THE DEMOCRACY CENTER ON-LINE: TAKING THE CENSUS - BOLIVIAN  STYLE

                  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" 

	Wednesday, September 5th. 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 n