Last week, the mayor of my town was kicked out of office. He didn´t even make it a year, which is not unusual for a Bolivian politician, but the unusual thing is that it doesn´t seem to be his fault. Apparently, two members of his staff recently became intimately involved causing certain members of my community to deem them unfit to perform their jobs. In order to oust said couple from their government positions, the community members elected to oust the entire staff. What this means for me is that I lose my entire mayor´s office that I was just getting to know and like. It was full of young, energetic people who I really enjoyed, and now it will be refilled with unknowns. I also lose Carlos, my favorite work partner, because he was a full-time government employee; and I lose half of Lourdes, who was partially employed by the local government and partially employed by an organization in Tarija. She will try to seek full employment with the Tarijan organization, but who knows if she will be successful? At least I still have Ana.

This is how it works here. If we don´t like the mayor we kick him out. When we kick him out we also kick out everyone he brought with him when he was hired. Carlos knew everything there was to know about PAN, he worked well as a facilitator, he had established good relationships with both the central PAN office in Tarija and the cooks and educators who worked in his PAN centers. Now he has to leave, and he will be replaced by someone with no experience and no knowledge of the organization whatsoever. This person will have to learn to do the job that Carlos was already doing well until the mayor who hired him or her gets booted and the whole cycle repeats. The entire country works like this. No wonder we´re a little behind in our development.

In other news, in case you haven´t heard, Evo has declared out of spite that United States citizens must now apply for visas to visit Bolivia. The good news is that he hasn´t decided how he will implement his brilliant plan yet. He has two options: the pre-pay plan and the instant gratification plan. The pre-pay plan is for you non-procrastinators and involves you sending in a bunch of paperwork and a fat check months before travelling and waiting to receive your visa in the mail. The instant gratification plan would mean that you could get all the way to the Bolivian airport before having to pay a fee to get your ¨visa¨ to enter the country. I vote for instant gratification. Evo will be meeting with Congress in April to decide which route to take, and the brilliant visa plan will be implemented in May. So, if you were planning on vacationing in lovely Bolivia (which I highly recommend), get in and get out before May or pay.

In more personal news, I am having kind of a severe allergic reaction to something. Two nights ago, my palms started to itch and my hands began to swell up. I woke up yesterday morning with normal hands but a breakout of hives all over my body, and by the time I made it to the hospital my feet were pulling the same routine my hands had done the night before. The doctor gave me a shot in the arm and a shot in the rump, and all symptoms magically disappeared. He prescribed five pills for the next five days and told me not to eat anything with preservatives in it.... meaning nothing. I didn´t exactly follow his advice, and here I am today with more hives. The problem is that Bolivian food doesn´t come as thoroughly labeled as American food, so you don´t always know exactly what you´re putting in your body. Besides, this whole ¨natural food¨ diet interferes with my usual philosophy of ¨if it looks good, eat it.¨ Will power, Sarah. Will power. If my hands and feet swell up again, I´ll go back to the doctor.

Hope your lives are political upheaval- and outbreak-free.

The opinions expressed in this blog are the opinions of Sarah Anderson and do not reflect those of the United States Government or the Peace Corps.