what just happened?

A few days ago we were in Okinawa, chilling with our good friend George who had just gotten a site relocation and was to be our new neighbor. We’d spent the morning playing baseball in the mango grove down the road from our house. It was going to be a good year. A very good year. I went off to a rural community in the afternoon to teach a health class to a group of women as I normally do, George and Tom stayed in Oki talking about the good times to come. A call came in on a friend’s cell phone while we were teaching our class, it was Tom, he said to come home right away. Two staff members from the Peace Corps had come to our door in their land cruiser to take us to the city. Ten minutes to pack, no time for goodbyes.

The political situation in Bolivia has become increasingly tense over the past few months. Divisions between the indigenous populations of the western half of the country and the wealthier independence seeking states in the east have existed for centuries. Racism, poverty, and inequality are rampant and divisive. With the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, at the helm, the poorer and oppressed people of the west found hope and courage to stand up against the wealthier and whiter eastern half of the country. Morales, working to give more resources and opportunities to the indigenous, has met huge opposition from the eastern states, who are now demanding independence and the control of their own revenues that come from the abundant gas and oil reserves in the eastern lowlands. They do not want to share the profits of their resources with the poorer indigenous in the western half. So tension has been on the rise. Road blocks have been a constant over the last month, restricting travel and the transport of food, gas, and other goods that Bolivia depends on from neighboring countries. Food prices spiked dramatically in many areas because of the shortages, and gas, both for cooking and for driving, was unavailable in many communities across the country. People were getting angry.

The good ol USA in it’s infinite capitalistic wisdom has opposed Morales from the start and supported the wealthier eastern governors. They have gas to trade and businesses to build. Morales, a socialist, wants to nationalize many industries and create a more even playing field for all the people of Bolivia –not Bush’s kind of game. And so last week, in a gesture of ‘get your paws off my people’ Evo Morales told Phil Goldberg the US ambassador that he was no longer welcome in Bolivia and asked him to leave immediately. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela and ally of Morales, followed suit and sent Venezuela’s ambassador home, too. The US reacted similarly, ejecting both countries ambassadors to the US. We started to get nervous at this point. Tension between the US and Bolivia has been very high for years, USAID who gives $80 million a year to Bolivia has been asked to leave, the Peace Corps has been accused of being a spy agency sent to dethrone the president, and anti-american sentiment has been increasing steadily. With the ambassador gone, we started to get nervous.

Just in 2008 the PC volunteers in Bolivia been on six emergency action plans and consolidated twice for our safety. It makes Washington nervous and causes a lot of disruption to the work we’re doing in our sites. Always at the back of our minds was the question, ‘are we about to get kicked out of here?’

Seems so. We packed our bags quickly and got in the land cruiser to head to Santa Cruz. I waved goodbye to our neighbor and said we’d be back in a few days. Six days, five hotels, and three cities later, we are now in Lima Peru. We were first consolidated to Cochabamba with our fellow 113 volunteers. There we were separated into two groups and transported from hotel to hotel to keep our location unknown. On Sunday we got word that we were to be evacuated. The other group would leave in an hour, our group the next day. We were not to call our families or our friends in our sites –if news got out that we were leaving the country, we could be targeted and in greater danger than we already were.

Still, there was still hope that we could return in a few weeks after things calmed down in Bolivia, go back to our sites, continue our work and our lives. The next day, after lots of waiting, crying, laughing, wondering, we went to the airport and awaited the military cargo plane that was to take us to Lima, Peru. Just before we boarded our Country Director notified us that Washington had decided to end the Peace Corps Program in Bolivia. We would not be going back. More tears. Hours later (bumpy hours) we landed in Lima and joined the rest of our group. Glad to be together again, and devastated at the loss of our friends, work, homes, and the greatest job ever, we’ve been clinging to one another, helping each other through the daunting process of deciding, in a very short time, what on earth to do next.

We all have two options: apply to continue our service for one or two more years in another country, or close our service now and be on our way. Not an easy call. Over the next few days we’ll find out which countries are inviting us to join them. The alternative opens the door to . . . to . . . anything. A year. To do anything. Wow.

We’ll keep you posted on what we’re thinking and where we might be heading. For now, I am so sad not to be in Okinawa, heartbroken to leave our friends and the work we’d poured ourselves into, but grateful, so wholly grateful, for everything the last year and a half has been.