Bolivia blog 10: Illimani and the Khapi community

Kirsty Wright, WDM climate justice campaigner

“Sin preguntas, sin negociar, el agua es vida” read one of the last billboards I saw as I was leaving La Paz. "Without question, without negotiation: water is life". The right to water, and the fear of losing it, has been a common theme since I arrived in Bolivia. Realising the right to water has long been a struggle for people here, even before the famous water wars in 2000. Now climate change brings a new threats, with melting glaciers and erratic rainfalls putting new pressures on the already scarce resources.

Yesterday, I went to visit the Khapi community at the foothills of the Illimani glacier that overlooks La Paz, dominating the skyline. Illimani has long been said by indigenous Aymara communities to be a guardian of the people. There’s certainly some wisdom in this. Not only is the glacier the source of water for the hundred of communities who live in the hills below it, as well as upwards of twenty percent of La Paz’s water supply (some estimate that it is closer to forty percent), but these agricultural communities are also the gardens of the La Paz, providing fruit and vegetables to the city dwellers below.

“The snow used to come down to there” said the village leader I was speaking with said pointing to the bottom of a thin slither of snow, as the sun set behind us, layering the glacier  with a warm orange glow. “When we were children we used to be able to walk up and touch the snow. Now you can’t get to the snow at all.”

Though the people of the small Khapi community have only recently heard about climate change through the work of Auga Sustentable, based in La paz, they’ve been aware that things are changing for a long time now. Plagues, the melting snow, and stronger sun, burning fiercely at the high altitude, have all pushed people to leave the community. Now there are about forty families living here. Just a few years ago there were over seventy. Sitting in this beautiful place, seeing these hard but simple lives that I found it hard not to envy, I found it really difficult that these people, who have only had access to the smallest amount of electricity for the past fifteen years, may soon be forced to leave. Access to water is not the main issue at the moment, as the melting glaciers have meant that they actually have more water. But once the snow disappears, as has already happened in other places, life here will become unliveable. 

It’s clear that in Bolivia climate change is not a problem for the future, but a problem for now. Though I knew this before, experiencing it, really feeling what it means for the first time, has been a harsh confrontation with reality. For many people who have been here in Bolivia for the cumbre, this reality will go home with them, as it will go home with me, and strengthen the struggle for climate justice around the world.