House Tour with an Entomologist

Juan Mamani lives with his wife and six children in an adobe house, roughly about the size of a single‑car garage in the United States. The adobe walls are unplastered and cracked. Entering the wooden‑framed doorway, one sees openings between the frame and the walls. The dirt floor is smoothly packed but covered with stacks of corn, potatoes, rice, and dried beans in one corner. A small earthen stove without a chimney is nestled in another corner with pots and pans surrounding it. The room smells of smoke and cooking. The ceiling is black from the soot of smoke. The building has a thatched roof, which forms the ceiling, and from crossbeams hang clothes, baskets, and several drums. Wooden beds with straw mattresses lie along each wall. Juan and his wife sleep in one bed, their children in the others. Beneath the beds lie shoes, clothes, boxes of valuables, and costumes for fiestas. A table with wooden chairs is in the center of the room. A small window provides a little light inside the cool, damp, and dark room. The house is basically a place to eat, sleep, and store things. Several guinea pigs scatter across the room, foraging on leftover food lying on the floor; others peek out from underneath the beds. A dog lies next to a bed, and one of four cats of the household sleeps on the window ledge. Eight humans and thirteen other mammals sleep in this room.

Along with the entomologists, we use a flashlight to search for vinchucas kissing bugs. On the wall are telltale signs–brownish streaks–indicating vinchucas have taken blood meals and defecated as they crawled up the wall. There also are several splotches of dried blood remaining where Juan swatted vinchucas. The inside of the house becomes more and more disgusting to us as we shine the flashlight into cracks and see hundreds of vinchuca eggs, like rice being stored inside the walls. After we lift up pictures on the wall, a large vinchuca sits paralyzed by the light. Kissing bugs lie hidden in the clothes hanging from the rafters and underneath the bed. Several bugs are hidden underneath the gunnysacks filled with food. Within half an hour, we find about twenty‑five bugs. However, this cursory investigation exposes only the tip of the iceberga thorough investigation of the Mamani household would reveal hundreds of vinchucas.

With reason, social scientists have described the Mamani household as a “sick house,” Casa Enferma, the title of Brisefio‑León’s study of Chagas’ disease in Venezuela. Social scientists often use similar terms to describe unhygienic houses in cities. When urban renewals are promoted to improve housing, these houses often are classified as “run‑down housing.” In Bolivia, political economists envision the country as developing through ecotourism and becoming a transportation link between neighboring countries; so many believe it is necessary to cover up certain places. For example, houses were painted along one street when the Pope visited Bolivia in 1987. Altruistic and political considerations frequently concentrate on the house as a focal point of disease rather than considering it as a family and cultural institution.