Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 73
had as much a stake in it as we did, the principal refused to help out. This event took
place several months before we had started to procure weapons, but we were still able
to gather a few guns, pistols, .22 rifles, shotguns and even knives and cameras. We
camped overnight in the classrooms during the critical week of this threat.
Later I was told that the governor of the State of Cochabamba (Department) had
discouraged the union leaders from attempting a takeover because he knew we were
there and he felt the time wasn’t ripe yet for a confrontation of that sort. I remember the
courageous support of my friends Orlando Joffre, an electrical engineer who managed
the local Power Company, and Modesto Sejas, a bootstrapping local entrepreneur
driven to improve himself, who helped me organize the resistance. One of Orlando’s
sons later graduated from Texas A&M. By no means were they the only freedom
fighters on the board or in the community. We were all afraid but some hadn’t even
started to fight yet.
Unfortunately, my experience with our expatriate teaching staff was quite disappointing.
With funds and recruiting help from the U. S. Embassy in La Paz, after reviewing
resumes from several candidates, we selected a gentleman from New York by the
name of Yehuda Hershowitz as the new school principal. One of his charges was to hire
some fourteen teachers in the U.S. and send them to Bolivia as our main educational
staff. A few months after he took over, I was surprised to learn that my children had
been returned home from school because Mr. Hershowitz had declared a religious
holiday. In curt response to my inquiry he informed me that twelve other teachers and
himself were of the Jewish faith, that the day was a Jewish day of observance and that
they wanted to have the same consideration as Catholic religious holidays.
One difference, which he chose to ignore, was that Bolivia has an official state religion,
and it is Catholicism. Consequently, the holidays are dictated by the state and not by
the church. Another regrettable act was that he declared the holiday on his own
recognizance, snubbing the authority of the board. Yet, he insisted on his position
based on the religious make up of the teaching staff. Rather than fire him, the board had
no choice but to let him finish his year because there was no way of replacing twelve
American teachers in Cochabamba if they decided to support their principal, which it
appeared they would do.
As a consequence of this conflict, he disdained our predicament with the threatened
takeover of the school by the leftist teachers union and denied us his and the teaching
staff’s support to defend our premises. In his political calculations, he preferred to shift
all the risks of losing the institution to the local parents. Needless to say that he left a
very poor impression not only of himself but also of the high-handed way with which he
forced upon us his Jewish majority determinations. He imposed his religious beliefs on
the rest of us and gave us a lesson on how to avoid risks that could be passed on to
someone else. In retrospect I see this example as a possible outcome of public policy
that mixes church and state and disregard of local authority by foreign hires. First, it
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