The price of groceries tripled today and many types of foods are completely unavailable, but that didn´t stop us from going to a salteñeria and then a Tarijan restaurant to eat some good traditional food with the extended family today. I had some cow tongue, ranga, pig skin, giant corn, aged potatoes, and keperi. We are all enjoying ourselves before the thousands of Massista marchers arrive. Very shortly, the city will be undergoing a kind of silent siege.

Well, things have calmed down somewhat. It´s really hard for an entire country to be this tense for this long. We are all waiting to see what will happen in Cochabamba today. Yesterday morning, four of the five prefects (the prefect of Pando is in La Paz right now being tried on charges of ¨genocide¨) agreed to commence with negotiations even though the prefect of Tarija was unable to reach an agreement in his peace-talks earlier this week. Both sides feel deep mistrust and anger about how things have panned out, but the average Bolivian is sick of uneasiness and fear.

Before I left for my Rotary exchange to Bolivia, Joanna Miller interviewed me and told me that the Prior Lake American website has blog-hosting capabilities should I feel the need to update folks back home. I´ve been in Bolivia for a little over a month now, and I´ve been dutifully keeping my own private blog (www.boliviablog.braveblog.com), but I didn´t see the need to start a Prior Lake American blog until now.