Crazy La Paz

So, an update is pretty well due, and I have rather skipped quite a lot between MacchuPichu, Lake Titicaca and so on. Suffice to say there were hailstorms up on the lake, so I skipped through pretty fast.
Spent the last week and a bit in huge crazy La Paz. The city is basically built into a valley, with the lowest point still being at very high altitude (maybe 3600? the sources all vary in their estimations). At any rate, it´s high. Climbing stairs is difficult. Walking around is difficult. Everything is on a hill and so going anywhere leaves you a bit breathless. The wealthiest and commercial parts of the city are located at the lowest points, lining the base of the valley. From there an unbelievable number of buildings are built up, way up the valley walls until a few perch on the top.
From a disance La Paz resembles a huge bowl that somebody might have poured a gigantic amount of uneven multicoloured shreddies into. A mad jumble of windows, doors, balconies, buildings piled one on another until it´s very hard to distinguish one from another.
Unfortunately, with typical Bolivian (and indeed South American) disregard for any sort of health and safety, people have been allowed to continue building their homes way up into the cliffs despite their instability, especially during wet season. TYhe ground here is pretty much made of sand, and thousands of streams run underneath the cliffs into the valley below.
Recently, there have been huge landslides around the outskirts of La Paz. In one particular case an entire two thirds of a mountain has fallen away, causing hundreds of homes and infrastructure to be completely destroyed. People are now building camps among the rubble and attempting to return to normal life.
The hostel I was staying at (Loki) was very actively involved in raising money to help put these communities back on their feet. One afternoon the staff set out to scout the camps and assess what they could most productively provide, so I went with them.
The scale of destruction is really incredible, described by the BBC as "looking more like an earthquake zone." Thousands of people are homeless. Some living in tents they have been provided with, but others making do underneath homemade structures created using salvaged materials and tarpaulin. In one site, 32 families were camped within 3 shacks. Bolivian families are large and the hostel staff I was with estimated that maybe 150 people were living there. They´re people that raise their own livestock and live off the land, so they had refused to be moved to a safer area as it would have meant leaving behind their animals, and the ground is still unstable and further landslides are very likely at some point.
It was astonishing how resourceful the community had been. Within only a few days of losing their homes, the community had set up a pretty functional camp site and were providing themselves with food and water, though they desperately needed matresses to keep them off the freezing ground at night. Needless to say, sanitation is also going to be important in the next few weeks.
Hopefully donations from the hostel and other groups around La Paz will help to relieve the situation until the government sorts out new land for these communities to set up again.
Volunteers are also needed to keep the children from the community occupied while the adults try to organise things so the few of us that went up to the site ended up staying a few hours and playing football with a group of the children. They did seem genuinely happy to have some random foreigners join them, and hopefully it was a welcome distraction from what must be hard nights in the makeshift camps.

Images from the BBC here

An article about the situation here