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A VOLUNTARY INMATE

the gate, and the head taxista made a note of their names and who they were visiting and they had to pay before leaving. The cost was only seven bolivianos, but with visitors for over a thousand inmates, the money from the gate added up to big business for the police.

At that stage, foreigner visitors without this national ID were rarely allowed to enter the prison. I explained to the lieutenant that my wife needed to come back in and her friend also wanted to visit me. They had come all the way from Israel. I was expecting him to argue, but luckily the Israeli girls' dark features meant they didn't stand out too much from the other wives and girlfriends. The lieutenant agreed to let them in, provided we went straight to my room and stayed there. We came to an arrangement that Yasheeda would pay twenty-five bolivianos to spend another night and her friend would pay the standard seven bolivianos to enter.

Sharon was still very suspicious of me, even though I tried my hardest to be polite and charming. I can usually make people laugh with some of my stories, but she didn't want to listen to me at all. I bought her a soft drink and tried to start up a conversation about where she had been travelling, but nothing seemed to work. I have never had so much trouble getting along with anyone in my whole life. Her face had that same sour expression as on the other night at Forum, so I made myself busy in the kitchen while the girls talked in Hebrew. They started having another argument. I wondered how the two of them had ever become friends. Yasheeda was so open and warm in everything she did, but her friend was the complete opposite — angry and cold, and she hardly ever said a word.

Yasheeda later explained that Sharon was angry with her for disrupting their travel plans. They had originally planned to catch a bus south with some other Israeli friends to see Potosí, the highest town in the world. The main attraction there is the ancient mines where workers still slave under the same conditions they suffered hundreds of years ago — breaking the hard rock using hammers and chisels with nothing more than a candle on their helmets for light, then carrying the sacks of broken rocks on their backs up to the surface through the dangerous mine shafts that are filled with toxic gases.

Afterwards, the group had planned to make a tour of the Salar de Uyuni, which is a salt lake that evaporated completely, leaving thousands of square miles of salt crystal. Although I had never been there,