Too much rain

It’s raining in Santa Cruz: outside, a gentle pattering on the leaves, gray skies, that unmistakeable sound of car tires sliding along wet asphalt.

I’m grateful for the relief from the 90-degree weather. (Summer in Santa Cruz is something I've had a harder time adjusting to than I expected.) But at the same time, I worry about the people who live where there is no asphalt and drainage systems are inadequate—the peripheral and rural areas, especially those near rivers, where a day of rain too often means serious flooding.

As I write, about 15,000 people in the Santa Cruz area, and tens of thousands more in other areas of the country, have been flooded out in the past few weeks. Heavier-than-usual rains have raised the level of the Río Grande in the departamento of Santa Cruz, making people’s homes uninhabitable and their fields rot.

According to the Santa Cruz newspapers, 3,053 families are living in 25 refugee camps in this province until the waters subside. Cuba has sent a brigade of doctors to help prevent epidemics from breaking out (so far, so good, according to the paper). The U.S., Japan, and other governments and NGOs are sending food and tents for the refugees. But they can’t stop the waters from advancing, or people’s homes and livelihoods from being endangered.

Please pray for the farmers—many of whom have gone into debt to pay for seed, fertilizers, and pesticides—who stand to lose all or most of their crops this year. (Many have lost animals too; thousands of livestock have drowned.) Pray for the people in the refugee camps who are hungry, sick, and/or anxious about the homes and belongings they’ve left behind.

I’m guessing this is one of the many disasters worldwide that flies mostly under the radar of the mainstream news. If you’d like to find out more, here are a few places you can look:

Granma International gives a good overview of what’s happened.

Relief Web is a good source for facts and figures—who’s been affected, what the need is, what’s being done, etc.

BBC News and Reuters focus on the political implications for Bolivia’s new president.

A little piece of paradise

“You can’t say you’ve seen the world until you’ve been to Moro Moro.” My coworker Sandra and I spotted this slogan in large block letters parading across the windshield of a truck on the side of the road. We were hiking along a dusty road on the outskirts of Moro Moro at the time—a town of a couple hundred people that’s nestled among the green hills between the departamentos (provinces) of Santa Cruz and Cochabamba.


From an economic, political, social, or almost any other standpoint, this slogan seems ridiculous: Moro Moro is a two-hour bus ride over dirt roads from the nearest urban center, and the farmers, teachers, and few storeowners who make up its population are hardly the leading edge of society. But if you’re looking for natural beauty, Moro Moro (whose name means “many mountains” in the local vernacular) may well be the center of the universe.

I’ll write more in the weeks ahead about some of my experiences there—the workshop for teachers Sandra and I gave in the even-remoter village of La Laja; our hour-long hike over the foothills to visit the family of a young Bolivian volunteer; the hospitality that left our hearts and our stomachs full. But for now, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

When I told my housemate Danitza, who’s from another small town in the valleys, about how much I’d enjoyed Moro Moro, she smiled knowingly and said, “Now you’ve seen a little piece of paradise.”