The Daily Minutiae

I have a good friend from Bolivia.  Starting next week in fact, I was going to look for a job to fund a trip "down there" for spring break.  What I didn't know was that Bolivia is, according to Al Jazeera English, South America's poorest country.  So much for that.

What I did know was the kind of situation that was rumbling in Bolivia.  My friend I met my junior year in high school, when he stayed for a year as an exchange student.  It wasn't until after Dan went home that I learned his father held a government position (maybe the only way they financed the trip) and that every once in a while rioters, would drop little presents on their porch: maybe a decapitated dog one day, graffiti the next.

That was the lure of it.  That's a place where It's happening.  News.  There were no reports that anybody was killed or really many were injured in the rioting, until very recently so I could write it off as a safe spring break.

Now, maybe not so much.  In the past week or so, almost a dozen people have been killed -including seven farmers earlier today- in clashes with the government headed by Evo Morales, a leftist sympathizer of Venezuela.  This goes without mentioning the dozen or so injured.

Hard to believe that two days ago I was figuring out how to fly into Bolivia's main capital, La Paz (Spanish: "Peace").

I was fortunate enough to get a question in at yesterday's double lecture.  "How can live coverage be improved?" was the gist of it.  And the the gist of Dr. Kalyango's response was "preparation, preparation, preparation."

Reading up and knowing all the backstory to South America, I feel like I've starting doing just that.