Clare, Alejandro, and I spent the day in Potosí--the world´s highest city in the world. Clare and I also casually took a 3 hour cab ride from Sucre to Potosí, and it cost the equivalent of $10 each. Bolivia is loco. Potosí used to be the richest city in the world due to its silver mines (although all the money was going back to Spain). The spaniards enslaved the indigenous people to work in the mines, however with 8000 deaths a year there weren´t enough workers, so they began to ship slaves from Ghana and the Congo to work in the mines as well--at it´s peak, there were 6000 african slaves working in the mines. Many, however, found it hard to adjust to the altitude at 4090 m, so many of the slaves got sent to work in the plantations near Coroico. This is why there was an Afrobolivian community there. Their story is really interesting and a documentary was made about their community called "Afrobolivianos Tocaña."
95% alcohol that we bought for the miners. They mix it with orange soda and drink it all day in the mines. Everytime they have a sip, they pour a little on the ground for Pachamama and a little on the ground for Tio--their devil protectorate.
Back to Potosí, although the majority of the silver has been depleted from Cerro Rico, cooperatives still exist today with the workers working in horrific conditions. We did a tour of the mines, and it is such an incredibly dangerous place to work. None of the workers wear masks, so the majority develop respiratory problems within 10 years of working there. There is also no record of who goes in or out of the mine. If a worker doesn´t come home for 2 nights, the family will inform the other miners and a search will commence, however, at that point it is usually just a search for a body. There are 50-60 deaths a year in these mines, and the life expectancy in Potosí is only 55 due to the number of men who work in the mines.
There was a 19 year old who had been working in the mines for 3 years already, and he had a baby. So many of the miners have a ton of children, and start their families extremely young--probably because of their shortened life expectancy. One of the men had 15 children with 5 different women. There life is so incomprehensible to us. At one point we descended 35 m down into the mine and there were absolutely no safety standards. We had to walk across a wooden board with no rail that dropped about 30 m on either side, in many places we had to crawl, and there were exposed electircal wires that would electrocute you if you touched them. And thousands of men work in here every day.
While extremely shocking and saddening, it was a good experience to see inside to try to understand the lives of these men. The guide, however--a former miner--was completely inappropriate and kept making sexual comments about all the girls, calling us sexy, and being really innappropriate to a 15 year old girl, asking if she was single and wanted to shack up with a 29 year old miner. At one point after making some jokes about women´s breasts, and after asking all the guys if they had girl friends and making jokes about their responses, he asked me if I had a boyfriend, to which I responded that I didn´t like his objectification of women. At first he said sorry, but then went on about how when you´re in a different place, you have to respect their culture, and compared it to eating Bolivian food in Bolivia as opposed to pizza. I was so pissed that he would have the audacity to compare respecting one´s culture and eating local food to accepting and participating in behaviour that demeans and lessons an entire gender. Although I am enjoying my travels, I fucking hate the machisimo attitude that permeates here, as though women are incapable of being independent, and are just objects for men´s desire. The men here also tend to revert to the maturity level of 10 year olds after acting macho in front of their friends. It doesn´t make any sense to me and I find it extremely annoying. I also don´t understand how some of the women here take the men´s behaviour as a compliment. There are many things here that I´m willing to embrace that are different from home, but this is just too much--I just want to smack them sometimes!
Just me casually holding some dynamite. nbd.
Other than the mines in Potosí we didn´t do much, we just spent the night (which was FREEZING!) and then after the mine tour we hopped on a bus to Uyuni.
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