The Sailors Who Have Never Seen the Sea
get over something: to stop feeling sad or upset about something bad that happened
Every year on March 23, sailors march through the streets of a country that has no coast. Bolivia once owned a coastal province called the Litoral: about 400 kilometers of Pacific shoreline, with the dry Atacama desert stretching behind it. Chile took the whole province in a war that began in 1879, and Bolivia has never gotten over it. The holiday is called Día del Mar, Day of the Sea. It is the day the country says out loud, once a year, that it still wants the ocean back. In 2013 Bolivia asked a court in The Hague to make Chile negotiate. Nothing changed. The sailors marched again the next year.
The Bolivian navy never went away, and it is not only for parades. About 5,000 sailors patrol Lake Titicaca and 8,000 kilometers of river. They stop smugglers, carry supplies to villages far from any road, and pull people and their animals out of floods. None of it happens on an ocean.
In 2008 a reporter visited the force on Lake Titicaca and spoke to an 18-year-old sailor named Wilmer Camargo. “I’ve never seen the sea,” he said. “But when I do I would like it to be a Bolivian sea.”
Bolivia’s navy has reached the ocean only once. Fifty sailors and four patrol boats went to Haiti on a United Nations mission.
Sample sentences
It took me two years to get over my divorce.
He still hasn’t gotten over losing that job.
I thought I’d get over it in a week, but I still think about it every day.
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Every year on ‘Dia del Mar,’ Bolivia celebrates the coastline they lost
