THE DEMOCRACY CENTER ON-LINE
"TAKING THE CENSUS - BOLIVIAN STYLE"
Volume 40 - September 5, 2001
Dear Readers:
I usually don't send out issues of our newsletter so closely, back to back, but as you will see from the following, this time, it was hard to resist.
Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center
"TAKING THE CENSUS - BOLIVIAN STYLE"
It's a Bolivian lockdown, baby.
All businesses are closed. All flights are canceled. No buses. No taxis. No stores. No school. No one is allowed to leave their homes and if caught on the street by police can be taken to jail. No, Bolivia is not under another state of martial law (though it might look as such to the casual foreign observer). Today Bolivia takes its once-a-decade national census.
I've been through a few census takings in the U.S. The federal government sends you a form in the mail. Pretty simple questions, really. How many people live in your house, what ages, what ethnic origins, etc. You have a few weeks to mail it back and if you don't they send someone knocking on your door, like a teacher demanding some homework you say your dog ate. A lucky few get that long survey, the one that takes three hours to complete, with questions such as what brand of toothpaste you use and if you could be any animal, what animal would you be. I think these are to make us feel like filling out our U.S. tax forms is actually easy and fun.
No mailboxes in Bolivia. To do a census you have to go door to door, to every door in the country, all on one day. So that's why we have to stay home, so we can be counted.
You can imagine how incredibly disappointed my kids and thousands of others are to have a day off school right here in the middle of the week. Actually, the government decided for some reason that they'd make it two days and on Monday sent out the word that schools would be closed Tuesday as well - like an upstate New York (my wife is from Buffalo) snow day, but with great weather. It reminds me of the stories my Bolivian friends tell of what it was like to grow up here in the 1960s and 70s when every week or so some general would roll up in a tank to the Presidential palace and take over the government. Kids would pray at night for a coup d'etat the next morning, saving them from some big math exam they hadn't studied for. Having a census seems like a much more civilized solution to the problem.
Bolivia takes its census quite seriously, dispersing an army of 170,000 eager questioners to undertake the task. Our census taker, a young woman from down the street, confessed to being nervous at being assigned the neighborhood gringos. She wasn't sure we spoke Spanish. Those in the city have it easiest, though the government did ask that people keep their dogs inside as to minimize the total count of dog bites that will be a part of the census experience. The people carrying out the census in the rural countryside will have a harder go of it, sometimes having to walk a mile or more between the tiny adobe houses that dot the hills.
To be honest, I think the government is kidding itself with one rule: “No alcoholic beverages may be consumed in any home, hotel, restaurant or other location. So, approximately 8 million Bolivians are going to stay home all day and no one will say at any point, “Hmm, how about a beer? It is a well known fact that, yesterday, the trucks delivering “chi cha (the local alcoholic beverage favorite of fermented corn) were doing a bustling business all day.
I do, however, appreciate that the National Institute of Statistics here makes an effort to count dogs [regular readers of The Democracy Center on-line will have noted by now that I have a soft spot in my heart for Bolivian dogs]. Official government statistics reported yesterday estimated that the nation's cities are home to precisely 777,999 dogs (I am not making this up). I guess that it was too hard to count them in the countryside and the government just gave up. I also know for a fact, however, that these statistics are wrong, because our neighbor Lourdes' Dalmatian just had another batch of puppies, which pushes the national dog population up to at least 778,005.
It is a day like today that I question my rigid “Daddy, how could you be so mean? policy of not owning either a television or a VCR. I mean, really, could you think of a better excuse to veg out with a video or two than being locked up, under government orders, in your house for the day with two teenagers. Absent a TV, we'll have to satisfy ourselves making pancakes on a Wednesday and maybe a game of Monopoly.
And so goes the Bolivian national census.
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