Just a brief update

First, I should introduce you to Martijn: he's Dutch-born, but a permanent resident in Bolivia. He has a wife, and his second son was born just a few days ago. He does translation work in English-Spanish-Dutch for various European companies, and teaches Dutch at a language school near my apartment.

Martijn and I made some phone calls today. We hit a lot of dead-ends and wrong numbers. It looks like Alvaro Garcia, the vice president, is a no-go (he only gives interviews to reporters - so I'm contemplating calling back as a reporter from the Western Front), and Evo was always a non-starter. Damn. They would have been cool guys to talk to. Garcia started some Marxist Indian communities in NW Bolivia in the '80's and later joined the revolutionary group Tupac Katari . Probably a really interesting guy to talk to! And can you imagine someone like that being head of state in the USA? The number I had for Andres Soliz, the former minister of hydrocarbons, turned out to be a guy who used to work with Soliz but doesn't anymore. We dropped the name of the reporter who furnished the number, Luis Gomez, and the guy gave us Soliz' home number - "just don't tell him where you got it!" But we got the machine, as we did for Carlos Villegas, the current minister of hydrocarbons. We did get a hit with CEDLA, an economic think-tank here in La Paz. Claudia, the name I got from Luis, said to call back on Monday and we could set up an interview with the hydrocarbons expert. Cool.

So on Monday we're going to try some of those numbers again, and on Tuesday we're going to the congressional building to track down someone from PODEMOS (For Democracy and Society, or Poder Democratico Social; it also means "we can" in Spanish. Bolivian parties and their clever acronyms!) - hopefully Jorge Quiroga, the party head. We'll see.

So for now, it's Hurry Up and Wait. Lame! I want to get as much done as I can before I'm supposed to meet up with my friends in Peru - only three weeks from now!