Thoughts resulting from a trip to Bolivia
I recently returned from a two-month trip to Bolivia. There I saw many things that I've never seen at home, some good and some bad.
On arriving in Santa Cruz, where my plane had been diverted due to civil unrest in La Paz, I was told by the taxi driver that people don't usually use seatbelts there. I put mine on anyway. In cities like Tarija, the place is small enough that people are laid back and don't drive too fast. In La Paz, there's so much traffic that speeding is impossible. Santa Cruz, however, is a city with perfect conditions for hair-raising, racecar experiences. At some point, one simply needs to decide that he will either arrive alive or die, and that all the worrying in the world won't change that, so just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.
I saw people riding in, on, and around vehicles in so many different ways. The most interesting thing I saw was a pickup truck with conduit pipe laid out over the top of the cab and the bed, and men sitting on top of the pipe on top of the cab while driving down the street.
Despite staying with a high middle class family, the road was still unpaved and cows could be seen wandering by. Relatively rich and poor people living side by side. My hostess said that it is important to live so close so as to remember those less fortunate than us.
In Tarija, I found that I am quite susceptible to altitude. Tarija is at about 1800 m or 5,906 ft. My legs felts as if I'd been running without breathing enough, just a bit of that lactic acid burn, and I tired easily. To counter the altitude, I drank coca tea. Lots and lots of coca tea.
Now, the moderately informed among you are probably snickering to yourselves about me getting high on coca leaves. Forget it. You can't get high on coca leaves. It just doesn't happen. In order to get cocaine from coca, you need to refine it using all kinds of chemicals not recommended for human consumption. Chewing coca leaves or drinking coca tea has effects on the body similar in scale to the caffeine of coffee or the nicotine of cigarettes, without the addiction (at least I never became addicted and never heard of it happening to anyone else). The coca leaf has actually been used by the Andean peoples to counter the effects of altitude and lack of food for centuries (http://www.cocaine.org/). It took the white man to make it into a potent and harmful drug. Currently, in Bolivia you can buy coca leaves in the marketplaces and coca tea in the grocery stores along side your chamomile, mint and black teas. They have it as part of the breakfast buffet in hostels in La Paz.
Peasants continue to use coca in the traditional manner (http://www.narconews.com/Issue34/article1078.html), though because some of it has been exported for the American drug market, the United States has been trying to completely eliminate coca production by destroying peasants' crops, often the only viable cash crop available to them due to the harsh environmental conditions. So, the US government is sending in drug enforcement officers to other countries to control their crop production, because someone thinks that it is possible to eliminate our cocaine problem by eliminating coca. (That worked really well with prohibition on alcohol, didn't it?) This is particularly interesting considering that Coca Cola has a monopoly on cocaine refining in the United States. They produce high-grade cocaine, which is then disposed of (given to the government? I don't know where it goes, actually…sounds like a fun research project for someone out there), and Coca Cola uses the spent leaves to make an extract for the beverage (http://www.narconews.com/Issue35/article1159.html). So, while it is illegal for me to bring my coca tea back into the USA, Coca Cola is allowed to buy tons of it from Bolivia and Peru. Go figure. COCA IS NOT COCAINE!
Another thing. I like taking walks at night. It's nice to walk through parks, due to the lack of likelihood of getting run over by a car and the sense of being in nature, despite being in a city. In America there are laws against being in parks after dark. In Bolivia there are no such laws as far as I'm aware. There certainly are no signs posted to that effect. Sure, there's the possibility of muggers and gangs, but they exist even in parks where they aren't legally allowed to be, so rather than having a law dictate to me where I can go, I prefer to be able to make my own decision about it. Sure, in Bolivia you might accidentally fall down an open manhole, but at least there is no law forbidding you from walking where you want to go. While there are some aspects, such as public sanitation, that are missing, it's often quite invigorating to be able to do what you want to do without worrying about getting fined for it.
So, yeah, there's a lot more freedom in Bolivia. On the other hand, there's a lot less social order. There is almost always garbage in the streets, because many people have never been taught not to litter. There is high pollution spewing from everywhere. Packs of street dogs lounge in the sun. Usually they leave you alone, but sometimes they'll bark at you when you jog past, though it was usually my experience that it was the dogs that belonged to people, but were playing on the streets who were the most aggressive. The real street dogs didn't really care. Some of them were hard to look at, though. Some had to drag their hindquarters, which had been smashed by cars. Others were so thin that you could make out every bone in their bodies. And that was just the dogs.
The peasants of Bolivia are in much worse shape than anything I'd ever seen before. You know those ads about feeding a child for $1/day? I was there. It's true. There are many people maimed and out of work. Others are just too old to work. Old women and children sit on the streets begging for a coin to buy bread. The economy uses two currencies: the boliviano and the dollar. The poor can only pay in bolivianos (about 8 bolivianos to 1 dollar). They earn about $50-$100/month if they're lucky. The middle class uses bolivianos for groceries and medication, but can usually buy some consumer goods priced in dollars at western prices. They earn from $10,000 to $15,000 US. The rich can do whatever they want.
I work at the Renaissance Festival, but having lived in Bolivia has made it impossible for me to enjoy the beggar routines there. One actor at Fest saws away on a violin while nudging his can of coins along with his toe. I saw an old man sitting in rags on the street corner in Tarija "playing" a violin that he'd never learnt to play in the hopes of getting enough money to cover his necessities. Sometimes there was an old woman, probably his wife, beating on a drum, also with no recognizable rhythm.
In America, we throw a lot of things away, like that boombox that stopped playing CDs, because it's just a lot cheaper to buy a new one than getting the broken one fixed. In Bolivia, labor is paid next to nothing, so they fix the radio rather than adding it to the landfill.
Poor people in Bolivia will try to sell just about anything to earn some money. I've seen boys walking down the street with TV antennas in their hands and other people with other odds and ends. All of the cheap crap from Asia that didn't sell in America and Europe ends up in Bolivia, I think, spread out on a blanket on a street corner with some peasant trying to sell it.
Copyright means nothing in Bolivia. You need a copy of that book? No problem. We'll just photocopy it. You want to watch a movie? No problem, we have a pirated copy right over here. You want a legal copy of a DVD to bring back to the States? Not a chance. We don't sell those. No one could afford to buy one! When I asked for an original copy, the lady pointed me to a rack of pirated copies. When I pointed out that they too were copies, she insisted that the quality was good, complete with menus. When I told her that I was concerned about the legality and not the quality, she just gave me a blank stare.
Why can't I get cheap medication here? Walgreens lists a dose of Depo Provera at $63.99 (http://www.walgreens.com/library/finddrug/druginfo1.jsp?particularDrug=Depo-Provera&id=10813). In Bolivia, I got it for 12 bolivianos. That's $1.49. That's a difference of $62.50! WTF??? Most pills cost between 1 and 2.5 bolivianos each. A boliviano is just over 12 cents US. So, who gets that extra $62.50??? As a side note, you don't need prescriptions for anything in Bolivia, so if you already know the drugs that you want/need, all you have to do is go to the pharmacy to pick them up.
On the way back from a small village, I had to walk half an hour to the main road, because all the drivers in town were at a party and weren't available to drive to the next town. So, I walked to the main road and hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck for two bolivianos. We had to stop three times. Once to pick up a couple of peasants on their way into town, once for a group of burros and once for a herd llamas. From the town, I rode in a taxi with 7 other people back to Tarija. Fun, fun, fun. Such a taxi ride lasts about an hour and runs you 10 bolivianos. In town rides in a private cab cost about 3 bolivianos.
I was annoyed by the quality of service in restaurants in Bolivia. Basically, the quality was really, really good. It was too good for the pay the waiter was receiving. I had to stop and think about the fact that my waiter couldn't afford the meal that I was eating.
Toilets are interesting. A note to the wise: Always carry toilet paper and soap with you! After seeing bathrooms there, McDonalds starts to look clean. Remember; toss the TP in the trash and not the toilet. The plumbing just isn't robust enough to handle it!
Things are much different there. A person with a pension from North America or Europe could live like a king there. I've thought a lot about social injustice and people wanting to end poverty. I've come to the conclusion that it's not going to happen. Let me explain why. My friend, Teresa, is a middle class woman living with her husband and two kids in Tarija. She is a university professor, which means that she has a respectable, but not abundant salary. She is the poorest person in her family. She has a maid, who comes to cook, clean, and do laundry between 8:30 and 3:00 every day. The maid earns $50/month. This is possible because of the huge disparity between the classes. If the maid were to suddenly become middle class (and all the maids were to become middle class), that would mean that they would have to be earning middle class salaries. A middle class person is of course unable to pay a middle class salary, so without a poor class, the middle class would not be able to have a full-time maid. This is the case in America, for example. So, in order for the lower class's standard of living to improve, the higher classes' standard of living must inevitably decrease to an equilibrium point. Therefore, although politicians may talk of ending poverty, it can never happen without violent revolution, because the middle and upper classes are unwilling to give up their privileges. Just think, if the third world where to stop being third world, the USA could no longer be first world, because there would be no one to mass produce our consumer goods. We would all have to land in a second world position. Not bloody likely.