Water is the blood of the Pachamama

So as most of you know, water is kind of my thing. I first became interested in it taking medical anthropology before going to Bolivia. We read a book by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a controversial medical anthropologist, about health in a shantytown in Brazil. I thought it was really revolutionary when she reported on how NGOs and health organizations encourage people to take Oral Rehydration Therapy (a powder you add to water to rehydrate yourself after lots of diarrhea) when people were just adding it to the contaminated water. Or they didn't have water to add it to. So these organizations thought they were really helping the people, but they weren't at all. Then of course Michael, my anthropology teacher, encouraged me to check out the current water situation in Cochabamba two years after the Water War there in 2000. I have now seen lots of articles by people reporting on the state of the water in Cochabamba after the Water War. In Cochabamba, I got interested in water and health, and water and community organizing. Anyway, here I am, 4 years later still interested in water. I kind of feel like I still know very little, but I am learning a lot. Last week's World Water Day events were incredible. It has been a while since I felt so alive here. I just live in such a bubble here sometimes, so it was really awesome to be exposed to all these indigenous organizations and women organizations fighting for water. At the march I met a couple women who run Acorn International in Peru, who handed me funeral flowers to carry at the front of the march. The flowers marked the death of the rivers due to extreme contamination. Here's a link to an article I wrote reporting on the events on a Peruvian news site for English speakers. Here's a picture from the end of the march: