[Scpg] Reflections on Cochabamba

Wed Oct 6 22:24:30 PDT 2010

Hi everyone,
some time ago I started to share articles I have been writing related to my 
experience at the People's World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth 
Rights in Cochabamba, Bolivia in April of this year.  Recently someone asked me 
to repost the articles on the scpg listserv with the complete text in the emails 
as well as the links, so I am going to  honor that request now. I have just 
finished the fifth of a planned series of twelve articles.  I am going to post 
the first article tonight, and will post one article at a time, possibly for the 
next four nights, or sometime soon after. You can always go directly to 
Hopedance.org and find them.  the first three were posted by Bob Banner although 
I am correctly listed as the author, so you won't find them under my name. I 
posted articles 4 and 5 myself.  

thanks,
barbara

Reflections on Cochabamba, Part 1 Eruptions of a 
Volcanohttp://hopedance.org/blogs/reflections-on-cochabamba-part-1-eruptions-of-a-volcano.html

In Iceland, beginning on April 14, 2010, eruptions of the volcano  
Eyjafjallajökull created an ash cloud that led to the closure of much of  
Europe’s airspace between April 15 and 20.  Two companions on the  delegation I 
was a part of in Venezuela at that time, one from Denmark  and the other from 
Italy, wondered if they’d be able to get home on  their scheduled flights.  As 
it turned out, the fellow from Denmark had  to wait a week until he could fly 
back.  The rest of us who participated  in the delegation from SOA Watch, a 
peace group that works to close the  School of the Americas and stop torture and 
repression in Latin  America, went our separate ways on Sunday, April 18.
I had just over twenty four hours to get from Caracas, Venezuela to  Cochabamba, 
Bolivia, for the People’s World Conference on Climate Change  and Mother Earth 
Rights.  When I first decided to go with this  particular group to Venezuela, 
without knowing how I’d make it happen,  or where I’d get the money, I realized 
that I was aware of another event  of enormous proportion which would take place 
in South America in  April—the People’s World Conference. I checked out the 
dates and found  that the conference started the day after the delegation 
ended.  It  seemed possible to do, reasonable to go all that way and attend two  
great gatherings since I was already on the continent, and exciting for  me to 
imagine.
During the years I volunteered for HopeDance Films in Santa Barbara, I  had the 
opportunity to see hundreds of well done documentaries about a  myriad of 
subjects.  Among the films that impressed me were This  Revolution Will Not be 
Televised, about the attempted coup of Hugo  Chavez in 2001, The Corporation, 
Thirst and Flow (For Love of Water).   Cochabamba, Bolivia was featured in the 
last three films, recounting the  “Cochabamba Water Wars’, protests in 2000 
against the attempted  privatization of the municipal water supply.  Because of 
the water wars,  the private companies involved and the Bolivian government 
canceled  their contract.  I had never imagined that I would someday go to  
Cochabamba myself, but now I was on my way.  As a Permaculture Designer  who has 
made water my particular focus, it was even more special for me  to visit this 
legendary place.
According to my itinerary, I would be on five planes during that  twenty four 
hour period, but in the end, there were actually only four.   It was hard to 
decide to take that many airplanes, especially to a  conference on climate 
change.   During my first impulse imagining the  logistics of the trip, I had 
thought that I could take overland  transportation between Venezuela and 
Bolivia, until someone who had been  there remarked that it would take me a 
month to do so.  I just didn’t  have the time.  If I wanted to go, fly I must.  
I was determined to  represent a variety of organizations and people back here 
in the States,  so that only one person had to make the trip and clock the 
flight time.
So there I was in Caracas at 11AM on that Sunday morning, ready to  board a 
flight to Bogota.  I had changed money on the black market, so I  paid the 
equivalent of just $30 to cover the airport exit tax of $70  US.  Then I was off 
to Lima, La Paz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and then  onto Cochabamba.  I had a 
layover in Lima from 4 to 10 PM, and I wasn’t  able to get my boarding pass for 
my next flight until an hour and a half  before takeoff.  Even though I had made 
my reservation six weeks  earlier, I didn’t know I would get on the plane until 
I was at the  gate.  Apparently the Icelandic volcano helped me out.  I met a 
woman  who was part of a group from Mexico traveling to the conference, and  
they had gotten onto the same flight because of all the Europeans who  had had 
reservations who were stuck behind the ash cloud on the other  side of the 
Atlantic.  As the conference wore on, I was so involved in  the day to day 
happenings that I stopped paying attention to news of the  volcano (or any other 
outside news). I never found out if any of the  people whose travels to the 
conference were interrupted by the volcanic  ash ever made it there, for even 
the last day or two.

A Permaculture designer, water harvesting advocate, and longtime  environmental 
steward, Barbara Wishingrad, attended the Peoples’ World  Conference on Climate 
Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 19-22, 2010,  along with 35, 000 other 
people. She also traveled with a delegation  from SOA Watch to Venezuela to 
visit clinics, schools, cooperatives,and  other social programs under the Hugo 
Chavez government. Barbara has  worked as an herbalist, homebirth midwife, 
street artist, interpreter,  and with special needs babies, among other things; 
she is currently  organizing a Water Harvesting Co-op in the Santa Barbara 
area.   Barbara  has lived and worked among indigenous artisans and midwives and 
has  made sharing indigenous wisdom an important part of her life work.  She  is 
founder and President of Nurturing Across Cultures, formerly The  Rebozo Way 
Project: http://www.nurturingacrosscultures.org .

This article is copyrighted by a Creative Commons 
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You may copy, 
distribute, transmit and adapt this work and other essays in the Reflections on 
Cochabambaseries by this author under the following conditions:
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

 "...the greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even 
if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is 
enough for everyone.
Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the 
very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and 
shelter."
- Bill Mollison

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