Some observations:

1. Men take care of kids here. Everywhere there are fathers walking or grocery shopping with their kids, all sweet and affectionate. Take note American men.

2. In La Paz, stoplights are merely suggestions. Beeping of the horn is considered adequate warning.

3. Employees in grocery stores are actually paid to approach people and try to sell products. You may be thinking: that is normal, we have taste tests in the US. Well, not quite. This one chica comes up to me while I’m browsing the cereal section and displays a bag of “instant” rice. She holds it up to me and explains its various merits, ie that it cooks in ten minutes and is 'muy riquisimo.' It seems that the idea is that I should now buy this bag of dried rice simply because she held it under my nose. Additionally, the 'Friends' theme song was playing during this encounter. Surreal.

4. Cholitas (women who dress in traditional indigenous garb even in the city) are actually pretty decent business women. They often sit on the side of the street selling
a. limes,
b. calls on their cell phones,
c. saltenas (yummy pastries filled with various things)

WORD ON THE STREET: apparently there is such a thing as Cholita wrestling— an organized sport with rules, and the cholitas actually wrestle wearing their traditional dresses and bowler hats. This is what I am told.

5. Some women who beg on the side of the street, particularly older women, actually rent children from other women so that they get more pity money. Very entrepreneruing.

6. Llama fetuses are good luck. Please email me if you would like me to purchase one for you.

IN OTHER NEWS:

I did my first video interview last week. We interviewed the director of the Bolivia office of OPS [Organizacion Panamerican de Salud]. He was very nice, and let us set everything up in his office. I moved all his furniture around and put a fake plant in the background. All very classy. Yet once he began talking on camera it was all foreign to me. Lots of Spanish jargon about “gestion” y “buenas practices” and other buzz words. I sort of tuned out. He could have been talking about how they chop down as many trees as possible and I was just smiling and nodding. Not looking forward to editing that…

After a conference in Cochabamba (cocalero region) I will be heading to Santa Cruz where I’ll be filming the various projects that the NGOs there are working on. Still a bit fuzzy on the details. Things I do know about Santa Cruz: the region has:
- soy agriculture,
- cattle ranching [erosion problems],
- vaqueros [more specifically, the men were described to me as narco-cowboys],
-oil money, and
- former Jesuit missions.