Erosion Control

I´ve gotten a little behind on my blogging, but there are some pictures I´d like to share from the last couple of weeks. Two weekends ago, my technical group (natural resources) went on our tech day to a village near Pongo about 2 hours away from Cochabamba. It was my first time out into the campo (countryside). The townspeople had apparently fixed up the dirt road to their town in honor of our visit and we were thankful for that since the roads were pretty scary even after being fixed up. We were close to the altitude of the altiplano at about 4100 meters. We met up with about 20 townspeople and they taught us how to do several soil conservation techniques. In the picture below, you can see the group we worked with and the stone retaining wall that we built together in about 45 minutes. It was pretty incredible to see how fast something like that can be built if you have plenty of people power. I got to learn some Quechua including counting up to four: uj, iskay, kimsa, tawa. Up until that day I had been feeling a little frustrated with my technical training because we had been spending a lot of time listening to people talk about the kind of work we´ll be doing and this was one of our first chances to actually do some hands on work. It was a very nice change.

On the night of Valentine´s day, Mark and I awoke at 3:30am to the sound of our host mother yelling for help. It sounded like it was raining, but it wasn´t. I went up to the balcony and saw that the road had become a river. Above are some pictures of how the road looked later that morning. The reason our host mom was yelling was because the river was also coming in through the back gate, into their yard where they have pigs, geese, chickens, and crops. They couldn´t find the key to the padlock on the back gate, so they had to break it off using bricks and a crobar. We spent the next two hours helping the family fill bags with dirt from the yard and drag them to the back gate where our host brothers were building a wall. Mark lost one of his sandals almost immediately in the mud, although we were able to recover it the next day. All throughout this incident my mind was actively preparing for what might have come next if our wall wasn´t able to hold back the flood. `How fast can I get all of our belongings back into our bags and up to the third floor? Would the Peace Corps send a helicopter to evacuate us if it were bad enough?´ Luckily, I didn´t need to know the answer to these questions because the wall worked just fine. Below is a picture of the road a week later so you can compare it to the flood pictures.

To add to the excitement for the week, our host mom went into town to do some shopping and brought back a puppy! Having him around has been a great comfort and a source of fun as well. Today, he even got a little vest that he seems to love to wear, with pockets and everything. He hasn´t been named officially yet, but I like to call him Machito. Apparently, black dogs are considered very good luck here, and are revered somewhat like guardian angels. My host sister and I definitely share a love for animals- she takes Machito up to her room each night so that he doesn´t catch a cold by sleeping outside with the other dogs. In the left picture below you can see Carola, Machito, and I preparing water balloons to attack some kids in the street- a very traditional Carnaval activity.

This week, I´ve been trying to be patient with myself and the program. It´s hard not to compare my experience to Mark´s. He understands and speaks a lot more Spanish than I do, and his technical trainers are younger and a little wilder than mine, so he´s having a lot of fun. The reality is that my work will be with adults and his will be with kids, so our trainers are well matched to their fields of expertise. I got to talk with my trainer today and I feel a lot better about giving her suggestions about how we might have more fun in our technical sessions that don´t involve hands on work. She and I actually have a lot in common and she was very supportive, so I feel better today after expressing my frustrations. Once we´re in our official site, I´m sure I´ll be able to work with kids as well as adults, and Mark and I may do some secondary projects together that integrate the goals of both of our projects. Tonight, we´re going to have dinner with some current volunteers that live near where our site will be so we´re looking forward to hearing more about how it will be.