This year is the 25th anniversary of Yoli’s high school graduation (or “promo” as they call it here).
Getting together with her classmates was one of the things that motivated us to come on this trip. I haven’t mentioned it so far in our blog entries, but coming to Bolivia in the summer first required us to travel to Washington DC to get Yoli a new Bolivian passport and ID card (“carnet”). We turned that into a family vacation as we try to do, and we had a lot of fun. But dealing with the Bolivian consulate was decidedly NOT fun. They informed us that they had no record of our marriage, despite all the paperwork we did six years ago, when we last traveled to DC. We had to do everything over. Getting all the necessary papers required more money and a couple months.
All this to say that: it takes a lot of time, effort, and money to travel here. It’s more than just buying a (pricy) plane ticket and getting on the plane.