Notes

Hello, my North American cousins. I am Margarita from the capital of Bolivia, La Paz. Let me tell you a little bit about my homeland and maybe you can come to love Bolivia as much as I do. Bolivia is not a wealthy nation. In fact, we are the poorest in South America, which is very sad, but things are getting better. For a long time, we had a corrupt government, which stole from our people and really hurt our economy. In the past 20 years or so, our economy has been growing and our leaders are trying to do their best to make things better. We might become a wealthy nation still because of our huge amount of natural resources in our country. We have the second largest field of natural gas in South America. Only Venezuela’s is bigger. Bolivia also owns El Mutun, the world’s largest deposit of iron and magnesium. But it has been difficult for us to use our bounty to gain wealth because of our poor conditions and bad government. We have not built the infrastructures to turn the resource into money. Hopefully, in the coming years, that will change and Bolivia will grow like never before.