Back from Bolivia

After giving a workshop about turning tourism to money and Corporate Social Responsibility, we went to a 'peña' at some restaurant where three old men from Samaipata were playing guitar and accordeon singing traditional (or so I suppose) songs. It was a great atmosphere, so we enjoyed our beers and reflected on the things we had seen while we visited our (potential) projects. After that, we went to a local karaoke bar - which seems very popular there - and sang/danced the night away. We had to get up reasonably early the next day because me and two girls were going to walk around through the national reserve Amboró for about 6 hours. Munching away on some coca we didn't feel like we had been taking a lot of alcohol and just a little sleep though. We followed some small, almost invisible footpath for most of the day, and our guide told us he had made it some 6 months ago, so we were among the first to walk there!
After exploring the woods, we had to get into some taxi's again to go back to Santa Cruz. Once we got there, we played some basketball in the Parque Urbano next to our hostal and after that, some bad bacteria got to me and made me dead-sick that night. I couldn't remember feeling that bad since a long time, but the next day I could finally get some sleep and little by little I felt better again.
So luckily I could join the rest of the group on the 21st when they went to a university of CadeCruz where they were going to give another workshop about CSR, this time to the happy few who enjoyed an academic education. All spanish-speaking SIFE members (including me) had to lead a group of students while they were working on a test-case to make that as socially-responsible as possible. Our group worked on a supposed Levi's factory in Bolivia, and they came up with all kinds of measures, ranging from on-site water purification and re-use of disposed fabric to flexible working hours and procurement of ecologic cotton. I hope they will apply CSR in their future carreers.
The next day was already our last one in Bolivia, and we spent it visiting another potential project in the sub-urb La Guardia. There, a group of Iranian tapestry-producers (we didn't come up with this) is teaching women in the neighbourhood how they can produce their own high-quality tapistry. We could witness a gathering where about 80 of these women turned up who appeared to be the heads of local associations, so they would pass the message on to about 1000 other women. Quite some multiplyer! After this gathering, we enjoyed lunch at the site where the tapistry was to be produced. Right now, they were still erecting the building were it was going to take place, but they had already made a lot of progress in a few months.
That night most of us went to bed early, because at 05.00 in the morning we took a plane to Sao Paolo (after we had opened our bags to let the Bolivia anti-drug force take a sniff) and after taking a look at that city for about 5 hours we continued our trip to Amsterdam. It was very strange to see all the neatly arranged plots of land and well-maintained buildings again, connected by trains and proper roads. The Netherlands is really conveniened to live in, but I hope I will remember the dirt-roads, the poorly-built houses, the run-down taxi-cars, the coca-chewing construction workers, the spicy smell of the jungle, the contaminated tap-water, the movement for autonomy, the big landowners and the small shopkeepers. The Netherlands have a lot Bolivia doesn't have (money being the most important thing) but Bolivia has a lot that I've never seen in the Netherlands.