The whole reason we travel is to learn. Be the lessons good/bad/fun/horrible we take something away from everything, hopefully something positive.

Right now we are in Bolivia, in a city called Sucre. It has been our home for the last three weeks as we have been studying Spanish.

Here are a couple of things I’ve learned recently, from friends we have made here, that are not so cool:

* Due to a rapid increase in Western demand recently for locally grown ‘superfoods’ such as quinoa, semolina and amaranth, the poorer Bolivian and Peruvian locals can no longer afford to eat these foods. Formally staples in their diets, these same people must now resort to solely eating rice, which we all know is rich in starch and carbohydrates and therefore adding to the problem of poor diet and obesity in poorer regions.

* The US government supplies Bolivia with old, unwanted clothes which they distribute and sell at market stalls. In exchange, the US get to mine the mineral rich Bolivian land. If this didn’t seem like enough of a one sided deal, the repercussions of the secondhand clothes  making their way into the Bolivian clothing market is leading to the destruction of the Bolivian textile industry as the youth of the country now prefer the clothing that carries the labels of Adidas, Nike and the like, instead of supporting their local industry. My source reveals that the problem is so big that many families are being displaced as their only skills are no longer of any use.

* Much of the population of Bolivia is so poor that they cannot even afford to buy (UHT) milk for their kids who are in desperate need of calcium for their bones. The cost of a small bag of milk here is less than 2B, or about 30 cents. Yep that’s right I said bag of milk. It doesn’t come in a carton because the cost of the carton alone would be equivalent to an hours wage locally. I’m not just talking about the super poor, I’m talking about many middle class, university educated citizens that I have met that tell me they still cannot afford simple things like milk, despite working full time in their industry.

I’ve posted a lot of videos glamourising our time in Latin America, so I thought I should share some of the stuff that was eating me up, the stuff I can’t convey in the videos.