Bringing a new meaning to the concept of a zebra crossing

This week, we were given the opportunity to do something truly unique.

Eleven years ago, an initiative was introduced in La Paz in an attempt to improve road safety for pedestrians, and make driving through the city easier for cars.

This essentially involved bringing together young and unemployed people in La Paz, providing them with training, plenty of enthusiasm and a full body zebra costume and head and sending them out into the streets to spread the message of road safety, bringing a new meaning to the concept of a zebra crossing.

For the first few years, the zebras were considered a joke. They were abused, kicked, pushed and laughed at by most and there was no respect for the message they were trying to promote. However 11 years later, the zebras are considered an important institution of La Paz and most citizens see them as delivering a vital message.

So on Wednesday morning we were given the morning off work and around 20 of us volunteers and some of the office staff made our way to the tourist area of the city- Plaza San Francisco- for 9am. None of us had a clue what to expect, we didn’t know what we would be doing, who with or how long for. We were greeted by two young Bolivian guys who took us down to the basement where we began two and half hours of team building, warm ups and training to get us ready for our zebra experience!

After we had jumped around like lunatics, assumed strange characters and sauntered around the room and therefore lost all our inhibitions (and possibly dignity) we were finally ready to be zebras. We were formally introduced to the full-time zebras by their arrival in the room, fully costumed-up and singing the ‘zebra song’. We were then ‘adopted’ by one of the true zebras, given our costumes- which turned out to be incredibly hot and stuffy, topped off by the head which allows only minimal tunnel vision. This wouldn’t usually necessarily be a problem, however, the job of being a zebra involves stopping traffic, helping pedestrians cross the road and keeping an eye on the traffic lights which generally needs to be done all at the same time…

We were finally let loose on the street and the fact that not only do I normally speak broken Spanish and have to listen extremely carefully to be able to understand others speaking it, but now I had a zebra costume preventing me from hearing or talking properly and that meant that I had no idea what my zebra was telling me to do, leaving me to resort to copying his every move.

I’ll paint you the picture. Me, in my costume, holding a circular sign reading ‘tengo actitud cebra’ or ‘I have zebra attitude’ dancing around wildly on the pavement waiting for the lights to turn red, waving the traffic through the lights and waving at anyone and everyone. On red, we would hold out our boards, encouraging the traffic to stop behind the line and then go out onto the crossing, helping pedestrians to cross safely (with more dancing, shouting and bowing). Another major part of the job was waving at and greeting small children who completely and utterly adore the zebras and make you feel like some sort of striped celebrity.

I think the most powerful part of the experience was the freedom and empowerment that wearing such a recognised ‘uniform’ gave me, and the strange feeling of walking down the same street as yesterday, when no-one even looked you in the eye or said hello, and have people respond cheerfully to your greetings, smile at you, say thank you for doing a great job etc. The problem was, after finishing our ‘shift’, taking off the costumes and then going to walk to get a bus, I had such a strong urge to shout ‘bwenas dias!’ at strangers in the street, cross the street by dancing in circles and even hold on to the tail that was no longer there….