Journey to the Andes: Rockin Paceña

Friday, February 17, 2006

Rockin Paceña

Hello all, it is I. I´ve really enjoyed not using a computer very much for the past little while, but my evening plans didn´t work out and I was passing by an internet cafe so I figured why the hell not. For the past week I´ve been shitting water bombs. No, really. Last Saturday I was out for a morning stroll to a part of town that I´ve never been to, and I popped in to a pretty typical Bolivian restaurant, which was full of people. It was totally untouristy, hence the price of 5 Bobs(the equivilant of about 75 cents) for soup, rice, salad, and chicken. It was alright, and I continued on my strole. I went to a local guitar shop and bought myself a pretty nice classical guitar for 550 Bobs ($80 more or less), and returned to my hostal. I was sitting on my bed strumming my new baby when I started to feel really cold and shivery....like when you get really sick..."Eff me..." I thought to myself. I crawled under the covers and started to shake...I got myself some food poisening!!! I almost knew it when I was eating the damn stuff too. I was literally thinking to myself "If I´m going to get food poisening anywhere, it´s going to be here. In fact, I won´t be surprised if I do." And boy, wasn´t I. Every two hours for the next day I straggled my way to the toilet to do my business....and it was super tough to sleep as well. What´s worse is that I didn´t have any one to take care of me, so I was by myself the whole time, thus sin comida (altavista translate that, friends) Fortunately, though, I did have a big bottle of water and juice to keep me company, but that was it. And, to rub salt in my wounds, that was the one night where Patty had goten special permission to stay out past 11:00 on a weekend to go out dancing with me. I was going to meet her at her house at 10:00, but instead I was gleefully cleaning out my bowels. Just thought I´d share. I´ve made a few friends here that I´ve been spending lots of time with. I have my buddy William from the UK, my spanish classmate Chris (though I´m done classes now) from Denmark, and a new friend from the States (though I don´t hold it against him) named Marc. Additionally I know a few people that are volunteering at the local orphanages (through Chris and his girlfriend) who are really great people. The other day Marc and I were having coffee and talking about South American politics. He´s living here, has an apartment and is teaching english, and he spends a lot of his time doing political work with the Bolivian unions. He was telling me about what´s going on in Bolivia right now, and it was very interesting. We had pretty much the same perspective on the situation, and I was compelled to ask him what his political alignment is. Turns out that he´s a Trotskyist, just like a lot of my socialist buddies back home, and a title that I´d call myself if my specific knowledge of the ideology wern´t so limited. So, since I want to raise a little awareness about what the 4-1-1 here in Bolivia is, I´m going to rock the current (and distant) events for you. Any further reading you want to do on any subjects mentioned just click on the links beside them. In december 2005 Bolivia had presidential elections. The winner was a former coca-farmer and Aymara citizen by the name of Evo Morales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales), head of the MAS party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_toward_Socialism_%28Bolivia%29) (Movemiento al Socialismo, in english "Movement Towards Socialism" if you couldn´t figure that out yourself). Evo got about 54% of the popular vote, which is by far the largest margin of victory any president has ever had in this country in half a century. Previous to his victory, Bolivia was rocked with a series of sometimes violent protests against the neoliberal and pro-USA economic policies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberal) that were being forced upon this country. Bolivia is the poorest country on this continent, yet it has the second largest reserves of petrolium and natural gas in all of South America, as well as a shit load of minerals. Because of the free-market neoliberal economic policies forced on this country by the International Monetary Fund (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMF) and the World Bank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Bank) (needless to say Washington as well) Bolivia has managed to get next to nothing for the huge amounts of materials that it exports every year. Foreign petrolium companies extract gas from Bolivia with paying hardly any taxes whatsoever to the Bolivian government, and thus hardly any money whatsoever going to Bolivia. What brought Evo to power was his campaigning against Washington and against the current form of economic globalization which has left Bolivia with nothing. The largest issue in this election was the issue of nationalizing the gas industry of Bolivia, similar to what Hugo Chavez (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Chavez) has done in Venezuela. Venezuela is also a very poor country (with most of the wealth concentrated in the hands of a few elite...like most places in the world, but especially in the global south) With the money generated by the nationalized gas industry, Chavez´s government has been MASSIVLY combating illiteracy, poverty, homelessness, and disease in his country with tremendous success (which says something about free-market economics, doesn´t it kids?) It also should be mentioned here that several years ago there was tremendous controversy in Bolivia over the privitization of the national water services. This was called the Water War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochabamba_protests_of_2000), when the Bolivian people fought back against the government (who had privitized the services, thus allowing the delivery of clean water to be a FOR-PROFIT business, which caused prices to skyrocket, leaving ordinary Bolivians without clean water) and re-publicised the water services, putting it back in the hands of the people. So its not just gas and oil, its all industries here that are at risk of being gobbled up by huge foreign multinationals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_corporation). South America right now is undergoing a tremendous swing to the left, politically that is. There are currently left wing leaders of state in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, and probably more that I´m not familiar with. There are elections schedueled for much of Latin America this year, and left wing leaders are set to win most of them. In Bolivia Evo is fresh off the press, and everyone is poised to see what he is going to do. By that I mean that he´s either going to go the way of Hugo Chavez, a radical left wing leader unafraid to say NO to Washington and go ahead with what his people really want, pursuing a very left wing adgenda like he said he was going to. Or, on the other hand, he might become a Lula (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luiz_In%C3%A1cio_Lula_da_Silva). Lula is the president of Brazil right now. The general populace of Brazil was THRILLED when Lula came into office, the leader of the socialist party of Brazil, but the IMF, World Bank, and Washington put tremendous pressure on Lula to become more "moderate", which he did, and consequently under his rule, despite his moderate efforts, less land has gone to the poor, more environment has been destroyed, and poverty has increased more than under the right-wing leader before him!!! There seems to be somwhat of a mentality in Evo´s government that they can´t be as radical as Chavez because they don´t want to piss off the united states, because if they do that, then they risk being alienated, having aid reduced, etc. But the fact is that just Evo´s PRESENCE is pissing off the United States. For example, Bolivian´s military is almost completely funded by the United States. Or, at least, it was. The US used to give 1.7 billion dollars annually to Bolivia in military aid, but congress in the states in currently putting through a bill that is reducing that figure to less that one million dollars. So, basicaly destroying it completely. AND EVO HASN´T EVEN DONE ANYTHING YET! Just the fact that Evo is not going to bow to Washington´s wishes entirely and is even somewhat of a threat to the current form of international capitalist globalization is enough to piss them off. So Evo, and any other South American leader for that matter, really has no reason NOT to pursue the adgenda that the people want and need. The people of Bolivia are desperate for change and most are hoping that Evo will follow the path that he really said he would. Most people are on the edge of their seats waiting to see what happens, but there are some who aren´t holding their breath. Whether he becomes a Lula or a Chavez, we´ll all see pretty soon.

In other news, on Monday I start volunteering at a house for street kids. My friend who volunteers there showed me around, introducing me to some of the kids and whatnot. I´m really excited for it...I played soccer with street kids the other night with a few of the people who volunteer at these houses, and it was pretty fun.

As of today I´ve also finished my spanish lessons! Am I fluent? Hell no. But I know a lot more than what I did before, and I´m making myself a spanish textbook and trying to learn 5 words a day (my vocabulary is my biggest problem)

Next weekend I´m also going down to Oruro for Carnival. The carnival in Rio is by far the biggest (and holey hell is it BIG) festival on the continent, but the carnival in Oruro, held at the same time, is number two. Which is strange, because I hear Oruro, unlike Rio de Janero, is a freaking hole. But the Patt-Meister and I are going to be going down for that.

I´ve also been reeeeally missing my music for the past few days. In this order:

1. Dream Theater
2. Liquid Tension Experiment
3. Meshuggah
4. Zero 7
5. Strapping Young Lad

I reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally miss Dream Theater. Soooo much....I bought their Live at Budokon DVD on the street the other day, but I don´t have a freaking DVD player to play it on. Reid, please listen to some DT for me. And LTE. I miss my babies. I miss cooking too, I want to fry up some bananas with cayane pepper and some coconut milk and cinnimon and pork...mmm...

So, I´m still a little sick, and I have to go back to my hostel to take a dump. Have a wonderful evening, I will talk to you all later!

posted by Ben @ 4:12 PM

6 Comments:

At 6:15 PM, Anonymous said…

I'll take up the SYL slack for you, and I've also been hitting up some dream theatre lately.

I'm glad you didn't die from food poisoning, and I am thinking of you with lots of safe exciting happy wishes.

- Conor
At 9:05 PM, Anonymous said…

Senor Trotsky: Thanks for the recent note and political science update. I was glad to hear that you survived your recent bout of food poisoning-as you can't spare to lose much weight. It is great that you have been able to hook up with some like minded compatriots. I hope you enjoy your trip to the carnival-have fun and stay safe. I find that I miss having you around-the blog is helpful but a poor alternative to having you close by. We have been so busy with the near opening(march 21st or thereabouts. Starting salaries in our sweatshop will be minimum wage at least until we can see that it will be profitable-I know you are probably ashamed of your capitalist parents. Still picking away at guitar-slow process -really struggling with f major. Take care of yourself son. Love Dad
At 1:58 PM, Anonymous said…

Hey Ben,
Just wanted to say that I'm missing you and your wonderful peanut butter chicken stuff, damn that was good. Dorian asked me the other day what brought it into your mind that you should go to Bolivia for six months. He thought you were there with a church group, definately not. Then he wondered if it was your dad and I said I didn't think so. And now I'm wondering exactly what it was. Just a combination of a bunch of things that you like, that's what I'm thinking.
Anyways, everyone here says "pound, brother". I hope you get better quick-like, and I wish I was down there too, dammit!
Love Ellie
At 9:09 PM, Andrés Paz said…

Well, that must have been an interesting experience, good to know your still alive, and that there are no really last effects.

Great to hear your finally getting on with your mission of helping people.

I'll pick up Zero 7 and LTE for you, I promise you that

Have fun bombing around at Carnaval!
At 2:42 PM, Ben said…

Don´t you think that like-minded "comrades" would be a better term :) ?

Sweet jesus Dad, you´re already using words like "profitable"!?!? I´m so dissapointed. And paying an employee minimum wage goes against Marx´s theory of surplus labour and value...*shakes head in dissapointment* What´s gotten into you...???

And yeah, F major (and all barre chords, mind you) are a bitch for beginners. Best of luck with that, I know you´ll get it!

Eleanore, I miss my peanut butter chicken too. The food down here is the shits. (most of) it isn´t terrible, but ever since I left the western world I havn´t eaten anything that has made me go "Wow! I want more!" and I swear to god the first thing I´m going to do when I get back to Canada is go out for sushi. And after that I´m going to go to Theo´s and have a rosemary chicken (no rice extra potatoe) and an order of domates *drools all over keyboard* i miss eating free greek food every night...

So yeah, I definetly didn´t go because of a church group, hahaha. I havn´t been to church since grade 7...and it *certainly* was *not* my parents who wanted me to go, haha. Tell Dorian that I wanted to see another part of the world and another culture (next time i´ll choose a culture with better food...), and south america just seemed like an appropriet place to start, with my knowing *some* spanish, and the current tide of left wing political leaders here kind of cemented the idea (CHAVEZ ROX MY SOX!!!)

I´m still getting over the food poisoning...I have to go for my second shit today (at least I´m down from 4) buenas noches!
At 2:09 PM, Sarah said…

hey ben
i really enjoy reading your blog and hearing about your travels!hope you don't get anymore food poisoining...it's a killer ...i get it everyday at our cafeteria! anyways just saying hi!
sarah julien