OVERSEAS BRIEFING

Author: BY KELLY BLYNN AND LAUREN ARMSTRONG

BOLIVIA - Buenos días desde las tierras bajas de Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the land of big American-style supermarkets, oil company executives cruising in their sport utility vehicles, trash-eating street horses, Mennonites, telephone booths that look like zoo animals and many other things that do not seem to fit the stereotype of indigenous, pan flute-playing, llama-filled highland Bolivia.

We're here for about two weeks working on our final project, making a documentary about the explosion of an oil pipeline in a campesino community outside the city named El Salao, and have learned and experienced quite a bit. So far we've played soccer with the oil company reconstruction crew, eaten at least a hundred mandarinas, met a mayor named "The Goat," slept on the floor of a psych ward and received various marriage proposals.

We arrived here in Santa Cruz a week ago, with few contacts and zero filmmaking experience, but have managed to sift our way through some of the Bolivian bureaucracy to talk to government officials about the accident. The most powerful part of the project has been spending time in the community talking to the people who were affected, hearing their stories about what some describe as the worst night of their lives. We have yet to make our way past security at the headquarters of Transredes S.A., a subsidiary of Shell and Enron that owns the pipeline and is responsible for the cleanup and compensation of the accident, but we're currently working out some sort of scheme where one of us distracts while the other runs for the door with camera in hand.

As environmental studies students and climate change activists at home, it has been a powerful experience for us to meet the people whose lives have been affected so profoundly by the oil industry and to hopefully find a way to tell their story. Many people in the community lost everything they had ever worked for, their houses and citrus trees and crops, and many others were burnt and left scarred for the rest of their lives. Although we've seen how the company is responding by building new homes for them and fortifying the pipeline, there are many things that money simply can't replace.

Although the situation may seem quite sad from the outside, many of the people we've met amazingly continue to have a very optimistic outlook on life. As Doña Rosa and Doña Felipa, two female organic farmers that lost everything, stated, they have no choice but to seguir adelante y no tener miedo (continue ahead and not live in fear) of the duct and of the fire. As for us, we hope to keep working to tell the stories that aren't being told and to keep trying to use more energy sources that don't so severely impact the environment and people's lives.