We seem to have the opposite problem up here in the jungles of Santa Cruz. There have recently been massive floods to the north of us in Beni, leaving hundreds of thousands of people flooded out of their homes. Two weeks ago we delivered food and supplies to people in a flooded village just down the road. Though the water had receded substantially, their homes still had a foot or more of water in them, and the twenty families from the community we visited had been living under tarps along the road for over a month. Sickness and malnutrition abounds in such areas.
We’ve been lucky not to have flooding in our town this year. At this time last year most of the community was under water, and people were living in tents and sleeping on any dry ground they could find. But the rains persist, and inside our pink hut in Oki, it’s so humid our concrete walls are sprouting mold and the chairs in our living room are rusting. Crazy.
It is normal to have a rainy and a dry season here, but the weather patterns have become more extreme over the past few years, and flooding and droughts have become an enormous problem. The Bolivian Government recently stated that the governments of the developed nations that are consuming vast quantities of carbon and thereby causing global warming, which in turn is spurring la niña to deliver her disastrous weather, should take responsibility for the damage they’re causing. In short, the message is that the US should pay up and compensate the rest of the world for the effects its greed is having on everyone around the globe. Wow. That’s not a bad idea.
But I thought global warming was just a myth. . .
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