COCHABAMBA, Bolivia | The night air smells of pine and dust. We are students from abroad, playing cards on the second floor of a Bolivian villa, in a mountain valley, beneath southern stars many of us have never seen before.

The dawn will arrive at six, but the sun will not shine until nine, when it climbs over the enclosing valley walls. We wear fleeces for warmth, but at midday, the 11 of us peel off our covering and seek shade to avoid sunburn.

At lunch, our host, Alejandra, speaks with us in Spanish, ever-smiling, explaining Bolivian life. There is a plethora of electricity, food and conversation. However, in one of life’s greater ironies, in this city of Cochabamba, a name which translates to “the place of water,” water is scarce. The city’s river is completely dry, and the levee of the riverbed is a green lawn, with ladders climbing to reach homes built of scrap metal. During the summer months, it rains every day. During the winter month of June, it never rains at all.

Cochabamba’s urban problems have been the subject of several documentaries, including “The Corporation” and “Thirst.” Just a few years ago, the Bolivian government sought the services of a multinational corporation to privatize the water supply of Cochabamba’s 800,000 residents. The infrastructure brought so many technical problems the company charged each person a quarter of the average income for drinking water. The Cochabambinos protested and won their water back, but the faulty system has never truly improved.

“Some always have water,” said Ismael Saavedra, director for the School of International Training’s Lens on Latin America program, which we began Thursday. “Some have water every day but not every hour, some all day but not every day, and some have no water at all.”

We sit on the garden patio chewing coca leaves and discussing films. Saavedra’s curly black beard covers his neck from the sun, which glints off his silver-loop lobe earrings and black-rimmed glasses. Although he likes to chew the abundant and stimulating leaves, as many Bolivians who seek to preserve Andean cultural traditions do, he never rushes, as “coca is not cocaine.” He never raises his voice in alarm, but rather smiles, remaining mellow and meditative. Besides teaching at the university, he leads daily Tai Chi classes and produces documentaries. His passion for reporting on the problems in his country is what landed him in jail at the onset of the Garcia Meza military coup of 1980.

“I didn’t film the actual killing,” he said, “but the spots of blood, spots on the walls, broken glasses, fresh blood. This was 15 minutes after the military had left.”

Saavedra spent three months in jail, being tortured physically and psychologically with tactics his captors learned in the U.S.-sponsored School of the Americas. His parents discovered his location three months later and used family members and the church to put pressure on the government to actually acknowledge his arrest. He was released two months later. He was lucky, however; many of his friends had been killed, simply because they were journalists.

Now that regime is long gone; Bolivia is now in democratic transition, and Saavedra teaches Bolivians about the pitfalls of corruption and how to maintain hope, as many Cochabambinos do, with the potential of democracy present. Prior to 2005, he brought now-president Evo Morales to speak to SIT students about politics. Thursday we spoke to political analyst Rafael Puentes, a former member of the assembly to draft a new constitution. Puentes spoke in the sun for two hours about democratic transition.

Friday, each of us will go to live with separate families. We will take public transportation to classes every day, where Saavedra will teach us how to film documentaries in Cochabamba on the topic of our choice.

We have had three days of preparation and six weeks ahead of us to learn Bolivia and make a movie of what we discover along the way.