In Iceland, beginning on April 14, 2010, eruptions of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull created an ash cloud that led to the closure of much of Europe’s airspace between April 15 and 20. Two companions on the delegation I was a part of in Venezuela at that time, one from Denmark and the other from Italy, wondered if they’d be able to get home on their scheduled flights. As it turned out, the fellow from Denmark had to wait a week until he could fly back. The rest of us who participated in the delegation from SOA Watch, a peace group that works to close the School of the Americas and stop torture and repression in Latin America, went our separate ways on Sunday, April 18.
I had just over twenty four hours to get from Caracas, Venezuela to Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights. When I first decided to go with this particular group to Venezuela, without knowing how I’d make it happen, or where I’d get the money, I realized that I was aware of another event of enormous proportion which would take place in South America in April—the People’s World Conference. I checked out the dates and found that the conference started the day after the delegation ended. It seemed possible to do, reasonable to go all that way and attend two great gatherings since I was already on the continent, and exciting for me to imagine.
During the years I volunteered for HopeDance Films in Santa Barbara, I had the opportunity to see hundreds of well done documentaries about a myriad of subjects. Among the films that impressed me were This Revolution Will Not be Televised, about the attempted coup of Hugo Chavez in 2001, The Corporation, Thirst and Flow (For Love of Water). Cochabamba, Bolivia was featured in the last three films, recounting the “Cochabamba Water Wars’, protests in 2000 against the attempted privatization of the municipal water supply. Because of the water wars, the private companies involved and the Bolivian government canceled their contract. I had never imagined that I would someday go to Cochabamba myself, but now I was on my way. As a Permaculture Designer who has made water my particular focus, it was even more special for me to visit this legendary place.
According to my itinerary, I would be on five planes during that twenty four hour period, but in the end, there were actually only four. It was hard to decide to take that many airplanes, especially to a conference on climate change. During my first impulse imagining the logistics of the trip, I had thought that I could take overland transportation between Venezuela and Bolivia, until someone who had been there remarked that it would take me a month to do so. I just didn’t have the time. If I wanted to go, fly I must. I was determined to represent a variety of organizations and people back here in the States, so that only one person had to make the trip and clock the flight time.
So there I was in Caracas at 11AM on that Sunday morning, ready to board a flight to Bogota. I had changed money on the black market, so I paid the equivalent of just $30 to cover the airport exit tax of $70 US. Then I was off to Lima, La Paz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and then onto Cochabamba. I had a layover in Lima from 4 to 10 PM, and I wasn’t able to get my boarding pass for my next flight until an hour and a half before takeoff. Even though I had made my reservation six weeks earlier, I didn’t know I would get on the plane until I was at the gate. Apparently the Icelandic volcano helped me out. I met a woman who was part of a group from Mexico traveling to the conference, and they had gotten onto the same flight because of all the Europeans who had had reservations who were stuck behind the ash cloud on the other side of the Atlantic. As the conference wore on, I was so involved in the day to day happenings that I stopped paying attention to news of the volcano (or any other outside news). I never found out if any of the people whose travels to the conference were interrupted by the volcanic ash ever made it there, for even the last day or two.
A Permaculture designer, water harvesting advocate, and longtime environmental steward, Barbara Wishingrad, attended the Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 19-22, 2010, along with 35, 000 other people. She also traveled with a delegation from SOA Watch to Venezuela to visit clinics, schools, cooperatives,and other social programs under the Hugo Chavez government. Barbara has worked as an herbalist, homebirth midwife, street artist, interpreter, and with special needs babies, among other things; she is currently organizing a Water Harvesting Co-op in the Santa Barbara area. Barbara has lived and worked among indigenous artisans and midwives and has made sharing indigenous wisdom an important part of her life work. She is founder and President of Nurturing Across Cultures, formerly The Rebozo Way Project: http://www.nurturingacrosscultures.org .
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