Note to Bolivia

Hello Bolivia. After all that planning I’m here.  The excitement of being where I said I would be is almost unsettling.  I wonder what this land with cities in the clouds will hold.  What am I doing here?  What should I be doing here? For who? For what? Why?  Slowly. I need to just take it all in first.  The rest will come later. As with altitude – it’s always good to ascend slowly.

A year is a long time; I better not waste it.  What would waste be though, really? No matter what happens, it would be hard to ever see this year as a waste.  I won’t.

We celebrate being Bolivia with a bottle of Bolivian wine and beer in the central plaza of Tarija.  The beer tastes as sweet as cola.  The wine is a little worse than Corbans White Label for $9.99 on sale at Foodtown.  I’m not complaining, I don’t mind Corbans when it’s on sale.  The altitude gets me tipsy, faster than usual at least.  Cheers. We made it. Hello Bolivia.

A couple of street kids come up and ask for money.  Hello Bolivia, I remember Kenya.  The paradox of our celebration and their lives is not so sweet.  Those feelings everyone gets when in a developing country come rushing in. The inequality, the privilege, how lucky we really are, and the stories you tell yourself to make it okay. It’s never okay. That’s not to say I’m not able to feel okay.  Carrying a Macpac of guilt won’t help anyone.  It’s the story that matters, always the story.  I just need to work on my own story.  That’s what I’ll do with my year, work out the story I want to tell myself.  Figure out how I’ll make it okay.

Time I get started in this land of a lot of white cloud.  Hello Bolivia.