An Experience of Love

Bolivian Quakers’ Witness to Climate Crisis

Like many Bolivian young people, I feel grateful to have grown up among Indigenous people. They value the creation that gives them food, shelter, peace, and joy. Since I was a child, I have known that stones, mountains, rivers, plants, flowers, and animals are loved, respected, and honored by the local people, young and old, in our community. Our grandparents’ and parents’ main teaching consisted in helping us to understand and value the creation. Thus, this was the way I have felt connected to the Creator since my childhood.

Bolivian families who live in rural areas are called “peasants” by the urban citizens. Life in the rural areas where Indigenous communities are located is simple in material goods but rich in feeling the goodness of creation. For example, in the Bolivian highlands, families work in the early morning on their crops and take care of domestic animals with joy and love. When they plant quinoa, peas, and potatoes, they thank the Creator and bless the creation. As the plants grow, the people follow the weather day and night by watching the sky, clouds, rain, frost, stars, and wind as they take care of their crops. So they keep hope until the harvest season arrives once a year, which happens in March.

This system of growing their food has changed in the last 15 years in a radical way because extreme weather has threatened the planting process and the crops. One of the first effects of climate change was seeing less water in the rivers and springs, which left us with less water for drinking, bathing, and cooking and also less water for the animals and crops. For us, water has always been a blessing, like tasting the presence of the Creator. When a new baby is born, an Indigenous mother gives a drop of water to the baby as a sign to feel the creation. And when it rains, water brings us joy because there will be water for drinking and for our crops. But the extreme heat and droughts have altered this life of connectedness with the Creator through nature.

It has been heartbreaking to see each year how our rivers, springs, and mountain snow caps have disappeared from our region. It is a huge loss for us because Indigenous people depend on nature as granted by God, our Creator. Now we have to worry about water when it is rationed to each family. And we see less food now; we used to have plenty of food to nurture our bodies. Even the poorest families had food to sustain their families in the past. 

Young adult Friends showed up faithfully to work as volunteers in this project. They visited various communities to coordinate with local authorities and to get information about the families who were affected by the drought. Then they went back to these communities to distribute the potatoes. 

At the Friends International Bilingual Center, young Quakers have done different types of work regarding the environment and climate change since 2016. We built biosand water filters to provide drinking water to the families for nearly five years. We have offered environmental workshops addressed to Bolivian youth for deepening our education about the environment and climate-change issues. Above all, through these workshops, participants have the encouragement to come up with ideas and action projects to prevent the worst effects of climate change on the people. 

In 2022, Bolivians faced a terrible drought. The Indigenous families in the highland lost their potato crops. The seed potatoes died in the ground. In response, the Bolivian Quaker youth felt called to do a relief action in this time of great sorrow among Indigenous families.

In January 2023, when many Bolivian families in the highlands declared that their potato crops failed, and they wouldn’t have a harvest in the following March, Bolivian Quaker youth organized a project to help them. We called it the Food Security Project because our Indigenous families were facing starvation. Humbly, we planned to provide potatoes for eating to these families in the first part of 2023. Our hope was to raise funds for ten families, and so we arranged a budget of $50 per family, which is enough to give one hundred pounds of potatoes to a family; we hoped that this amount would last at least for a couple months. In one of the communities, we heard an elderly man saying loudly, “I will eat one potato each day,” as he held a potato in his hand with tears of joy in his eyes after he had received the bags of potatoes. With the favor of God, our project was successful because we ended up distributing potatoes to one hundred and fifty families most in need in various communities. Also, young adult Friends showed up faithfully to work as volunteers in this project. They visited various communities to coordinate with local authorities and to get information about the families who were affected by the drought. Then they went back to these communities to distribute the potatoes. The distribution of potatoes in one Indigenous community usually took from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on a Saturday.

As we said goodbye to the families once we had distributed the potatoes, the locals requested help with seed potatoes for the planting season in October. Our answer to them was a diplomatic smile and some words of hope: “If God provides donations for the seed potatoes, there will be seed potatoes for your community; please pray.” Although there was not much time to raise funds between June and August, we were able to get donations for the seed potatoes. I still remember one local authority sent a WhatsApp message in August that said, “It is snowing, which means there will be a good harvest in 2024. Please, we hope to receive the seed potatoes.” His words confirmed that it was God’s will to distribute the seed potatoes, no matter if there was money or not in our hands. By faith, we contacted the families in September 2023 to tell them that each family would get 125 pounds of seed potatoes.

In the planting season from October to November in 2023, our young adult Friends did amazing work in the process of distributing the seed potatoes. Most of our volunteers were young women. In spite of the fact that women are not often appointed as leaders, in October some of them decided to lead the volunteering team to each community. They had gotten a lot of experience in coordinating with local leaders and in talking to the gathered families during the first part of 2023. Our leaders made sure to purchase the huge bags of seed potatoes, to rent a car for the transport of the potato bags, and to arrange all logistic details both in the city and the Indigenous communities. 

Usually our volunteer leaders and their teams came back from those communities exhausted but with great joy. Whenever they shared about the experience of their service work, they said, “It was an experience of love”; “Wow, on the faces of the families there was much love and joy as they received the seed potatoes”; “I am glad I was invited to join the volunteering team because I felt filled with love”; “Please, let me know when you go to another community next time because this is the type of work I was feeling led to do in ministry.” Thanks to the love of these young volunteers and the Quaker donors in the United States, more than three hundred Indigenous families joyfully received seed potatoes by November 2023.

We are still running this Food Security Project by distributing food items in both highlands and in the jungle areas where there are droughts, flooding, and fires. Doing this service project has been a wonderful transforming experience for both the volunteers and the Indigenous families.

In March 2024, we visited these families again to ask them how the harvest went. Most of them showed us tons of beautiful huge potatoes. Some of them cooked the new potatoes for us to thank us. And they told us that they now had enough food for the whole year and new seed potatoes for planting the crops. That experience encouraged us to offer the same support to other Indigenous communities in October 2024. We distributed the seed potatoes to another 244 families, even though there were political, social, and economic crises in our country. Now we are still running this Food Security Project by distributing food items in both highlands and in the jungle areas where there are droughts, flooding, and fires. The service projects have been a wonderful transforming experience for both the volunteers and the Indigenous families. However, there is still much work to do among Indigenous families in my country due to the severe effects of climate change.