April 2002

Dear Friends,

There's a man who sits near my corner, waving his former hands—now stubs that reveal the shape of the shattered bone beneath—and calling out silently, his mouth gaping but wordless. Everyday I pass him and glance down at his contorted face. Some accident has pulled his forehead, cheeks, jaw, and left, eyeless socket into one massive, descending scar. Last week, I found out the probable cause. This man is not alone. La Paz is filled with such individuals, scarred and misshapen, handless, eyeless.

And now that I know why, I am troubled, fearful that it will happen to Obed, Edwin, Ana, or some other little kid I've never met.

Last month I wrote about the mines of Oruro, and the presence of U.S.-based mining corporations there. Then, last week, I finally visited Potosi's mine, Cerro Rico, and nervously made my way in with 12-year-old Edwin. Edwin is one of the 6,000 children working inside or around the mine site. He works, for now, as a guide, taking uneasy foreigners like me on tours. He charges about seventy cents. Though he says he never wants to work as a miner, there's a good chance one day he will.

Unlike the multinational-owned mines surrounding Oruro, Cerro Rico is a cooperative, run by the miners themselves. The children, therefore, often provide extra sources of income for their families, going to work alongside their parents. A small child, a 5-, 6-, 7-, or 8-year old, might sift through the piles of rock discarded by the older miners, combing for overlooked minerals. An older child may sell stones to tourists or lead tours. Edwin, at 12, has been leading tours for two years: taking gringos like me, hunched, down the light-less tunnels; calming our nervous questions when we hear the tic-tic-tic of hammers against stone and the rush of gravel moments later. (Landslide! I thought. No, normal, Edwin assured me).

By the time a boy reaches his teens, he is probably already working as a full-fledged miner, spending hours at a time inside. Mining is still largely male-dominated, with girls and women sticking to selling stones, culling for minerals in the debris, or guarding pickaxes and other materials outside the mine's gate. There is no single entrance. Instead, the sides of the mountain are pock-marked with hundreds of entrances, and at each entrance, a small shack where a family lives, guarding the miner's equipment and the entrance itself. None of these homes has electricity or water.

I learned from the Center for Regional Development (CDR), a Bolivian organization working in Potosí and with the Joining Hands network, that a child who begins to work in the mine as a teenager can probably do so for no more than 3 to 5 years. Pretty soon, the health consequences, like pulmonary silicosis, take their toll. The day I visited, we saw a teenager doubled over with the kind of thick, soupy cough I used to hear in my grandfather. Teenagers look wizened, look decades older. Inside the mine, as I watched the particles of dust dance in front of the gas-lit lamp, I instinctively covered my mouth and nose with my T-shirt, wanting to filter it out, knowing what it does to healthy lungs.

I spent three days with CDR, getting to know their work, and getting to know the kids of Cerro Rico. What a silly, wise lot. Most are old beyond their years, with poor formal education but unimaginable life experience. The last day of my visit, I sat in on a workshop put on by the organization to get parents involved in the new projects that CDR is establishing for the children. Over 200 parents packed themselves into a small room to talk about their hopes for their children, to listen to CDR workers talk about their new scholarship program, which will provide the kids with things like paper and pencils they cannot otherwise afford, and to dicuss their goal of organizing the children so that they have some protection as they go about their work. CDR operates under the hope that one day they can phase out child labor and find more sustainable, less dangerous futures for Cerro Rico's children.

The children put on what we call in Bolivia a "socio-drama," a series of skits where the children acted out their lives. It was a bitterly funny experience, with kids like Edwin providing dead-on, deadpan impressions of skittish gringo tourists (like me!), demanding bosses, and the violence of alcoholism. Periodically, while making fun of gringos, they'd stop and have me stand up and wave, gently teasing me. We laughed for hours, but I got the point. These kids are funny, smart, cuddly, observant, entrepreneurial, and wise beyond their years. They are also doing work that destroys their health and provides little future beyond short term necessities, like eating. Today.

In Potosí, it's hard to ask a family to keep their child in school. They may be able to catch a glimmer of the vision—hope that the next generation can make it—but in Bolivia's poorest region, that's a hard vision to maintain. Basic survival often comes first, and so child labor is widely accepted. When people look around and see the reality that there are few employment opportunities beyond the mine, it's hard to expect anything else.

CDR knows it's a hard sell. So it works with the children, helping them find other skills, helping cover some of the costs that would otherwise bar them from school (like school supplies), and also works with the local community to create alternative sources of income. That's the toughest part. In a country with terribly high unemployment, especially in the cities, and where those who can find work may work multiple jobs and still not be able to scrape together enough to feed their families, the solutions are not simple.

We tend to have a very faulty image of the poor, both in the United States and abroad, believing the solution is simply individual responsibility. For example, in the U.S. we often hold baseless views of people on welfare. We've grown so accustomed to the stereotype, we ignore the statistical evidence to the contrary.

Mark Rank, one of my professors at Washington University in St. Louis, has spent his career trying to dispel welfare myths.

What he has discovered is that in the United States, people in poverty are the same as you and me. Actually, it's likely that you and I will spend a year living below the poverty line. The truth is, statistically two-thirds of adults will receive some form of welfare by the time they reach 65. And between the ages of 20 and 75, fifty-eight percent of Americans will spend at least one year living below the poverty line. One of the most important statistics Rank has provided challenges one of the more ingrained (and racist) myths of all—that of the black, inner-city recipient. The truth of the matter is, two-thirds of welfare recipients are white, and many live in rural areas (statistics from Washington University Magazine, Spring 2002 pp.10-13).

Rank's point is this: People in need, poor people, are us. The images we have in are head are often false, and the danger is that we will continue to develop policy that reflects a distorted view of the poor. Along side faulty views of who receives such aid and why are stereotypes that prevent us from asking more important and relevant questions about how to address it.

They also relieve us from the responsibility of looking at the structural causes of poverty because our faulty images often incorrectly blame those in need, blame it on their laziness, on biologically inferior intelligence or abilities, blame it on their lack of will or determination, morals or other personal inadequacies—the problems of the individual.

The same goes for poverty worldwide. We develop incorrect assumptions about why people are poor, and those assumptions often blame the victim, failing to recognize deep structural and historical causes, ignoring causes that are beyond the control of the person in need.

In my nearly eight months here I have gotten to know personally some amazing, hard-working, creative, entrepreneurial, ethical people. Economically poor people.

What has struck me as CDR offered me a glimpse into the lives, the joys, and struggles of the kids of Cerro Rico and their families is how much I needed those faces and those stories to give the statistics meaning. Statistics may tell me how wrong my ideas about the poor are, and challenge me to change them. But nothing teaches me, nobody challenges me, like Edwin, Ana, Obed, and Iliana of the mines, like Veronica and Cristian, the street kids of Cochabamba, like Luis, Enriqueta, and Rina, who are working with the network and with their own organizations to address poverty in their communities and throughout Bolivia.

Yours,

Susan

(For further reading: Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America by Mark Robert Rank)