Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (free ebook reader txt) 📕

figure out a way to manage the danger. It’s not great, but it’s the best option I have right now.

I sigh. No good choices.

“I’ll take it,” I say, pulling the words out of myself like the dentist pulls rotten molars.

As I try not to think too hard about what I’m signing myself up for, we agree on the details. I’m expected at the mouth of the mine tonight at sunset. I’ll make thirty-five bolivianos for every night of fear and loneliness I put in. It’s not much. But, I remind myself, it’s something. And it’s guaranteed. Even the men who work in the mining cooperative aren’t guaranteed their pay. They only get paid a portion of what they can bring out. If they don’t manage to bring out much, like on the day of the disaster when Papi was killed, or if what they bring out is mostly poor-quality rock, low in the ores that the manufacturing plants want, then they don’t get paid much. If they’re sick, or hurt, or don’t work for whatever reason, they don’t get paid at all.

It’s something. And something is more than nothing.

“Well then,” says Don Carmelo, “I guess I’ll see you tonight.”

“I’ll be there,” I hear myself saying. “Thank you, Don Carmelo.”

After leaving the condor’s house, I walk until I get to the slag heap where Mami and Abuelita are working with half a dozen other women. Belén’s not with them. She must have run off to play with friends. I think wistfully to the days when I was young enough that I could run away from work. I am not that young anymore. I tuck my shaking hands behind my back so the women won’t see my fear.

“Ana!” Abuelita calls. “It’s good to see you. Mónica told us the whole story of how you waited overnight to make sure you got the medicine. Good job.”

I smile at her, wondering what that story will be embroidered into by the end of the day.

“Come,” Mami says, indicating a boulder near her for me to sit and work with them. “Belén’s at home in case César needs anything. You can sit here and work with us.”

I feel a twinge of sadness that I was wrong about Belén still being allowed to play. It makes me feel even less like listening to Doña Elena complain about her aching hip and Doña Marisol talk about her daughter’s upcoming wedding. But I fold onto my knees at the edge of the group and start breaking rocks anyway because I’m not quite sure how to say what I need to.

It turns out the women are in the middle of a fairly intense conversation. It seems rude to interrupt them with my news, so I sit quietly and wait for an opening.

“. . . I still say the government should nationalize the mines again,” Doña Marisol is saying. “This switch to little cooperatives leaves us all vulnerable.”

Some of the women nod. Despite myself, I find I’m paying attention. Our whole lives change every time the price of mineral goes up or down. Would we be better off if things were different?

But Mami is shaking her head. “Prices for metals are set by international markets. There’s no way for the government to control that.”

“The government would find a way,” Doña Elena huffs, “and I’d rather have one of us running things than some international power. Give them a hand and they’ll take your whole arm. Remember the Water Wars of 2000?”

Even I know what she’s talking about. It was four years before I was born, but they teach it in school and lots of people still talk about it. Years before Evo Morales got elected president, the Bolivian government needed a loan from the World Bank to improve the waterworks for our third-largest city. But one of the terms of the loan was that they had to privatize it: sell the public water service to a foreign company. Bechtel, the largest construction company in the United States of America, ended up owning all the water in Cochabamba—a city of 800,000 people—even the water that fell from the sky. When they doubled the price of water overnight and padlocked the public taps, a huge protest broke out. Protesters were met with tear gas and bullets. Six people were killed and 175 were wounded. It was partially the anger over this Water War that helped Morales become president.

“Corporations, pah!” adds Abuelita. “How is what they do any different from the way the Spaniards enslaved the Inca and took the silver out of this very hill to make themselves rich?”

“Not the Spaniards again,” mutters Doña Elena under her breath.

Abuelita bristles. “Yes, the Spaniards! Our rulers were always Europeans, all the way back to the colonial times. Even Simón Bolívar, the great liberator, was just another European. We indigenous—Quechua, Aymara, Chiquitano, the Guaraní down in the Amazon—we’ve always been the majority. It’s about time we keep our wealth here instead of sending it off to make others rich. Tell me,” she goes on, fixing Doña Elena with a glare, “how can a corporation in San Francisco own the rain that falls in Bolivia? Rain belongs to God.”

I love the fact that, even though Abuelita and Doña Elena are basically agreeing with each other, they’re still fighting.

“Yes, well, everyone’s a good socialist until they get a taste of power,” says Mami. It’s interesting to see Mami participate in political conversations. She never offered opinions when Papi was still with us, but out here, surrounded by no one but other women, she speaks freely. I wonder whether she would voice these opinions around César and how he would react if she did. “Then they hoard money for themselves as much as anyone. Look at the Morales government now—as corrupt as any government ever was.”

“How so?” asks Doña Marisol. “He took power away from the U.S. corporations and the World Bank. He gave us a new constitution, a new, indigenous flag. He brought women into the government