> Regardless of how progressive and multicultural etc. you U.S. Internetters
> are, you always have this tendency to hold discussions as if everyone
> participating or listening in, lives in the U.S. And many of you doesn't show
> the faintest interest in what is going on elsewhere.
>
> Trond Andresen
> male, white, heterosexual,
> -but Norwegian- creature ;-)
Right. Friday at 1:00am a 6.7 richter scale quake hit the southern part of Cochabamba department. Our house, some 150 miles away, shook severely, waking us. After standing in a doorway while the earth settled down, we bolted for the street, where we stayed until about 2:00am.
The next am news started to arrive. Aiquile and Totora were hardest hit. Aiquile (pronounced ay-KEY-lay) was an important regional adminstrative center under Spanish colonilism, situated smack-dab in the middle of the trade routes that sent food from Cochabamba to the silver mines of Potosi. With the resurgence of the silver economy in the 1860s, Aiquile rose again, and much of the beautiful republican architecture of the town's center dates -- dated -- from that period. Since the decline of silver in the 1890s, though, Aiquile has been in decline. Now it is in ruins; the official death toll is 81 today, and still climbing.
The area around Aiquile is populated by indigenous communities, most in small hamlets, without communications or even passable roads. Houses are/were largely made of stone, adobe, and wood, grass and mud roofs. Dozens of people have been found over the last few days in their collapsed homes, many starved to death.
Two dear friends who were living in Aiquile passed 8 hours buried under tons of adobe. Miraculously, they are ok, though their two daughters (ages 1 and 8) were killed. We spent the weekend making funeral arrangements, consoling, mobilizing.
When I came back to the computer to look at my messages, I admit to a certain ambivalence regarding the back and forth on the lists. And I began to wonder about the much discussed connectivity of people and places. The events of the past days lend a certain poignancy to Trond's comments. Here I am participating in this "virtual community", yet living things so absolutely disconnected from the tempo, tenor and texture that are (that I imagine to be) the enabling conditions of the exchanges. Perhaps I am just acclimating myself to the dissonaces produced in inhabiting the interstices of local and virtual communities.
Anyway, food for thought....
And just in case, I'm a displaced pale penis person, with an income of about $18,000 per annum doing independent "white collar" work.
Tom Kruse Cochabamba, Bolivia