Querida Cochabamba:

Another day another destiny! (For the enjoyment of all the Les Mis fans out there haha)

Hello everyone!

I leave tomorrow for Cochabamba, Bolivia and I’m super excited/anxious/nervous (but mostly excited). I can’t wait to meet my host family, my coworkers, and the children I’ll be working with. I know it will be a super challenging, but ultimately amazing experience. For my first post, I would like to explain the social issue I will be working with while I’m in Cochabamba.

It’s interesting to try to define the “social issue” that I’m working with because what I will actually be doing involves education; however, I would not assign that as my social issue. I will be working with children in an orphanage, so perhaps my social issue is the noun form of that, the prevalence of “orphanhood.” Once again, I’m not really sure if that would be the best way to describe it either, especially if looking at it from an American perspective. The majority of children in orphanages in Bolivia (I’ve read figures that state 60%) are not living in orphanages because their parents have passed away, but rather, because poverty has made their family unable to afford to take care of them. Part of me would like to say then that the social issue I’ll be addressing is poverty, and maybe it partially is. I would like to think that in teaching music to the children, in caring for them and showing them love, I will in some small way help to break their cycle of poverty by giving them something that they can grasp, something they can be passionate about, something that can give them hope. But…then the realist inside of me pops up and says, “C’mon. You’re not ending their poverty. Stop kidding yourself,” and so I’m reluctant to declare that as the social issue I’m addressing as well. Perhaps the reason I’m having so much difficulty in assigning one word or phrase to this is that it is kind of a combination of all of these things, not really any of them alone, but pieces of each put together. Maybe part of the problem too is simply the fact that I have never really experienced any of this firsthand yet. In my mind and from my research, I currently hold the idea that this is an issue of inspiring a passion for music in the hearts of children who have been greatly affected by poverty and that this issue is one that needs to be addressed; however, my perspective on this could easily change once I actually arrive and start doing work. We shall see.

Thank you for reading my first post! Hopefully, I will be able to write many many more to keep you all updated! Thank you so much for your support. Please keep me in your prayers. You’ll be in mine 🙂

P.S. Feel free to send me snail mail if you like! I’ll try to answer you back as quickly as I can 🙂 Here’s my postal address:

Laurel Bingman/CO Carmen Herbas
Apartado Postal # 368
Correo Central
Cochabamba
Bolivia

Love,

Laurel Bingman