Eight-year-old Glenda Mamani does her homework at a table outside the Sipe Sipe snack shop that her mother Jenny owns.

The Beginning of a Better Life
Habitat helps with a crucial first step toward homeownership in Bolivia

By Shala Carlson

The Mona Lisa smiles down on the cramped, dimly lit room. She is pasted high on the concrete wall of the one room that five members of the Cervantes family call home. Two beds pushed together take up about three-quarters of the available space; piles of clothing — one topped with a well-worn, well-loved teddy bear — nearly take up the rest of the room.

Perched on one corner of the smaller bed, future Habitat homeowner Mabel Cervantes smiles a different smile, one more easily understood. “All my life, we dream to have a house,” the 22-year-old says. “This room, the owner can take away at any time. And we would go to the streets. But soon, we pay no more rent, we pay for our own house.”

That house, Cervantes says, will mean security, space, an indoor bathroom and steady access to a potable water supply — all things she, her daughter, her sister, her niece and her mother now live without. Less than two feet away, across a narrow hall, another family lives in similar conditions. In the small courtyard outside that serves as the residents’ laundry area and only bathroom facilities, the Cervantes family puts out green and red plastic tubs to collect rainwater. Sometimes, this is their only supply; they buy expensive buckets of water from a city truck when they can. A skinny, sluggish baby pig noses the sewage that collects near the entrance. The small town of Parotani, cut into the side of a hill alongside a busy highway, is little more than a maze of these kinds of courtyards and concrete rooms.

Cervantes and her relatives will be one of several families that will build Habitat houses in this rural area outside of Cochabamba as soon as the group has completed the ownership documentation process on the land. The partner families are all from this rural area; in nearby Sipe Sipe, Jenny Mamani — another future homeowner, a wife, mother and city-square snack shop owner — looks forward to leaving her mother-in-law’s house. “It’s strange in this house,” she says. “And we aren’t so comfortable. I’m going to live in my house with my own rules.”

Until the land documentation process is complete — Habitat staff estimates it will take one or two months — Cervantes will stay in her room in Parotani whenever she isn’t traveling to one of her two jobs. Today, she climbs the steep and rocky path up to the highway; here, her family owns and operates a kiosco, a tiny rest-stop snack shop that offers a little bit of everything: soda and food, batteries and rolls of toilet paper, souvenirs and traditional Bolivian sandwiches and dishes. “I cook, I sell, I wash the dishes, I clean the place,” Cervantes says, laughing. “I take the money, too.”

Other days, she takes a three-hour bus ride to her job as part of an office-cleaning crew at an international oil company; when she is gone to that job, it can be for weeks at a time and there is no phone where she stays. It is hard for her to be away from her young daughter Solaine, she says, but the job is a good one and she keeps her eyes on the future. “I have the strength to go to work so very far,” she says resolutely. “Thinking about Solaine and a better life for her makes me strong.”