Category: Countries

Upon arriving in Sucre, I called my friend Sonia and was taken to the home of some YWAMers nearby. This was my reason for being here – to work in this home and help the King’s Kids branch of YWAM develop their own web site.

Looking down on the city of Sucre from its highest point.

This family was different to most Bolivian families. Their mother was Austrian and the kids had faces that looked like gringos (foreigners). Their father was Bolivian and they had lived in Bolivia most of their lives, so they were truly Bolivian, with the combined hospitality of both the Austrians and the Bolivians.

Rather than resting after such arduous travel, I decided to press on with the work as Sonia was leaving in the afternoon and we needed her assistance in some of the things that we were doing. We achieved a lot in that day.

Sonia left in the late afternoon, at which point I was given a motorcycle tour around the town and then dropped off down near the university. From here I wandered back down the streets, stopping at various places until I made my way to the central plaza.

The central plaza by night.

In the central plaza a young boy around 10 years old asked if he could clean my shoes. We got chatting and he told me about how his dad worked in another part of the country and sent him here to go to school, and how his mum was not around so he had to work for the money to feed and clothe himself.

Not once did this boy put on the begging face that I had seen in so many others, but he persisted in asking for food, so I took him to a nearby eatery and purchased him a meal. The waitress serving at the time already knew him, and warned me that he would go out onto the streets with the food and sell it again rather than eating it. This was a ploy that I had not yet been aware of. She told me that she would make sure he stayed there and ate the food for himself.

The young lad that asked me for food in the plaza.

The next day was another day of work, with a lot of work on the web site and also training up the guy that was going to do much of the work on it.

Just before lunch I ran down to the bus terminal, only several blocks away to purchase a ticket, and was dumbfounded at how unfit I was in not even being able to run a couple of blocks without gasping for air. It was only as I was struggling along on the return leg that I realised that we were in a city at a very high altitude, which was probably causing these symptoms.

That evening I left the family, thanking them for their hospitality and boarding my overnight bus to Santa Cruz. My time in Sucre had been extremely short, leaving me with a desire to return one day and discover more of this interesting little town.

Now I was looking onward to the large city of Santa Cruz.