Even if the strong dollar hurts Penrice's profits, the mining boom does have some benefits: the company sells some of its soda ash to miners, such as Uranium One, which will mine the metal in South Australia and export it, probably to Japan and elsewhere.
It would have been hard for the six of us to be anything much in 2000, because by then Rodrigo Lira, the best of the lot, had killed himself, and what was left of him had either been rotting for years in some cemetery or was ash, blowing around the streets and mingling with the filth of Santiago.