I have exciting news!!!!

Dumdumdum…. Wait for it, drumrolll….. Manu Chao is playing in La Paz next week!!! Hooray! And I am going to go! Now, I know not many people will actually appreciate this news (though I know A&A and Gracie will!), but it’s so exciting I feel like a teenager about to go to her first rock concert. I mean, how cool is that! Seeing Manu Chao at an open air amphitheatre in Bolivia! So cool…. Anyway, yes I promise I am working hard! Back to 16 hour days 7 days a week which is why I haven’t blogged until now (having a quiet Friday night in the hotel room to recover!) but its been great so far. ok, yes, it is a disaster and lots of people are living in shit, but the work is good this time and one has to enjoy oneself sometimes when you do disasters for a living…. So for those who don’t know what the disaster is (which would be pretty much everyone cos its not really big enough to make the news) basically lots of bad weather has flooded people out of their communities and destroyed everything in the low lands and in the highlands the bad weather has destroyed crops, water systems and swept crop lands away into the river. We are organizing camps for the displaced communities etc etc. Bolivia has the Andes in the west, lowlands in the west and the amazon basin in the north. I arrived into La Paz which has an altitude of 12,000 feet, the when east to the lowlands where the camps are, and then up to the highlands again to Potosi where the famous silver mines. Now I’m back in La Paz, and going up north to the Amazon basin on Monday for 3 days. The scenery is beautiful, the food is good, the people are very lovely and helpful. The culture is colourful and fascinating. There are so many beautiful old Spanish colonial buildings. It’s just great. Oh, it was Carnaval too so we got to go dancing in the street and in every town in the country people got drunk and danced through the streets each with their own band for four days straight, more in the countryside, and threw water bombs at each other. It was so funny. And what else is really nice is that I don’t particularly feel like a foreigner sticking out like a sore thumb here like you do elsewhere. Don’t know if it’s a language things, or a cultural thing but its nice. Anyway, that’s about it for now… I’ll try and attach some photos.