TIPS FOR ORGANIZING TOURS:

· Plan FAR in advance. Six months is ideal. Otherwise you will likely have a rushed tour that doesn’t adequately take advantage of all the time and energy needed to make it work.

· Be sure to start the visa process EARLY! This can be difficult and it is best if you have someone in country who can help.

· You first need to determine which cities you plan to have them go to. Take into account cost, distance and where you have people to help.

· A good place for people to speak that can bring in funds to pay for the tour is universities, but in most cases, it is best to start this process early – September and February are actually a good time for US universities (September and January for Canada – check “academic calendars” and the name of the university for elsewhere), because it is the beginning of the semester and less hectic for everyone.

Basically you are aiming to get things moving a semester in advance in the universities that have the most speakers and most international interest (and usually the most money). The best resource I can suggest for possible university contacts is the Bolivian Studies Association which has an extensive list publicly available of academics interested in Bolivia. I would pick your cities, figure out the universities in each city and then see if there are any bolivianistas there. Then, and this is crucial, I suggest you figure out if anyone knows this person and will either send them a personal note, or let you use his/her name to approach him or her because you are more likely to get a response if the letter begins 'so and so suggested i get in touch with you about'.

The other thing to try and do with universities is to get various departments to co-sponsor the speaker. This way if a number of departments chips in $200, you can come up with a reasonable speaker fee to raise funds.

· Other suggested places: schools, churches, community organizations, labor unions, etc. etc.

· You MUST have someone on the ground to accompany, arrange logistics and so on. It is a huge job so someone must be realistically able to take it on. On the Felix Muruchi tour (US), the main organizer has over 200 emails for a four city tour (and he hasn’t gotten here yet!)

· You should have local coordinators in each place s/he is going who are pulling together the logistics there with the backup of the main coordinator. Ideally someone would accompany the whole tour and serve as translator, liason and so on.

· You need people with strong spanish skills in each place and you need spanish speaking places for your speaker to stay. Especially in the places they stay, they should be people who know something about the culture the person is coming from, and ideally can prepare or have on hand culture-appropriate foods (makes people feel comfortable and at home). Be sure that they get more than junk food to eat (when i went to interview Oscar Olivera in Cbba two years after he had toured here, the first thing he said to me was "yes, of course i remember you, you're the woman who gave me pastel de quinua at her house. it was the best meal of the whole trip").

· You need to be sure not to overload your speakers (i've had people come through here who were being made to speak 8 or 9 times a day!). They  need some time off – to sightsee, to visit friends and family, to shop for gifts for families (I could tell stories about being with Nepali visitors in Walmart….)

· You need to be sure to give cultural orientation to your tour people who have never travelled internationally (we had a group of six [amazing] amazon indigenous leaders stay in an empty apt we had in san francisco, and they really didn't understand indoor plumbing - we dealt with it because we've been places where indoor plumbing is a novelty but not everyone in northern countries would have be able to do this).

· You need to make sure your speaker knows what to bring in terms of clothes, climate etc.

· It is important that your tour people get the chance to learn something about the host country in their area of interest (for example, water privatization perhaps or factory workers or women’s organizations or other latin American countries etc. etc).

· Decide on your talk titles/themes well beforehand and encourage the speaker to work on his/her presentation. Photos, maps, powerpoint etc. etc. can all make a presentation more interesting and more accessible to an audience, many of whom may know nothing about Bolivia. Ideal is if there is someone incountry who can work with the person to develop their presentation(s).