So I left Bolivia. I moved out of my house with the host family about a month ago to live with my friend Juan. I quit my job about two weeks ago to ride horses with a Chilean trainer in the countryside. The fsd program ended, my job was not working out as I had planned, and I made other plans when the originals didn’t work out… as planned. Now I find myself sitting in the 18th floor high-rise suite of a friend of a friend in Buenas Aires, looking out over a white-washed New York city that hums a low whisper beneath a Sunday layer of fog. I came here for ten days to decrease my level of culture shock. I came here because I knew that leaving a foreign country where you’ve been abroad is incredibly difficult, and also that going home is equally difficult, and i thought myself brilliant for realizing that THIS time I would do the leaving and the coming at different times. Not simultaneously, as had previously been my error. Little did I know that I would bus three days to Buenas Aires only to find myself in a doppleganger version of my life in New York- getting high in a loft apartment, watching the family guy, eating chinese food, listening to the Notwist, showing people Rabbit and Mouse- really truly eerily similar except that it was dubbed in argentine spanish. This could not be further from my experience sitting in small, low-lit cafes in Cochabamba, with close friends and two lousy bottles of beer. I took a bus for three days to get to Buenas Aires. At the bus terminal, someone stole my big backpack, with all of my clothes inside. Last night I realized that that pack also had all of my photos from college inside. The photos that I told myself, when I first got here, “damn, shouldn’t have taken all of these, what if you lose them?”. So all of my clothes are gone. And all of my old photos are gone. A big part of my life has just been erased, which feels somewhat appropriate considering the circumstances. Even if I can separate leaving and coming, “moving on” and “letting go” still occur at the same time. And suddenly it dawns on me that all of this has something to do with a horse named Wayra.

Wayra was an enormous red jumper horse- huge head, huge heart, huge market value. The last offer they got for him was $40,000, and he was still 5 years old and barely trained. Wayra was Nico’s pet project, the horse that he was going to make from scratch and re-sell- some years down the line- for a bundle. Nico is 24. He trains Senora Lucy’s horses for a commission of their final sale price. Nico is from Chile, tall and handsome, and absurdly self-involved. Nico was wholly unappealing to me as a human being until the following happened:
One day, we went to see the horses in the countryside. There was a horse there named Gaston who had clearly been abused; Gaston did not like to be caught, did not like to be approached, touched, or saddled. We set about trying to catch him as one usually does (three or four people block off space using their bodies, slowly moving towards the horse with their arms outstretched until he is cornered in a small enough space, so that one person can step forward and halter him)- but the horse kept spooking and trying to bolt through the invisible ring we were creating. All the while we are doing this Nico is talking low to the horse, cooing, saying indistinguishable words of comfort. Finally he stepped up right next to him. The horse shimmied from side to side, head bobbing one way and then another, and he looked like he was about ready to bolt forward again, when Nico stepped into him, chest to chest, and blocked his way with his body. For an instant they were like greco roman wrestlers, Nico’s chest against the horses neck and breast, Nico’s arms slung up and over the horses neck, his feet planted firmly in the wet earth and grass below. Then the horse relaxed. Nico gently pulled the halter over his head. How Nico managed to have the conviction that his body could stop a horse is beyond me.
It was one of the most awesome moments I have ever witnessed. Tears sprang to my eyes. If there was anything to get about Nico, I was sure that in that instant, I got it.

Nico had six horses on his hands, Wayra being the highest priority as far as training was concerned. He offered to steal me away from the unsatisfying world of riding the club’s burnt-out school horses to help train the incredible horses he was riding. With my job on the fritz, the program over, and the opportunity to ride horses that I would never be able to afford to ride in the States, I decided to help him train full-time. I told myself that it was only for a couple of months, that I would still come back home earlier than planned, in early June, and that it was okay for me to engage in such an indulgent activity since, as I’ve said, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Nico had an unorthodox view on how horses of this quality should live. The popular doctrine is that these horses should live in box stalls at expensive riding facilities, where they are safe and well protected. Nico felt that horses were saner, healthier and more horse-like if they got to live in open spaces with other horses. Places where they got to move around freely, graze all day, and socialize with each other. So about three weeks ago we “transported” the last two of the horses to the country. I had thought that this would mean putting them in a trailer and driving them the ten kilometers to Tiquipaya, but we ended up riding them there instead. Imagine this: I set off on a beautiful, tall gray mare, next to Nico, astride a beautiful, tall, chesnut gelding, and we walked out into the street and then made our way to back-country roads. We towered above the small adobe houses. We walked along and passed bright green fields of corn, crossed streams and steep mud banks, ducked below eucalyptus branches and watched butterflies flitter around us. The mountains- the Andes- loomed purple and blue on the horizon. Everywhere was beauty, and we were seeing it all from horseback.

Wayra was the big, dumb, hesitant one. My mare, la Impetuosa, was four years older and ten times braver. When we had to cross water, I pushed la llegua forward first, then Wayra would follow. She trusted to me to pick the trail, and Wayra trusted her. To get them used to each other, and teach Wayra a thing or two about cowardice, we practiced a training trick that Nico had picked up from friends of his that play Polo; using our leg-aides, we would start in the middle of the road and push our horses sideways into one another. The idea was, quite literally, to run the other horse off the road. This seemed absurd to me at first, because there was no way in hell that my mare could physically move Wayra anywhere, but we won every time.

That night we stayed in a small cabin on the new property so that one of us could wake up every two hours to check on the horses. There were already 8 criollo horses on the property, and we needed to be present in case they got in a fight or one of the new horses collicked. There was no electricity or running water, so we built a big fire and sat and looked at the stars and watched the horses move around in the dark. The ajoining property was a conference resort (of which Senora Lucy was part owner), so people came and brought us a huge plateful of gourmet food to eat. I mean, yes, this really happened.

In the morning all was well and I took Nico’s car so I could go to Quechua class in the city. I was happy with my life, happy to be driving, happy to know my way around so well, happy to be taking Quechua. Life was looking really good; we would turn the space into a functioning Equestrian Club, we would train the criollo horses and give trail rides to the resort guests, we would build the thing from the ground up, escape the petty social world of Cochabamba riding clubs, and train horses all day and eat the Resort’s gourmet food and swim in the pool in the afternoons. I thought, “okay, for a month or two, I can do this.” The day before I had been cutting down brush with a machete to clear a path through the forest. I had thought, “now I’m really in Latin America”, sweating and swiping down with the machete, trying not to let it fly out of my hand. I hacked at a dead tree with an ax until it fell.

When I came back from class at around 11:30 there was no Nico and no Senora Lucy. I found Lucy’s maid walking up from the pasture with a bundle of blankets from the cabin and asked where everyone was.

“Oh! Nico’s very upset because the horse died.”

“El caballo? Que caballo?”

“El Wayra, senora!”

Wayra died that morning. I found out later that he had eaten a poisonous plant. That he had been running with the other horses to establish who would be dominant, who would lead the herd- he was running flat-out when he fell. He collapsed and was in terrible pain and then died within ten minutes. Nico, of course, had a breakdown. I was thankfully not there to witness any of it. I found him at the Club a few hours later, head between his knees, crying and muttering “poor horse.” He had hand-walked the mare back to the club. She was also showing signs of being very sick. Nico’s best friend and Nico’s whole career in Cochabamba were both gone.

So this is how I ended up in Cochabamba without a job or really anything to fill my time. I didn’t have enough time left to get involved with any new NGO’s (though I tried). After the day when Wayra died, when I forced Nico to eat and to sleep and stop pitying himself, he stopped calling me. We had only been friends for a few weeks, but we had spent every day together. That day, he had told me that I was his salvation in Cochabamba. That he didn’t know what he would have done had I not been there. I didn’t even see him before I left town.

So this is all a part of my decision to leave Bolivia. Wrapped up in that is the desire to see my family, my friends, and Josh. On April 24th I fly to Miami, on the 27th I fly to Santa Barbara, and on May 11th I’m moving back to New York. I guess I’ll need some new clothes.