Potosi

Went down a working mine today in Potosi! It was really interesting, and you have to go there if you come to Bolivia. People usually die after about 10 years working in the mines, largely because of respiratory diseases caused by all the dust, asbestos, cyanide and arsenic etc that they either work with in the refinery, or in the mine itself. Of course there´s always the risk of the ceiling collapsing on you and you not getting rescued for THREE DAYS too, which happened to someone just 5 or 6 weeks ago! Most people still work by hand too. We saw soem people working with pneumatic drills, but not only are the expensive, you can´t actually see a thing when you´re using a drill coz of all the dust - impossible to breathe too!

You could stand up in the mine a bit, but some bits we had to crawl through and it was really horrible and claustrophobic. It was also really warm. The maximum it gets is 45c but we only went to about 25-30. We were lucky enough to have an stupid guy asking stupid questions in our group. He kept asking if he would die in the mine, as he couldn´t breathe properly because of the dust, and then he asked if this miner, whose job every day for about 3 months was to tap holes in the wall with nothing but a hammer and chisel and only himself for company, got bored. And, "Why doesn´t he have a cd player or something with him?"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah, like, how come they don´t get cable down there?! Why don´t they build a games room?! What a goof. What they did have for fun was chewing on coca leaves, and drinking 96% alcohol - seriously, we got there at 10am, and some of them were already drunk, and it was a Monday! Apparently by Friday they´re a bit rowdier, and there´s somewhere near Potosi where they go and have real "fight club" type fights. That´s their recreation for you! They supposedly worship this devil too, since they´re working underground. I say supposedly, but actually I think they do offer coca leaves to him, maybe not this one precisely, but they have their own pictures or icons that they use. We talked to some of the miners, and our guide was also an ex-miner, and some people do actually work in the mine for 25-30 years - its pretty amazing, as we spent 3 hours down there, and I couldn´t wait to get out at the end, it was so hot and enclosed and difficult to breathe - just walking around was hard work, but these guys had to load 200-400 baskets a day with rubble from the mine. It was a mix of silver, tin, and minerals - as well as asbestos etc. It was pretty impressive how hard they worked. They got paid relatively well, but for the price they paid with their health it didn´t make it much of a desirable job! None of them wore face masks either - it wasn´t really practical with all the physical work they had to do, but how much more crap they must have inhaled! We joined them chewing coca leaves all day, and it made our tongues go numb and our teeth green, but it was fun when you got over the horrible taste. You actually have to keep a ball of the leaves in your cheek like a hamster so that the saliva mixes with the leaves and after about 40 mins you start feeling a bit perkier, but you need to keep that ball in your cheek for about 3 hours, yum.