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Meeting the local people, struggling to speak their language and consuming their cuisine and music, is an inherent part of these trips for me. Children, I find, are essentially the same the world over. I enjoy capturing their innocence, curiosity and playfulness. The two pictures of local adults, however, are starkly different - they seem burdened by the pain of life and the difficulty of ekeing out a living.
A part of Bolivian reality struck a familiar yet disturbing chord with me. Having lived and traveled in Africa during the Apartheid-era, I am sensitive to the racial undertones of day to day conversations in a nation struggling with inequality. This point was driven home numerous times by Bolivians of European ancestry, who wasted little time in letting me know that their father or grandfathers were from Europe. The first time this happened, I thought it was just an interesting personal fact. After the fifth or sixth time, a somberness took over every time I heard it.
Bolivians of relatively unmixed Spanish ancestry constitute only about 15% of the population. These descendents of early Spanish colonists have formed much of the aristocracy since independence in 1825. This changed two years ago when Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president was elected. Prior to his official inauguration in La Paz, he was inaugurated in an Aymara ritual at the archeological site of Tiwanaku before a crowd of thousands of Aymara people.
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