The Underworld

It´s been a busy week or so. I just got back from Potosí and Sucre and am trying to catch up with the real world. I have not faired so well.

Potosí is an old mining town and the highest city in the world (around 14,000 ft) and probably the reason why Bolivia became a country. When the Spanish colonized, they began mining silver out of Cerro Rico, which watches over Potosí. They forced many African slaves and indigenous people to work mining the silver and tin and 8 million miners died because of poor working conditions. Most of the other cities in Bolivia were settled to support this industry.The colonial influence is obvious by the architecture and by that it is an incredibly poor city now, because most of the wealth has been stripped from the mines, but none of the weath was ever invested in the city but pocketed by Spanish elite. Since then, Potosí still relies on the mines, even though they have been exploited to almost nothing. We got to go into Cerro Rico through mining tour company (a strange concept in itself). It is a different world and hard to undertand. The miners are very supersticous and rightfully so. They ask protection from a legend figure called Tio, who is frightening but atleast something to trust in. It was dark and sludgy and hearing dynamite blasts through the walls was haunting. We would run into miners on the tracks and gave them pop, cigarettes, coca, or alcohol as a sort of gift for getting in the way of their work.

Most of the workers now are in their late teens and 20s and most miners do not live past 40 because the breath in so much junk. Many of the young miners are trying to get through school but many never do and thus never escape the mines because they have to stop school to work, in order to eat. Even though the mines are hopeless, their is a definite pride to being a miner, maybe because they are aware they are killing themselves to support their families.

We also visited an afterschool sort of program for miners kids. It was wonderful, we played a rendition of duck duck goose for a really long time and red light green light. During a snack I talked to about five 7 year olds about the mines. They were all eager to work in the mines because all their brothers and all their fathers did, and they all said with equal enthusiasm that they were afraid of el Tio.

In other Potosí news, we went Karoke-ing with an Andean folk band and went to Casa de Monedas, one of the main minting factorites for the Spanish empire. We also took one morning and went to a natural hot spring. It was a wonderful temperate lagoon that I think I could have lived in. We swam around and also covered our selves completely with mud.