Museo

Every other Thursday morning, the language students at Maryknoll have their field trip to one of the historical and cultural attractions of Cochabamba. Joshua and I were overdue to have our excursion to Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d’Orbigny, or the Alcide d’Orbigny Museum of Natural History. Two weeks ago, in lieu of the museum, we went out for pasteles y api as we celebrated the Maryknoll lay missionaries who were finishing their classes. Last Thursday was the off week for field trips, and I stayed home anyway because of my insomnia. So today was the day for our deferred excursion. The students and teachers crammed into two overcrowded taxi-trufis without working seatbelts (again, as usual) to get to the museum, located midway between Maryknoll and the Franciscan convent where I roost. 

Think small with this museum: five rooms of exhibits. You can cover the museum in an hour, and that’s about what we did with our guide. This was certainly the first time I took a guided tour of any museum in a language other than English. I will admit that my mind was diverted, and I was not fully paying attention to the guide as she spoke. Profesora Liliana was kind enough to ask her to slow down to accommodate the learners in her midst, but the guide did not really slow down enough for most of us. Wanting to learn something of the language while learning something of the natural history of Bolivia, I chose instead to read what I could of geological and biological note. 

As is usually the case with guided tours, I found myself wishing we could slow down. I learn best by observing visually; I find museum guides’ commentary to be distracting and hurried. Given the handicap of listening to a second language being spoken, I found my attention to be really diffused.

Of course, I can return any time I want to during museum hours to contemplate the variety and beauty and grandeur of life as it developed in what is Bolivia today. If the trilobites whose imprints remain in the fossils we saw were here to crawl around, I would follow them. If those turtle specimens could talk, I would talk to them. If all those bats under glass began to flutter, I would be grossed out. And if the baby condor, itself larger than any other adult bird I have ever seen, were to be met by its parent, and they took off into the air, I would be awed. 

Proceeding through the geologic eras, from 500 million years ago to the present, regarding the fossils of long-disappeared lifeforms or the skeletons and stuffed remains of still-existing species, I thought to myself, our time is short. Furthermore, I thought, how inconceivable that the miracle of creation, which unfolded over hundreds of millions of years and reached such an exquisite balance of existence at the advent of human beings, is now being upended and unmade in a geologic instant. Inconceivable, but all too real. If it wasn’t for our terrible shortsightedness and profound ignorance, how could we be forgiven for what we are doing to life itself? 

Earth Day is coming up in a week and a half. I am sending prayers to the members of our justice, peace, and integrity of creation ministry at Church of the Good Shepherd in New York City. They are organizing an ecological fair to promote care for creation in their neighborhood and a deeper conversion to responsible relationship with our Sister Mother Earth that is personal and socially conscious. It’s on Saturday afternoon, and if you are in upper Manhattan, stop by Good Shepherd and the open-air exhibits. God willing, the weather should be fine!