Reports from the road -- Bolivia -- Habitat for Humanity Int'l 1
Reports from the road -- Bolivia
Shala Carlson, assistant editor of Habitat World, and photographer Steffan Hacker, both based in Americus, Ga., will spend the next week traveling throughout Bolivia. The visit is slated to include three of the nine locations in which Habitat works in the country of 8 million: Cochabamba, Santa Cruz and the Andean town of Oruro.
Along the way the writer-photographer team will be working to document some of the living conditions of families in Bolivia and what Habitat for Humanity is doing to help with the housing deficit there. In Santa Cruz, they will visit the Amanecer (“Daybreak”) project that is working to provide accessible homes for families with physical disabilities. The Arco Iris (“Rainbow”) project in Cochabamba is an initiative to provide decent housing for 25 families. The visit will also include a stop at the Santa Ana III housing development in Oruro, where Habitat is seeking to help families through the process of gaining legal rights to their land.
The team will arrive in Bolivia on Dec. 1 and will spend the week documenting the need for affordable housing in words and photos there. On Dec. 7, the team heads to Chile to do the same.
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Bolivia – Posting 1
One day in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz is all you need to be reminded that for too many families in this world, owning a stable, safe and decent place to live is something that can only be dreamed of and struggled for.
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Bolivia – Posting 2
In Santa Cruz, homeless men sleep on the slim cement ledges that line the open sewer conduits that run through parts of the city. They fashion tattered tents from tarps and signs and pieces of cloth and lay their heads down inches from whizzing traffic on one side and, on the other, inches from the steep incline down to the black waters below.
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Bolivia – Posting 3
The Mona Lisa smiles down on the cramped, dimly lit room. She is pasted high on the concrete wall of the one room that five members of the Cervantes family call home.
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Bolivia – Posting 4
Driving through the streets of the small Bolivian town of Sipe Sipe one afternoon, I noticed a small house made completely of mud bricks. Such structures aren’t really out of the ordinary here, but a cactus had impertinently sprouted on the roof of this one and was happily growing in the baking sun.
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