From Rurrenabaque with love

“You would have to be half mad to dream me up.”

It is the morning of our last full day in Rurre, tomorrow we’re taking a flight back to La Paz again. Our stay is much overdue but I’m not at all ready to leave. Met so many amazing friends, saw so many beautiful things, dreamt so much, got drunk, danced, cried, laughed.

I will write a separate entry for the two excursions we did, one was to the pampas as I already mentioned and the other one was to the jungle. Mesmerising.

In Rurre, we have as I’ve written earlier spent a lot of time writing on our thesis. So much that all out friends and acquaintances are commenting on it – but you are working so hard! You cannot work all the time! We have spent much time at the hostel, but also at a restaurant called Casa del Campo, where the owner has become like a second mum to us. Delicious food, but slow cooking!

We have of course also spent time with Miguel, the couchsurfer, almost everyday (Rurre is so small you are bound to run into each other at least once per day). We were also excited guests at his sister’s birthday party, when she turned eleven last week! A lovely experience, and interesting to see the differences from a Swedish celebration. First of all, all guests arrived (as expected) two hours late… and the TV was on all the time, since there are no games, just dance. And the dance is performed to the latest hits, which are in Latin America quite often performed by a man surrounded by women in bikini. Interesting, as in Bolivia the women will wear clothes even to go swimming, and we are often stared at for wearing a swim suit. On the contrary, any mother will breastfeed her child in public at any time! Confusing…

The last two days we have spent with Elin and Pontus! Pontus is a friend of mine from Sweden that I see maybe once every year together with his cousin Marcus, who is one of my closer friends. And now they are on the road, apssing by Rurre! We’ve had a really good time here although the weather turned from 30 degrees and sticky sweat to icy rain… We’ve been eating out a lot, and laughing a lot as we share the same cultural sense of humour. And Elin and Pontus are really funny – they are a perfect match! We wish you all the best for the rest of your trip, and we hope to get invited to your wedding so we can give you a chocolate fondue machine!

More friends who had a big impact on us were Sami, a French guy living with energetic Edwin. Both had such a lovely energy, cannot help but smile when around them! And our jungle guide, Leoncito, a really special person. As well as Cheo, the young artisan that is so passionate about life and nature.

This is such a special place. I think the strongest reason for that is the intense presence of the wild nature – the Pachamama, as mother earth is called in Latin America. You have to be senseless not to feel anything here, which is why I’m secretly planning my return to get a longer stay in the jungle. Maybe next year…

Thesis writing is serious business!

“Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!” 

So, we decided to stay in Rurrenabaque (RBQ) and write the main body of our thesis here. Yesterday we could finally start writing, and it feels fantastic. Our first time here was dedicated to other things – we did an amazing trip to Las Pampas for three days, and two days of field trips for a contract job that Tess is doing for the environmental consultancy U&We. These were fabulous experiences and it was relieving to stop thinking about the thesis for a while – even the best of brains need a rest at some point.

So this week, we have started to revise the interviews. It is a hard job indeed, reading the transcriptions in Spanish, I select the important parts and then I translate them for Tess. The texts are hard to deal with since spoken vs written language is so different, and they can be very confusing… a funny thing is that in Spanish, ‘no’ can sometimes mean ‘yes’, it depends on the intonation, which we of course cannot see in the transcriptions! Cochabamba feels like such a long time ago, and even though we mentally started processing the material already when we did the interviews, there are many things we don’t remember. Especially for Tess, who never fully understood the material when we did the interviews.

When we did our data collection, I got to practice my skills as an interviewer since Tess does not manage the Spanish that well yet. This learning process has become very obvious to me now, as I see the varying quality of the interviews. And although my Spanish is good, it is still my third language and therefore I can be thrown of my feet if the informant is using a confusing rhetoric. And I swear, Spanish-speakers can be so confusing!

Now, we try to write as much as we possibly can. I miss our kitchen table in our old apartment in Malmö very much – RBQ is great in many ways, but writing here is difficult. It is very warm, which makes our mid-day writing sessions very sweaty. We still don’t have a proper table where we live, which makes writing not ergonomic at all, and this is a noisy place (although the hotel we are at now is pretty good in that sense). Still, I would not want to be anywhere else.

To go for a swim in the river whenever we get too hot, walk barefoot, some of the new friends we met here, the hills, the pace of this place… I was lying in the garden a while ago, looking at the sky and the bush with orange/pink flowers next to me. The colours are so vivid! That is something I really miss in Sweden – everything is a bit …duller. It of course has its own charm, but this lively colours, especially the green of the plants in contrast to the sky, it fills me with energy.

Las Pampas ... will tell more about that another time!

L'chaim

A very, very sensitive topic indeed. I don't know yet if I will publish this entry, well, time will tell.

Israeli travelers are abundant in South America. From what I have been told, everyone has to do military service - men do three years, women get away with only two. Thereafter, the "trend" is to work an let's call them unqualified jobs, as a waiter, and then go travelling the world.

Israeli travelers are not popular in South America. They are infamous for traveling in large groups, often 5-8 people, only speaking Hebrew, being very loud, doing lots of drugs, bargaining on everything and always going for the cheapest option. Were I lived in Colombia, there were two Israeli hostels which led me to the conclusion that they really like rave music, at all times of the day, and that their parties are rather exclusive. They are not known for their great social skills. Various hostels and guides simply refuse to deal with Israelis. However, everyone who has met a single Israeli (myself included) always has to add that it seems to be the group behaviour which is so irritating, not the individual.

Arriving in Rurre, we realised that this is an Israeli hotspot. We were told that it is so because an Israeli was kidnapped here a long time ago, wrote a book about it and therefore all Israeli want to go here now (I consider that logic dubious, but I guess also logic can be relative and cultural). And honesly, we got quite fed up with the masses. Waking up to an overdosing Israeli vomiting violently outside our hut in the wetlands was not fun. Worse was to have a group of ten sitting outside our door at the hostel, smoking weed, listening to horrible music and shouting in hebrew. We ended up having to go to another hostel to get some peace.

And why? Why are they so loud? Why do they almost always travel in large groups? Why are they not behaving like normal people?

Tess and I guessed that the loudness comes from the military training. Running around in large groups preparing yourself for war, I can see how shouting becomes a normal way of communicating. Well, it's a theory.

Then two days ago as we were walking home from the river, we stop outside a restaurant where I'm looking for a friend. Then three guys shout at us - come and have coffee with us! - why not, we thought and joined them. I got a beer instead of a coffee and then we were soon engaged in conversations with these Israeli kids. I can't remember everything we talked of, but I remember the strange feeling of enjoying the company, yet feeling very distant from the guys. And of course, we touched the topic of politics. Ouch. But it taught me something very important. One of these young men, when he started talking about how Arabs attack Israel, there was such a brutal frustration and anger within him, and I thought to myself - this is what keeps wars going, this deep hatred. Then I understood something even more important.

I will never understand this man.

I will never understand why he is feeling such hatred. I will never understand what it feels like to come from a country that has been disrupted by conflicts for thousands of years, under constant attack and criticized by every other country. I cannot possibly imagine what is like to belong to a group that has been persecuted for generations, dispersed over the continent. There is no way I can grasp the horrors of the holocaust and what effects it had, the aftermath that has shaped and divided the world. It is not even in my collective memory, because swedes don't know what war is. We haven't had a war of our own in almost 200 years.

I will never understand where this man comes from. So who am I to judge him? The only thing I feel I can do right now is thank him, for opening my eyes, and try to be somewhat more humble to other's reality.

Arriving in Rurre

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Oh, Bolivia.

A week ago we left La Paz in a little propeller plane, which was by far the most beautiful flight of my life (and I’ve done quite a few…). Since the plane was so small, we flew between the snow-covered mountains and then down towards the lowlands, the green hills, the rivers.

When we arrived at the airport of Rurrenabaque, which was basically just a house next to a field, we were greeted with the phrase “wellcom to paradais!” (imagine a Spanish intonation here), and he was so right. This is so incredibly beautiful, it’s like living and breathing a documentary from national geographic. The landscapes I barely dared to dream of are now surrounding me.

So we got into town and called our couchsurfer. In this remote (yet touristic) village, there is only one couchsurfer, who of course gets heaps of requests. However, after 3 years in the CS community and this being my 40th time surfing, I have some practice in writing requests by now and know how to make people understand that I'm genuinely interested in meeting them and not just want to stay for free at someone's house. Miguel, or Lechu as he is nicknamed, picked us up and then drove us to his grandparents place, where he picked a coconut from the garden and served me. In the afternoon Tess was feeling a bit ill, so Lechu and I did a little excursion to a remote beach to go swimming in the river. Lechu and I get along so well, he is fun to hang out with and we have a special kind of humor largely based on teasing each other. He is not at all the typical Bolivian, since he lived in Venezuela for five years and has travelled a lot. At some point, I think travellers merge into a people who have more in common with each other that their countrymen – we are in a certain way a different species, with our own variety of course. And yet, after a while, you can pick out distinct types of travellers so easily... will return to this topic later!

Couchsurfers and a shared piece of beach art!

CBBA - LA PAZ - RURRENABAQUE

“Alice came to a fork in the road. 'Which road do I take?' she asked.'Where do you want to go?' responded the Cheshire Cat.

At the airport in El Alto, just outside La Paz, having breakfast and checking emails. We left CBBA yesterday morning, to take a bus to La Paz. It was a great example of "hora Boliviana", Bolivian time conception, as we arrived at the bus station at 8:40 and managed to catch a bus leaving at 8. After a sweaty 8 hour ride without air-conditioner in the blazing sun, we reached La Paz. 

"Malmö, go fuck yourself" my travel partner said as we woke up this morning. Malmö with its maximum altitude of what, 4 metres?, has nothing on La Paz with its 3650 metres and stunning views. It is not flat anywhere, and the landscape somehow reminds me of the moon. When we arrived we met up with my friend, the crazy painter Gabriel, who took us to his little flat in Alto Obrajes where we stayed the night. And now, we already left again - we are heading to the jungle!! 

Sadly, I have a headache from the altitude here, but that just makes us even more eager to head down to the Yungas. I wanted to go there the first time I was in Bolivia, over two years ago, but it was rain season and thus flooded. So now, finally I will get there! I want to couchsurf, breathe fresh air and see animals...

Bring me cuteness!

Ten cuidado siempre...

“No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.” 

After a total of eleven months in Latin America and daily warnings of the thieves here, it finally happened to me. I got robbed!

I was walking down a kind of messy/crowded street with my backpack on, and as I was reaching the end of the street, I automatically reached back to check that the little pocket on it was closed. It wasn't, and my phone and wallet was gone from it. Fuck fuck fuck, I thought, pulled of  my backpack and started looking through it, but nothing else was gone.

Honestly, that was not so bad. I lost an old cellphone (thank you Ewa for giving it to me, I'm sorry I can't return it), about 50-100 SEK, a USB stick and my master card. A bit annoying to loose the card, but my mum <3 helped me to block it immediately so no damage done! Interestingly, I was carrying a macbook, our passports, my camera and 700 SEK as well, and left in the opened outer pocket was our dictaphone, a cable to it and my swiss knife.

So I guess sometimes you are lucky. I didn't get a gun pointed to my head, I didn't even notice it. It means as much to me as if the things had fallen out of my back, because I know it was my fault. I know it is way too easy to open that pocket and take whatever is in there, but I guess I had to learn to not do it by failing. I want to emphasize that Bolivia, or the other South American countries I have been to, are not more dangerous than other places. I am sure there are an equal amount of robberies, rapes and murders in NYC or Barcelona or Paris, but there is more poverty here. Poverty which drives people to the edge of human dignity, when you have nothing more to loose. People here are far, so far from "evil". They are just incredibly poor.

And why are they poor? Because of a world system that makes people in the western world rich on the expense of people in Latin America, Africa and Asia. That is why there are entire populations in poverty, and some of those, out of despair, end up pickpocketing. So who am I to blame them?

My life in songs

“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” 

I think about how absorbed I am by my unconditional love for this continent and the life I have lived here.  Hence, if I were to describe myself with two songs, I would pick these:

The lyrics, the images. I feel them, I feel the Andes being my backbone and my veins as the rivers of the Amazon. A fairly good translation can be found HERE

And then Shakira, Gypsy. But the Spanish lyrics are of course better.
About being free, in constant motion and learning from experiences.

Don't try to tie me down, nor dominate me. I'm the one to decide how to commit mistakes (...)

Take me and let's go, life is a pleasure. It's normal to fear what you don't know 
- I want to see you fly.

How to write an essay in CBBA

“It was much pleasanter at home," thought poor Alice, "when one wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down the rabbit-hole...and yet...and yet...” 

It's pretty hard to get efficient here. Things take so much more time than you expect them to! It would be easy to complain about this, but hey, this is what makes you realise how privileged we are back home. 

We were promised an office space with wifi, which we thought would be a great place to write. Well, it wasn't. Wifi does not work, people are running in and out, the street outside is heavily trafficked, and the table is way too high for the chairs. Then our room has only one electric outlet, and if we sit for too long on our bed, our bums starts to hurt because it is so hard. We do have one chair, but no table. This is not meant to whine, just describe our reality and the reasons why writing a thesis in Sweden is much more convenient. So what do we do? Well, we have found some places that have wifi. This is a Mexican restaurant: 

And this is Tess, as a great coffee place where we hang out with the other foreigners who like western style places:

Back at our place, I built a table in the courtyard to be able to sit outside to write and read. But I'm afraid it will fall over if I make it any higher, so when I write, I have to bend over until literally have my chest against my thighs. But then I also like having my face pretty close to the notebook when I write.

On the other hand... we have around 25 degrees all the time, which is the perfect temperature even for my picky body. We are surrounded by the most helpful people I could ever imagine (more on that another day). I get to speak my favourite language all the day. We learn new things all the time. Being here is such a great process of self-development  getting to know different sides of myself, getting a lot of new ideas and having to deal with myself. We are honestly not that distracted by our surroundings, since we don't have that many friends here, boyfriend is far, not much going on in this city anyway... We are living our essay and I honestly do believe we will finish it on time, even if many other students who get this scholarship do the writing after they get home. And we are so rich here that we can afford paying someone else to transcribe our interviews, which saves incredible amounts of time and work!

In total, doing a field study is inconvenient, but it rocks. Actually, my life in general is generally not that convenient, but it rocks.

Mornings in CBBA

"I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different."

If anyone ever wondered what Bolivian Folklore sounds like, this is it:

And this is VERY popular, especially at the primary school next to our home. So we are usually woken up to the sounds of the roosters out neighbour keep in our garden, then we are reminded of the traffic of the big road outside our patio, and then when school starts, this song is often played. NOISE.

But the mornings are nice.We wake up early, usually around seven, since the sun shines in. Sometimes I write my diary, or read the novel I'm currently captured by (The Wind Up Bird Chronicle). Then Tess wakes up, and we look out the windows to observe the mountains which look slightly different every day, depending on the light and clouds. We crawl out of our sleeping bags (Thank you dad and Ewa for that Christmas present!) and go down to have breakfast - a huge bowl of fruit from the market around the block.

And by the way, there is this song, who was once stolen from another Bolivian band (Los Kjarkas) and made world famous. This is the original....

Hard work hopefully pays off...

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” 

We are two hard working women indeed!

Last week were as I’ve already written ups and downs, but when we reached the weekend, we had managed to conduct seven interviews in five days. And remember, we cannot just walk up to any random dude on the street – these are all representatives of an organisation or institution, which requires a bit more formality.

Our plan has been to do the last interviews this week, adding up to 12-15 in total. As the transcription is a VERY time-consuming process (I listen, translate to English and then Tess types it) we are gonna try to hire some linguistic students at the local university to help us with that. It shouldn’t be too expensive considering how much time we would actually save. Next week we intend to finish the work in CBBA, to be able to leave next weekend.

We are getting a bit tired of this city… the climate is lovely indeed, but it is very polluted (one of the most contaminated cities in South America according to a professor we interviewed) and noisy. The mountain range is beautiful, but too far away! So, from here we are heading to Rurrenabaque, which is in the Amazonas region where Tess is gonna do a consultant job for U&We and then we are hoping to do some Eco-tourism in Parque Madidi! 

Plaza during demonstrations

View from our rooftop room

Downs and Ups

“How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.” 

I am obviously in the rollercoaster of the thesis – yesterday I felt like a complete idiot! Who do I think I am, coming from fancy Sweden and assuming that in two months I will have a better understanding than the locals about the extremely complex situation of the water management in Cochabamba?

Days like those I am incredibly happy to be with my partner in crime Tess – what would I do without her?! When I’m sobbing, she comforts me and rationally explains why we are not idiots, that our research purpose has a different approach which although it will not change the world, will result in a presentable thesis. Then she tells me I can have an ice cream, and everything feels manageable again.

We decided to broaden our perspective a little and include more stakeholders, and today we have conducted another two interviews. It is a little bit tricky since we cannot just go out in the street and ask anyone, but need representatives from selected stakeholders. But so far we have done five interviews, and we have possibly five more this week. All in all we might possibly end up with 15 interviews, which would be a huge amount of data. But then we are free to choose what will be interesting to us, which is way better than struggling with too little information.

On the personal level, we are still in awe of this country. We see so many beautiful things every day, and the people are incredibly nice and helpful wherever we go. This past Sunday was Día del Peatón, pedestrian day, which meant no motorised vehicles from 9am to 5pm. As I was doing a participatory observation from 8.30am to 10.30, I had to walk 45 min to get back home. What an experience! It felt like two weeks after the apocalypse, or post-oil-peak. So calm and quiet, and the air is less contaminated. I was walking in the biggest roads and saw entire families biking everywhere and people selling juice and ice cream in the middle of the streets. I was filled with joy and prosperity when I got back home. This happens three days per year here in CBBA, and it is surely an eye-opening experience…

Five desks later...

"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice."You must be," said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.” 

It seems like one day in CBBA is a compromised week. So much happens all the time! During the weekend we became culturally overwhelmed, with an excursion in the city that brought us to la cancha, which according to the rumour is the largest market in South America. From there we visited the last lagoon of Cochabamba – Cocha means lagoon and bamba means flat or flat land in quechua, the indigenous language spoken here. In the night we were taken to a chicha brewery called Chernobyl for a peña, a traditional folklore party. Chicha is a fermented corn drink, which not has that much alcohol but still managed to get my stomach out of order and kept me still for all of Sunday. The Bolivian experience.

This week our thesis has taken some big steps ahead – we have managed to book one interview and two meetings/interviews via email. We went to the local authority with a letter presenting us and asking for an interview, but ended up getting passed around from desk to desk and at table number five, we got an interview straight ahead which was complemented by another chat at the next desk. Feels really great to have started the data collection! The transcription however takes forever, since some subjects speak really fast and we have to translate from Spanish to Swedish or preferably English. So much hard work for a Bachelor thesis! But at the same time, after this job, everything else will feel super easy…

We also met up with Mathilda, another MFS grantee doing her study here in CBBA and we had a really nice time discussing our perspectives on Bolivia. She is writing about racism towards the indigenous population, such an important topic!

This continent is wonderland. There is so much magic here, that I somehow forget about when I’m in Europe. I forget the power that lies in truly believing, and I forget how to really listen to what is around – not only sounds, but also to wishes, desires, connections, heartbeats. Life is worth more here.

Even the stars are different here

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 

 

 Waking up on our second morning in Cochabamba, and Sweden feels a lifetime away. After arriving to La Paz and realising that all flights to Cochabamba were full (maybe because of semana santa/Easter celebrations), we took a 9 hr bus ride to our final destination. After 60 hrs of travelling, we reached La Tinkuna, the house belonging to our partner organisation. At first, I was kind of a culture shock for us to think that we would live here. We had to climb up concrete steps and along a roof to get to our room, with solid beds and no pillows. The toilet facilities were… let’s say basic. But, we were completely knocked out and fell asleep within an hour.

After a good nights sleep however, this seems like the best place one could imagine for writing our kind of thesis. We have a view of the cordillera, mountains, outside our window. We have our own room, with light, we have a basic kitchen, functioning toilets and a shower (although none of us have tried it yet). After breakfast at the local market, we had our first meeting with the Red Tinku Team.

Ramiro, our supervisor, started by asking us what we wanted to investigate. Then, he and the others started explaining what the situation is like today in Cochabamba regarding the water management. The municipal authority SEMAPA basically covers the north side, which is the rich part of town, and somewhat stretches towards the south, but nowhere near sufficiently. Therefore, neighbours in the south have gathered in small cooperatives and themselves financed wells, which they built together and pay for monthly. But the quality of the water is very poor, and therefore Darwin told us that in his community, they used water from SEMAPA to drink and cook, but as it was not enough water, they used salty water from a well to wash themselves, was clothes et cetera. So it seems like the further south, the less SEMAPA water. Where we live now, which is neither really south nor north, water is available three days a week for a couple of hours in the morning, which is when the tanks and tins are filled up. Then, what one can do is to try to use as little as possible and hope that it will last. Now there are ten people staying here, and I doubt that all of us could have a shower every day…

According to our informants, since the water war* in 2000, people have lost engagement and participation is dropping low in the cooperatives. Oscar Olivera used to be the profile of the resisting forces during the water war, but no one knows what he is up to now. La Coordinadora de defensa del agua y la vida* has dissolved, and there is no coordination of the initiatives to get water, no overall authority. There is a dam construction ongoing, but Ramiro seemed not to believe that it would be enough water for all. Much of the problem seemed to stem from rapid urbanisation, where the city and especially the south expanded faster than the municipal network could handle. The situation is not recent however, the SEMAPA network have been complemented by these local solutions for decades. When we asked about governmental involvement, they told us about MiAgua, which seems to be a less complicated way of getting water. We need to look more into that!

So much information, our heads felt like water melons! But wow, there is so much interesting things to look into, and Ramiro is a great supervisor who has many contacts we can make use of. This is gonna be great!

*The Water War of Cochabamba – in 2000, the municipal water system was privatised, which led to rising rates and cooperatively owned wells was turned over to the trans-national company Aguas del Tunari. The inhabitants of the city rioted, barricaded the city for several days and fought against the police and military until Aguas del Tunari was forced out of the country.

* La Coordinadora de defensa del agua y la vida – led by Oscar Olivera, this was the overall organisation behind the water war who fought for water to be a human right and not owned by foreign investors.

Off to a start...

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” 

As every good philosopher knows, there can never be one beginning. Was it the day at university when Tess overheard me talking about field studies in Bolivia and I caught her with the phrase are you coming with me? or was it when I, in Lisbon, was sweating over the application for the scholarship to fund our research? Or when we booked the tickets? Maybe it was even earlier, when I was in sixth grade and started studying Spanish. Or we could start by yesterday, when we headed out in the light of dawn to leave Sweden behind for a while.

The plan was to go Copenhagen - London - Miami - La Paz - Cochabamba. It worked out fine until we got to Miami, where we were met by ridiculous cues to get through passport security. With a tight schedule, we kindly asked if there was another way and got a sweet shout back. Nope. The dude who took our fingerprints on the other hand was all jolly and surprised when we told him that Denmark and Sweden are two countries. He told us Swedes are all nice because they like heavy metal and essentially, you are just like us Americans!. Oh fabulous. Running, running, got to the gate which was empty. What? Oh that's right, I set my watch according to the air plane, which was still one hour behind. So we missed the flight. 

23 hours until the next flight to La Paz. Great. We tried to sleep on the floor for a while, but it was just too cold. So after chatting with my mum (it was 8am at home, 3am here) she convinced us to take into the hotel om the airport. Very good decision, which we were just too tired and irrational to make on our own.

So here we are now. Tess is sleeping and I'm awake. So many thoughts running through my head.

This country, where the most fundamental right is freedom. Where giving your fingerprints takes a good two hours, research is biased, state money is spent on war overseas, healthcare is for the rich, and the equality is among the lowest on earth. This idea of freedom... Where to be free is to carry a gun and drive a car, to be able to step on anyone to get ahead in life. I really don't want that kind of freedom.

Instead, I feel my longing back to that marvellous continent stronger than ever. So many memories from there that I've had to push aside to be able to lead a normal life in Sweden, that overwhelm me now. Freedom to me is having all I need strapped to my back and the road ahead, waiting, patiently. The driving force is my curiosity. I long for the language, the people, the Andes, the thin air, the green colour of the hills and trees. 

I am Alex and this is my wonderland.

What are we actually supposed to do?

“Do you think I've gone round the bend?"

"I'm afraid so. You're mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.” 

Here's some background info.

I started studying a Bsc in Environmental Science at Malmö University in 2009. After a year and a half, however, I could no longer resist the urge I felt to travel so I took a gap year to be on the road. My inner compass naturally guided me to South America, where I fell in love with life for real. I adored Bolivia, which is why I decided to apply for a scholarship so I could do research for my Bachelor's thesis there. 

When I was back at uni again, I took up where I left and hence ended up in a new class, where I met Tess. She is the most adorable and intelligent woman I've met so far, and its seems like she can put up with my company. We were awarded a scholarship to go to Japan together in August, where we attended a summer school at Hiroshima University on the theme of Global Environmental Sustainability. How awesome? 

Then we applied for the MFS grant, offered by Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency). The idea is to help students go abroad and conduct a minor field study on a topic that benefits the development of that country. So since I wanted to go back to Bolivia and Tess was eager to join me, that was our pick. We are both very interested in water related issues, and one very interesting case is the water wars of Cochabamba, where the water was privatised but the people were dissatisfied and rioted until they got their ownership back. This happened 13 years ago, but the access to potable water is still very poor. So what we want to investigate is how the local authority and other stakeholders (such as the small cooperatives that have formed to provide water for unconnected neighbourhoods) collaborate, and how this could be interpreted from a sustainable development perspective.

We will be staying with a local organisation in Cochabamba, called Red Tinku. They are young social activists engaged in the water distribution, and they have a sociocultural centre where they house volunteers and where we will be staying. Seems like a good way to get to know people and not just sit in an apartment and write all day!

We were supposed to be in Cochabamba by now, but due to the missed connection flight we are still in Miami. The plan however is to spend two months in Bolivia, mainly in Cochabamba, and get back home by the end of May.