought along with her, painted wit black zebra stripes and cracked sufficiently to let off pungent waves of eggy–odor every so often, that had me thinking the one of the customers had a particularly dodgy belly until I belated related the smell to the egg!

This Egg accompanied us on the rest of our morning missions, cradled in my hand as we got a taxi to the bus station (I wondered would the taxi driver have the impression that we European ladies are particularly smelly!) The lovely old lady at the post office seemed surprisingly un-bemused by our request of a photo together with Lucy’s ONE postcard and the egg!  As I enquired about bus ticket prices at one particular window the lad kept looking down at my hand until we were all laughing once we’d acknowledged the Egg’s presence and that it was a little weird to be carrying her around.

This is not the first time Lucy and I have shared eggy experiences – the first was on a cycle-camping trip with Emma and Ollie along the Southwest coast of England.  One night sat around a mini campfire we did an experiment to see if a raw egg explodes if placed directly in a fire... what do you reckon?  We all huddled back shielding our faces from the anticipated explosion but in actual fact the egg eventually just cracked, oozed and by the time we removed it from the flames was a semi-burnt boiled egg that none of us wanted to eat,  so we threw it over the fence, meaning it landed on train tracks... triggering a series of concerns about the animals that might potentially risk a squashing by the train in the eating of the egg, or about the egg’s future, and what on earth the symbolism was of us women throwing an egg onto a train track, being as an egg strongly represents fertility!?!

 

This time round we thought through carefully where we’d like to leave this Egg, and eventually rolled her (with much aplomb!) into the basin of an empty fountain in the central square Plaza 14 de Septiembre, surrounded by pigeons.... hmmm what might the symbolism be in that?  Well, a fountain is a spring or source, and although this one is currently dry, there will come a day when it fills with nourishing water, enabling the egg to move and take flight with any one of the many opportunities waiting in the form of the surrounding pigeons.... Lucy, what do you reckon?!! :-)

 

On our evening wander we chatted about how it is to be a foreigner in a new place and a new culture.  Lucy, who’s lived in various places around the world, including Montana and India, remembers a particular moment of turning on classical music in her home in Belize and realising just how much she missed the cultural submersion of London.  As creative folk we are so used to the cultural saturation of London, that this is certainly something we can miss while traveling (though interesting in Central America I more remember being delighted and appreciating the cultural cacophony of London on my return rather then missing it while away).  In Chile tone of the huge draws was certainly the creative energy of the company and the variety of galleries and cultural events in the capital.  Here in Cochabamba , wandering the streets whilst wondering how I will settle for those three months at the end of the year I was glad to notice a number of good bookshops,  interesting social-focused newspapers and magazines, and a couple of galleries, cinemas and theatres.  I was also happy to get the Facebook contact of one artist from her husband in a gallery where I was really touched by the delicate magical beauty of her pastel paintings that seemed to celebrate feminine creativity.

One of the aspects of Bolivia that is more uncomfortable to face is the poverty.  There are many very elderly folk, painfully thin and in raggedy clothes, begging from the floor of the streets.  There are many grubby faced children, like one tiny little boy alone in a side street, playing a couple of notes over and over on a mini mandolin who looked up at Lucy and I with the most mournful eyes.  Poverty in Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and is the reason why so many organisations are working here in International Development.  One of the activities that Lucy’s colleagues offer is a once-a week baby washing service in Plaza 14 de Sept. where local mums can bring their children to be cleaned in the open air.

200 years of freedom for who?

It was such a pleasure to see Lucy... it always is, but particularly lovely over her, so far from home.  One of her colleagues and friends, Colombian-German Diana, noticed my overly-rapid hard-to-understand way of talking in English and we laughed that maybe I was talking even more fast than my normal fast because of the excitement of having so much to catch up on, and the chance of talking in English, where there is no stumbling over vocabulary gaps! (In this aspect a big parallel with the Chileans who are known to, and admit to talking very fast and without clear pronunciation, just like some of us Brits perhaps ;-) )

This was actually Lucy’s last evening in Bolivia.  Her and her team were preparing to fly back home to the UK early the following morning, so when I was invited back to their halls-like home set-up for a tasty dinner the group were busy packing and starting to say their goodbyes.  Safe flight home folks.

 

[this image is actually from a perfume ad in Cochabamba, but I love the image... this is how my head feels after an afternoon in your company Lucy :-) ! ]

So thank you so, so much for such a great couple of days Lucy ... as always I’ve left your company with my head spinning extra-fast with thoughts and ideas...  Thanks too for my postcard and the antique 1 boliviano note!

Good luck settling back into London life and planning your next excursion to Greece.

I’ll look forward to seeing you in the summer!

Big love

:-)