Tech Week (March 9-18)
I was a little worried at the start about being away from Mark for 10 days after living in one room with him for 7 weeks. Overall, it was an experience that allowed me to practice taking care of myself. I think I´ve relied on external things or people to make sure that I feel safe, happy, and comfortable, and I´m now gaining experience and confidence in doing this for myself. I´m also learning to accept the fact that it´s okay to feel threatened, sad, and uncomfortable sometimes, and that it is during these times that I am growing and changing. The point of Tech Week was to visit current volunteers in their sites and to get an idea of the type of projects that are being done and what it´s like in various sites. On day 1, we encountered our first bloqueo, essentially a road block used for political purposes. Therefore we had to backtrack about 2 hours to Cochabamba to take the other road to Aiquile, our first destination. We traveled through the morning, having to skip two appointments due to running late, and in the last hour of driving I started to feel like I had a fever and my stomach was rumbling. I had to have the land cruiser pull over each 15 minutes for me to use someone´s corn field or duck behind a cactus. Finally we arrived in Aiquile. Everyone else in the group went to a presentation about an irrigation project and I promptly ran to the restroom almost in time to use the toilet and the trash can at the same time... if you know what I mean. I slept feverishly from then until the evening of the next day and then it was all over. I felt great for the remainder of the trip, and I´ll never know exactly what bicho (bug) was responsible for my gastrointestinal adventure. Ironically, Mark was vomiting on his trip on the same day. Is there such as thing as empathy vomiting? I take it as evidence that Mark truly is my soul mate.
Our next stop was in a much larger town called Valle Grande.
Here, we had our first charlas (presentations) with a bunch of boys from the local orphanage. My group had created a relay race to help the boys think about sorting trash into recyclables, organic waste, and inorganic waste or non-recyclables. Then we played a game using a frisbee to demonstrate how plants and animals are connected through food webs. 
I´m not sure how many of the boys achieved our learning objectives about the environment, but they certainly laughed and smiled. We ate dinner at the orphanage which was homemade mac and cheese, black beans, and avocado salad. Having skipped all meals over the last two days, I was a little concerned whether my stomach would tolerate the huge plate of food I had been offered. But there was no way I was going to offend the orphanage by not finishing my plate. In the end it worked out just fine. 
The volunteer who works at the orphanage has developed a recycling project where she pays the boys with stickers for every bag of recyclable paper that they bring her. Her cat was not amused that she was dog sitting for another volunteer at the time. 
In Valle Grande we also met with a women´s group that makes and sells marmelade and liquors using locally grown fruits. We got to taste each type and my favorite was a peach jam. My least favorite was the liquor made from prunes.From Valle Grande we visited a town called Moro Moro, to which the road was muddy and slippery. We gave our first official charlas to a group of abour 40 community members. During my charla on compost piles, I was really nervous about speaking in spanish in front of such a large group. I relied on my partner´s higher level of spanish and let her talk as much as possible, while I frantically came up with things to say and edited them in my head. One of the times I got up the courage to speak, I tripped over my tongue a little when I was warning the group that they should keep animals away from their compost piles. I knew I had misspoken at the time, but not that I had used the word "allemanes" instead of "animales." After the fact, another volunteer informed me that I had in fact warned the group to keep germans away from their compost. Overall, the experience of being a minority in a Spanish speaking country has been a humbling one. It´s a little uncomfortable to not fully understand what is being said to you and then to have complicated thoughts and only simple verb tenses and limited vocabulary to express them. I have, however, greatly improved my Spanish skills over the last 11 weeks. According to the Peace Corps language interviews that I had to do 3 times during training, I began at an intermediate-low level and proceeded to advanced-low... a gain of 3 levels. Still, I´ve got a long way to go before I am anywhere near my fluency in English. On the way back from Moro Moro we stopped for a bathroom break and I snapped this photo of one of many pigs riding in a camion (truck).
From Valle Grande, we moved on to Quirusillas, where we spent the next five days with a pair of married volunteers. During this time the five women on our trip shared one room in the local restaurant/lodging place called an alojamiento. As dangerous as it may sound to concentrate estrogen in this way, it worked out alright. I took advantage of the alojamiento´s shower each morning since it was included in our daily fee (in contrast to my now normal shower every third day. Back in Cochabamba in our host family´s house, we had to pay 2 bolivianos per shower and it was also on the third floor and was less convenient). I also met a new flying bug, called the mariwi, which is very stealth when it bites you and leaves behind a tiny red spot that swells up the next day. Each day I applied three different types of insect repellent and it helped a little. On our first day in Quirusillas, the volunteers there brought us up to a lake on the mountain above the town. We were going to drive there at first, but once we got on the muddy road it became quite slippery and we were forced to stop and walk when we encountered a series of derrumbes (landslides). 
At the lake, we collected some native trees to replant at the local plant nursery, and learned about the medicinal properties of some of the local flora. On our way up it was misting slightly and it created a wonderful vista over the valley.
The next day we harvested some hardy grasses to use to plant live erosion barriers in a nearby mountain area called Rodeo.
After we installed the live barriers, we were invited to lunch at the landowner´s house and he killed some of his ducks to make soup for us. I couldn´t really handle the duck meat, partially because the piece in my soup still had evidence of the plucked feathers on it and partially because all of its relatives were waddling around watching us eat it. I still tried a little bit, but it was more than enough for me. We also had an interesting beverage called Mochochinchi, which is made from dried peaches that are soaked or boiled in water. It was similar to Snapple Peach Iced Tea, except there was a rehydrated dried peach in the bottom of each glass. Quirusillas had the best fried empanadas (and cheapest, at 50 centavos or about 6 cents each). I liked them because they were only filled with cheese, instead of a lot of unidentifiable ingredients like other empanadas or salteñas usually have. Our last night in Quirusillas the volunteers there made baked chicken, mashed potatoes, and apple crisp for us and we devoured it. We were also introduced to a traditional bolivian practice of mixing red wine with coca cola, which is not nearly as bad as it sounds.
Our last stop was in Samaipata (see above), the most touristy place I´ve seen so far in Bolivia. The town has obviously invested lots of money to make its plaza look really nice and the restaurant we went to was really tasty. We were going to visit a nearby town called Paredones, but unfortunately there were two large boulders in the road that were scheduled to be blown up with dynamite that day. So we turned northwest towards Cochabamba and about 9 hours later we were back. We had the weekend to rest and do laundry and the following Monday at the Training Center our sites were officially announced. Mark and I had already known where our site was for about a month since couples don´t really get to have input into where their sites are. It´s pretty tricky to find a place with the right combination of work projects and need for two volunteers. It was still really fun to find out where the other trainees were placed, and our project directors even dressed up as bunnies for the announcement of sites. It was actually a bit strange.Site Visit (April 2-8)
We got our first glimpse of where we´re going to be living for the next two years. It´s a little pueblo of approximately 500 people about 4 hours by bus from the city of Tarija in the south of the country. After hearing it described as "Arizona country" by one of the project directors I was anxious to find out what the heck he meant by that, having not ever really been to Arizona. When we got there, we discovered that what he meant was that it was dry, cactus-laden, and had beatiful red rock soil. I had tried really hard to not have any expectations about our site, but after getting there I realized I had been picturing a lush river valley. There is a river, but it is said to be contaminated by mining operations upstream. There is only electricity in the town from 1pm to 1am, which will be a unique challenge I´ve never faced before. There seems to be one phone in town where we can make and receive calls, and the Alcaldia (mayor´s office) in town has internet. I will be working with the technical department of the mayor´s office (see below) and have already been offered a desk and any paper, folders, or pencils that I might need. Mark and I attended a meeting at the Alcaldia and were introduced to the entire staff of about 25 people. At the end of the meeting, the Alcalde (mayor) brought in two huge pots full of boiled "aba" beans. I´m pretty sure they are the equivalent of fava beans in the states, but I´m not sure. They are huge, light green beans with a very starchy flavor. Knowing that the offering of food is a way of showing respect here, Mark and I each grabbed a couple beans right away and learned how to peel them to get to the part that you eat. Unfortunately, a staff member then brought us each a heaping bowl of the beans and we set to work to get them down. Even the staff was complaining that there wasn´t any cheese to go with the beans. Soon enough, most of the beans had been consumed and we headed back to the room we were staying in for a siesta.
Saying "Ciao" to Cochabamba
When we got back from our site visit, time really flew by. We had our last few Spanish classes, tried to visit our favorite restaurants, and I spent a decent amount of time visiting with the kittens at our host family´s house that had been born during tech week and had opened their eyes while we were visiting our site. The mom cat, Campinita, really reminded me of Maya, and it was amazing to see her kittens mature over the time we were there.
On Saturday, we had the Fiesta de las Familias at the training center, to honor those who had welcomed us into their homes back in January. We ate lunch and then presented various prizes and performed traditional bolivian dances for the families. We even prepared a demonstration of traditional dances from the United States in the 1980´s in order to educate the Bolivians about our culture. Below is the picture we took with Doña Casilda and her daughter, Carola.
Afterwards, Mark and I went out in the city with some other volunteers and we encountered our first Bolivian drag queens. They claimed to be the only drag queens in Bolivia, which wouldn´t be too surprising. I suspected that they were Argentinian based on their height, but it might have been an illusion caused by their platform stilleto boots.
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