Taking $10,000 Cash To Green the Driest Barrio in Bolivia

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]I'm taking $10,000 in physical cash to Bolivia to help 50 local women green the desert. They are turning the baron wasteland at the back of their house into a thriving food forest to feed their children. In this video, we'll show you how they are doing this without access to running water and why we need to bring crisp dollar bills to take this project to the next level so that this entire dusty bario can become a lush green oasis. This is Santa Rosa de Lima, a marginalized community located over an hour and a half's drive outside of the city of Cochab Bamba. Up here, hundreds of displaced families are struggling to build lives in an incredibly harsh environment. Without reliable transport, simply getting to the city is a major hurdle, leaving women and children in the community completely isolated. I've come to meet an amazing woman who is organizing some absolutely incredible life-changing projects here. This is Ka and she's going to be showing me some of the amazing solutions that they're implementing here. I have been working here for 10 years with women in this community using ancestral techniques to transform the land because the people here are migrants from rural Bolivia.

[00:01:13]Moving to the city means they are losing their customs. This project is a safe way to revive these customs in an area that is not always secure.

[00:01:21]>> Casper explained to me that there are a lot of children here with about four to five children in each family. But because of the lack of fresh vegetables, there are hunger and malnutrition issues that especially affects young people.

[00:01:33]Casper is taking us to meet an incredible woman who has achieved the unthinkable by growing food where it's supposed to be impossible.

[00:01:45]This is Emma and she's going to show us her garden where she's growing enough food for her and her family. Let's go and have a look here on what is a very modest patch. Emma is doing two amazing things. The first is that she is growing enough fresh food to feed her family of five all year round. And the second is that she is doing it in a place where growing anything is normally impossible.

[00:02:08]Emma has told me that the soil looked like this before. It's very hard, rocky, and infertile. So, how have you managed to make the soil fertile so you can grow so many vegetables?

[00:02:18]>> The ground in this area is very hard and compacted, but we are using a secret ingredient we learned from our ancestors to transform it.

[00:02:26]>> And today, she's going to reveal their ancient secret ingredient. But Emma isn't alone. She is part of a growing movement. How many women in this community are growing food in their gardens?

[00:02:38]>> So far, there are 50 women here with organic gardens.

[00:02:42]>> Emma told us all of the women are growing enough food to feed their families. They also exchange products they don't have with each other. But how do 50 women who don't have access to running water feed their gardens? Well, Caster has been working with the women to overcome this challenge. and we will take a look at how a mother and daughter have managed to store 14,000 L of water.

[00:03:03]But the next place Castor is taking us to is using ancient engineering to do something really important by generating an income from the vegetable gardens in the community and helping new families to grow their own food. It's the newly built community seed house that's using special ancient intelligence in its design. The seed house has been built with adobe. This keeps the seeds cool inside. They've also allowed for air to circulate at the top and they've used this cane. This allows for the longevity of the seeds. This area is not connected to the water system or water mane. So there's no other way to get water apart from to bring it in and buy it, which is quite expensive. The seed house has a tin roof. This means they can capture rainwater, but at the moment they have nowhere to store it.

[00:03:49]>> We want to construct a reservoir to collect rain water built from the stones and earth and materials that are in this area. We think this project is so great that we want to support it because they still need our help. There's a lot to do here. They need to build a wall around this seed bankank for security cuz we're in a neighborhood that's very poor and there's a bit of danger danger here.

[00:04:09]They also have a patch of land behind the seed bankank that they want to secure as a place to grow plants for more seeds. So, the community would like to buy this area here from where I'm standing all the way to the seed house.

[00:04:22]Some of these plants like the trees are native and they're very beneficial. So we'll be conserving those and then also in other areas we'll be transforming the clay hard dirt into fertile soil to plant vegetables so we can grow them for seeds. So here you can see in detail the problem just how rocky it is. There's quite large rocks around. It's very hard. It's clay and that means there's not that much fertility here because there isn't enough organic matter in the soil. So we're going to transform this land and make it fertile with your help.

[00:04:55]Make sure to check out the link in the description below if you want to support this mission. Thanks to this amazing community, we've already raised 40% of our target. We're hoping to close the remaining gap before we set off in 1 month to handdel the cash. More on exactly how that works later in the video. But first, what can you do if you don't have any access to water? Casper took us to meet a family that now has water in a place where there isn't any.

[00:05:22]Hola, I'm here with Renata and Paula. Although there is no water supply in the bario, as you can see, Ranata has water to feed her plants. And it's all because they have created an ingenious system to capture rain water. In fact, it's so successful they needed to do something else that's quite ingenious to store it all. They've created this giant reservoir.

[00:05:50]The rain is captured from these gutters on the roof is brought into this tank and then this pipe connects with the reservoir to take the overflow and store the water. When the water is needed for the garden, it's actually pumped up through these pipes and into these tanks. So, here is the pump which takes the water from the reservoir up into the tanks.

[00:06:13]From the pump down there, they bring the water up into this tank. Then they fill up this bucket which they attach with this hose and use the gravity to water the garden. The water that's been pumped up from the reservoir is now being fed by gravity into the hose. This helps the family to water their plants for 3 months during the dry season. To install this water system, the family puts up 50% of the cost. The other 50% is donated by Caster's organization. What's amazing is that Caster's organization has supported 12 families to do this and hopefully they'll be able to do a lot more. Systems like these are really important because they're allowing people to grow food in very poor areas of Bolivia where they don't have access to water. But delivering your vital donations to Caster's project is currently a logistical challenge. The local currency has collapsed against the US dollar. Transferring your donation cuts its value in half. But in cash, it's worth twice as much. That's why we have to deliver it in person. But foreign cards rarely work at the ATMs and the airport kiosk have terrible rates. So our first mission is navigating the city to find an exchange house. But because of constant violent protests, for our safety, I will be using my eSIM in advance to coordinate reliable transport. Hunting for a physical SIM card at a chaotic airport isn't an option. Instead, I use SY, a global eSIM app that's available on both Android and iOS. I just opened the app, selected the Bolivia plan, and activated it. They cover over 180 countries, including high data ultra plans, which are perfect for longer expeditions. So, wherever you're off to next, don't get lost in the Judicial Desert. Go to s.com/leafoflife or scan the QR code on the screen. and use code leaf of life at checkout to get an exclusive 15% discount off your data plans.

[00:08:08]The community is spread out across these hills high above the city of Kocha Bambber and exists because this area has the cheapest land closest to the city basically because it's close to the main trash dump. It's the definition of isolated and vulnerable with high crime rates, extreme poverty, and roaming packs of dogs. This is a typical barrier shop.

[00:08:30]>> In Bolivian barios, it's common for shops to appear behind sturdy iron bars as a security measure. To protect against theft, it's because this is an area where the police never come. So instead of entering the shop, customers conduct transactions through small openings directly with the shopkeeper inside. So this little shop here is called a tienda de barrier. It's a place where people can buy kind of basic goods that they need like eggs and there's water. I can see that there's toilet paper, things like that because the supermarket's very far away.

[00:09:04]Caster wanted to introduce me to some of the young people from the bario. Caster is part of an initiative that supports local families with seeds and tools to help them grow their own food. This is really important because there is so little fresh food available here. So, how many of you have got gardens where you're growing food at home?

[00:09:30]So, do >> the amazing thing about this is that it shouldn't be possible to grow anything at all here, which is why Caster is taking us to see how they are using ancient wisdom to achieve the impossible here. So before we do that, we're just going to buy some ice pots for the children here cuz it's so hot. They need some refreshments.

[00:09:54]>> It's incredibly hot here and we all need to cool down. Much gracias. Bolivia has a migration problem within its own borders due to an ongoing economic crisis that's severely impacted rural areas experiencing what's been dubbed as a rural exodus with people forced to escape the deepening poverty in their remote communities and migrate to urban centers in search of informal jobs.

[00:10:19]>> So what are the ancient Inca techniques Emma is using to turn compacted ground into fertile soil? Let's go back to her beautiful garden to find out. Emmo is using an ancient Inca technique to transform compacted clay soil. Used for millennia in Bolivia, but only recently understood by modern science. So, here we can see this is the soil that they're using. It's very compacted and hard.

[00:10:44]What they do is they use this tool to break up the ground and mix in ash and charcoal into the hard clay earth.

[00:10:51]>> This is the hard earth we have here.

[00:10:53]First I break it up a lot and then I mix it together with ash and charcoal to make it more fertile.

[00:11:00]>> By mixing porous charcoal into dense clay, it creates vital pore spaces which improves drainage and irration significantly increases water retention and the soil's ability to hold essential nutrients while also providing a stable habitat for beneficial microorganisms.

[00:11:16]But it's not just the charcoal and ash alone. Emma is recycling all the organic waste from the garden to fertilize the soil.

[00:11:24]>> To complete the transformation, I add organic material like dry leaves and branches and my vegetable food waste that I compost as well as some sheep manure and cow manure. And together with the ash and charcoal, it makes this super fertile soil.

[00:11:39]>> And finally, Emma covers the ground with mulch to protect the soil from drying out. Here on top is very dry, but underneath, as you can see, is damp, so it doesn't need much watering.

[00:11:52]>> Emma is not just using ancient techniques to grow food. She is also using them to prepare food. These are stones that are used traditionally here to grind up hot chili sauces.

[00:12:07]The ingredients are placed onto the surface of the stone like tomatoes, chilies, and they use this stone and also this smaller stone to grind them up.

[00:12:18]>> So, what's really interesting to see is that a lot of the plants are left to go to seed. And that's because they're saving the seeds to use for a seed business. The communityrun business also provides seeds for new families to start growing their own food. This is where we're going to buy some seeds from the community to take to a remote part of Bolivia. The next place we are visiting is so remote they don't have access to fresh vegetables and fruits, which means there is a big problem with malnutrition, especially with young people. So, we are going to buy thousands of seeds from the seed house to take to three awesome school projects where they are growing fresh vegetables to feed the students in their school meals. There's tomato, cherry, potatoes, lettuce, parsley, we've got pumpkins.

[00:13:05]There's another type of pumpkin that's yellow. And we've got a type of beans that's very special because it can grow all year round and it doesn't need a lot of water, which is perfect because the location we're going to doesn't have a lot of water. 4 5 6 7 8 9 We've got 38 packs of seeds here. And there's approximately 12,000 seeds in total.

[00:13:31]Incredibly, it's only $20. So, we're going to double that as a thank you to the community to help them. Here you go.

[00:13:40]>> Muchas gracias.

[00:13:42]>> Muchas gracias.

[00:13:44]>> They also have an amazing plan to green the desert here using the mysterious ancestral method we saw earlier in Emma's garden.

[00:13:51]>> I'm hoping that we can all get together and help this community to achieve this.

[00:13:56]If you want to find out more, check out our links below.

[00:14:02]Don't forget to subscribe for the next episode when we'll be going to see the home of potato domestication in the remote high desert region where the families of Santa Rosa de Lima are from to take the seeds we bought here to three incredible school greening the desert projects. And if you enjoyed this video, give it a like down below. Thanks for watching.