Sunday, 8 October 2006
Daniel Salamanca, a good friend of Melissa´s, invited Melissa and her friends over to his house. So Sandrine and Justin (friends from NYC www.triplebridgeltd.com/TDM.html), Andrew and I, Melissa and Gallo (friend from Cochabamba) all went to Daniel and his step-father Peter´s fabulous house. We hung out pool-side, and had a great bar-b-que. From what I understand, Daniel´s (great?) grandfather was one of the (hundreds of) past presidents; he was president in the 1830´s. The family owned much of Cochabamba´s land, but it was taken away and given to the people during one of the social movements many, many years ago. The family was allowed to keep a small parcel of land which they now farm. Peter was fascinating; he went to NY as a young man to study dentistry; he then practiced in South Dakota and Houston TX for many years before returning to Bolivia to "retire". Interestingly, he began investing in a silver mine in LaPaz, and invested enough to now run the mine: a dentist who now runs a small mill in the city of LaPaz. Since Bolivians minors are fighting between themselves (private versus publicly run mines) and almost 20 miners killed each other a few days ago in a dispute, it was fascinating to talk with him about his and other mines in Bolivia. In addition, we are planning to do some travelling with Sandrine and Justin; this was the perfect opportunity to plan some of our travels. In fact, Andrew is currently traveling with them to Toro Toro (maybe their trip wil look something like this? http://www.boliviacontact.com/turismo/en_tour/Torotoro-45.html) while I am taking my Spanish classes and practicing on my own - ack!
2 comments:
I'm curious, too, about how the people you're interacting with perceive Evo Morales?
Interestingly, although we talked extensively about Peter´s mine, I never got a true feeling for his emotions about Evo. I do know that he did not look favorably on publicly owned mines, he felt the miners were better paid and treated with privately run mines; in addition, he said the mines were more profitable when privately owned. Evo has only been in power for about a half year. Our observations are that the people of Bolivia are impatient and this impatience is getting Evo into trouble because he cannot do anything fast enough. Our host family is worried about his policies because they are considered at the upper tier of the middle class. There are many rumors flying around, one of which is that if a home-owner owns more than one piece of property or has another small house/building on their property, the owner will have to give that away to the indigenous poor people without compensation. The ex-pats say that these rumors are just rumors, but I am not sure what to think. Bolivia has a history of impatience with their presidents and corruption. Evo is the first president of indegenous background, therefore he is carrying a heavy load. I think time will tell... Meanwhile, we will post more opinions as we learn them...
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