Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 211
corpus of the trust from the U.S. to Bolivia because the bank interest rates were much
higher there and easier for him to manage. Within a year the fund disappeared in one of
the worst inflations of Bolivia’s recorded history. My efforts to help teach people how to
fish instead of giving them fish evaporated again.
Almost 20 years after I had first become involved with her work, Mother Consolata was
gone and her children had become wards of the state. I learned that she had left
Cochabamba sad and depressed by the treatment she got from the pro-communist
managers who took over her orphanage. I was told that she had gone back to her native
Austria. My niece Diana’s maternal homeland is also the Austrian Alps around Salzburg.
In the summer of 1986 she spent a few weeks there with her mother. While in Europe
for other reasons, I decided to visit Salzburg and see both of them. Mother Consolata
had returned to her birthplace to retire in a monastery set in a beautiful small valley. My
visit evoked recollections of treks to see a guru in some far away place. She was old
and wise, a true guru; but I was still unhappy with how her life’s work had been
despoiled. This was a woman I had come to admire through my association with the
orphanage.
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SELF-HELP
As I say, American emergency charity is unconditional. But rightly so, it is limited. We
give the victims of tragedy fish, but we don’t teach them how to fish. Really lasting help
comes when we reach the people directly and teach them how to be self-reliant. A good
example of this policy was the Peace Corps initiative of President John Kennedy.
Shortly after President Barrientos took the reins of the Bolivian government, Peace
Corps volunteers began arriving in Bolivia. I opened my house to them and began to
form friendships that lasted for a lifetime.
Somewhere in mid-1965, I was invited by the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, Bolivia to
participate in a program called Partners of the Alliance. It was a mini-extension into
private citizenship of the Alliance for Progress, the plan that President Kennedy put
together for his Latin American policy. The central idea of the “Partners” was to connect
private individuals in Latin American countries with private entrepreneurs in the U.S. to
see if together they could generate economic activity. I was asked to lead the group in
Cochabamba, which convinced me that the image my former employer had tried to
project of me being an American-hater had not taken hold. (See Professional Practice,
Chapter 3).
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