A little taste of Chernobyl

Just a quick update from a slow internet cafe:

For the next two weeks, I´m a de facto member of the de Rojas family. Vita and Rene de Rojas are a retired couple in the Juan XXIII suburb of Cochabamba. Juan XXIII is a working class neighborhood, made up largely of recent retirees who were able to pull themselves into Bolivia´s tiny middle class.

Rene, like most of his neighbors, spent his career in the tin and silver mines - mines that were closed when the government sold off many state industries. Even though he is now relatively well off, there is still a bitterness about the privatization process that left tens of thousands of miners unemployed. The government oversold the benefits of privatization, which did little to improve the lives of ordinary people, and there is a deeply held suspicion here that the only beneficiaries were multinational investors.

There´s a bad taste about the privatization program in the United States as well - with few formal jobs available, many of the laid off workers moved to the fertile valleys of Bolivia´s Yungas and Chapare regions, where they started growing much of the coca that fueled a surge in cocaine production in the 80s and 90s.

But we don´t get into politics over the dining table, where I join Rene and Vita for three meals a day. Nearly every lunch and dinner features some kind of potato (Bolivians grow dozens of varieties) with rice and a piece of meat and vegetables. We watch the news shows and talk about when Rene is finally going to bring me some chiche, an alcoholic drink popular in this part of the country. He wants me to try a variety of the drink called Chernobyl, after the nuclear plant. He and Vita say that a couple glasses of this brew is all I´ll need to become fluent in Spanish. "We´ll be singing and dancing all night long," they promise. We´ll see...