The Price of a Life

There were two notable deaths in the province in the last week or so. The first was as a result of torrential rain throughout the region, which caused several landslides and (somewhat ironically) cut off water for a few days in Charazani and other nearby communities. One landslide led to a rock falling on a house and crushing a man inside, which apparently made the national news and led the Governor of La Paz to drop by (hopefully to pledge that at his level of government they would be giving as much aid as possible to help clear the roads and suchlike). Almost a week later, when I walked along the road that leads up to the community where this had occurred, to meet a Kallawaya I know in his community, I saw another landslide that had deprived someone of their kitchen and was blocking a good portion of the road. My friend told me that their problem was that they were lacking a wheelbarrow to clear away the rocks and didn´t have the 350Bs (about £35) that one would cost in Charazani. I wanted to help, but felt that it should really be the job of the local authorities to provide them with a wheelbarrow in their hour of need, and in any case didn´t have anything like that amount on me at the time.

The other death was somewhat more shocking when I heard about it, and was in no way caused by natural phenomena. An old man in a community several hour`s walk away from Charazani had fallen asleep in the street after drinking too much. Two boys aged ten and eleven set alight to some part of him, apparently thinking that they were playing a trick or a joke on him, and that he would wake up, not realising that because he was already drenched in alcohol he would become a human fireball. The whole ayllu (collection of communities) was naturally in shock at these events and a few days later meetings were held to determine what sanction the boys would face for their actions. I was able to observe community justice in action at close quarters, when men and a few women from the four communities that make up the ayllu gathered in the square to debate the fate of the boys. After several hours of discussion, involving back and forth between community leaders, relatives of the deceased, and the boys´ fathers, it was decided that the boys (or their families) should pay reparations of 8,000Bs (around £715 at time of writing) each. The cost had originally been set at 10,000, but after pleading from the boys´ fathers, that they weren´t millionaires and simply wouldn´t be able to repay such a sum, the amount was reduced.

Although the amount seemed small to me considering what they were being made to pay for, when recounting the events to a friend in a nearby community afterwards, she wondered how the boys or their families were going to manage to scrape together the money to pay it back.