Potosi, Bolivia

There are no ancient ruins in Potosi, Bolivia. No exotic wildlife. There are no museums worth seeing. No thriving nightlife. Oddly a bit out of the way, stuck in the Bolivian mountains somewhere between La Pax and Uyuni, Kristen and I are there for the same reason the Spaniards were there 500 years ago. There for the same reason its residence have been there since. We are there for the mines.

Hundreds of years ago it made a handful of Spanish miners very rich. Its mining was powered by a workforce created by combining conquered indigenous peoples and imported enslaved ones. Back when the silver veins were rich and the manpower was all but free, the mines turned simple men into sudden kings. For a time, a life of extravagance and purchased political power sprung up around this town. Hundreds of years later, many things have changed... but unfortunately, not enough has changed.

Today the men of Potosi still haul tons of rock out of the side of the mountain. Over 2000 miners work 160 mines that scatter the mountain side. Unlike the oppression of the past, the mines are now a cooperative, a loose collection of mine owners who each hammer away at their own claim, staying out of each others way but collectively paying for the oxygen that gets piped in and likely lobbying together on important issues. Unfortunately, though, this community has no oversight of how the mining progresses, and while our miner guide seemed confident that the experience of the elder miners was better than any engineer or scientist, cave ins still kill more than any other miners a year. Cave ins, I can't help but think, that might be prevented by oversight.

Modern technology has changed the way the rock is processed. Ages ago the silver dried up, and the chaff they haul out is no more than flecked with minerals. Its about 8% tin, 3% silver and 2% lead. 13% valuable to be refined, separated, and exported. 87% to be dumped (after its chemical processing) into the river that no local dare swim in. What was once thrown aside as rubble is now valuable enough to be worth blasting loose and carrying out of the mine, thanks to modern science. And by valuable enough, I mean barely valuable enough.

The value is such that while it will pay a man's wage, it won't buy new tools. So while the technologies of the modern day are used in the refining of the miners labor, it hasn't touched their actual labor. Their method has not changed since the time of Nobel. Take a long piece of steel, and hammer it about three feet into the rock. Stick some dynamite in the hole. Run. After the boom, throw the chunks into a mining cart, and drag it out of the mine. Apart from piped in O2 and battery powered headlamps I can't see a way that this process has changed in 150 years. The fatality rate hasn't changed much either.

About 1% of all miners in Potosi die every year from accidents. Cave ins and and other malfunctions. And if you don't die violently, you die insidiously. No miner lives past 55. None. The respiratory diseases make old age an impossibility. Our guide could think of no expert miner he had ever heard of who reached 60. None. Not only did these men risk very short lives, they accepted mortalities that were shortened as a matter of fact. A life of 6 day a week, 12 hours a day, that was guaranteed to end before 60 from lung problems, if not earlier by some other cause.

At some point, you ask why. Why do they do it? There seem to be two prevailing reasons. One, is its in the culture. Our guide recounts the story of his own youth, he wanted to stay in school, and maybe go to college. But when he was 13, his dad told him he was a sissy if he didn't join his brothers in the mines, took him out of school, and put him to work. Manhood, it seems, is defined by mining. It certainly means muscles, hard work, bravery, and sacrifice for your family. By many standards of manhood, those attributes are mainstays.

The other motivator is the money. In Bolivian terms, miners make a lot of money. A worker in an internet cafe, or another tourist venue, might make 300 Bolivianos a month. A miner, on the other hand, of course, according to the productivity of the mine, might make as much as 1200 a month. This quadrupled salary is enough to keep many in the mines far longer than they had intended.

It should be noted, that 1200 Bolivianos is less than 200 dollars in the US. A job that is far more dangerous than most every job in the States that pays less than the worst job one could get. All and all, their high paying sacrifice pennies out to being just over $0.50 an hour.

One has to admire their determination. Even in the face of certain death, they manage to retain a sense of optimism. They do not live in fear of cave in's or noxious gases, rather they say, "If today is the day I will die, then I will make it a good day." In some ways, the certainty of it makes it all easier to bear. Our guides father was age 53, and still alive. As he talked about it, it was a simple statement of fact for him to say that his dad could die today, or maybe in a year.

But even as I admire their courage, I have to ask if their conviction is misguided. Certainly, they had limited choices. Growing up in a world where this was the norm, they were all but destined to live this life. But I rail at such determinism. Are we, the wealthy beneficiaries of their cheap labor and carelessly discarded lives, so too destined to be blind to their plight? Deined to ignore their suffering? Fated to become what our world told us was normal?

Our normal life is far easier, if no easier to deal with. Normal for most Americans is to work to much, but spend even more, flitting from distraction to distraction, far removed from the lives of who have less and obsessed with the lives who have more. Free in a vast number of ways, but oddly just as paralyzed, our convictions dulled by the inevitable meaninglessness that accompanies a life overly focused on getting what you want.

I say to hell with such destinies. Accepting what cannot be changed is an important part of dealing with reality, but I rail against any who sees respiratory death at age 55 as an unavoidable reality. Neither are we destined to be spoiled overgrown children, blind to our overabundance. These are unfortunate, and very avoidable realities that should be striven against with an immenant tenacity, the same tenacity that drives the miners to feed their families, and the same immenance we expect our desires to be met.