Chicken heads, centipedes, and mutant potatoes, oh my!

About one month after swearing in as volunteers, life is pretty darn good in our site. We have travelled from our site to Tarija and back several times now. The bus ride seems shorter each time, and sometimes actually is. On our second trip to site, we got to load a mattress, two chairs, and a kitchen stove under the bus along with several other bags. It´s actually standard practice here, but we were still a little self-conscious about the amount of space we were taking up. Those three household items have greatly increased our quality of life, along with the recent purchase of small speakers to play music and hear movies played on my computer. We also splurged on a blender/juicer machine just like the liquado (smoothie) ladies in the central market have. After seeing some other rooms in town, we are grateful to have the amount of space that we do. Officially, we´re just renting one big room with a bar at one end left over from its days as a Karaoke bar. But our land lady has been kind enough to let us use an adjacent, open area for our kitchen. Not only is our land lady pretty cool, but she also has a pretty rad dog, Oso, who likes to hang out with us and is very tranquilo.

Mark helping the bus driver unload our stuff upon arrival in site.

View of our room from the bar.

We love to cook, but it´s certainly a new experience not having a refrigerator. Some things rot and/or liquefy incredibly fast, such as broccoli kept in a black plastic bag. Lesson learned. I´ve been really enjoying the act of peeling and cutting up vegetables and fruit... it´s rather like meditating. We´ve started a composting bucket which fills remarkably quickly. My intention is to eventually have a worm composting bin, but for now we´ll give the food waste to our land lady so she can feed it to her sheep. I´m relatively comfortable cutting off the parts of potatoes that have been housing little white grubs, and I even found a couple of potatoes that made me laugh.

Plant products are not the only type of food that have gone under the knife in our kitchen. Our first experiment with the local fresh chicken, technically half a chicken, went very well. We unknowingly bought the half of a chicken that included it´s neck and head still intact. It was relatively easy to recognize the parts that we would normally eat in the states such as the breast and thigh, and we did our best to use as much as we could. But we were still left with a decent amount of bird that we didn´t know what to do with. Luckily, trash day came soon and we gave it to the basurero. The Szechwan Chicken that we made was the best meal we´ve had so far in Bolivia, thanks to a Peace Corps cookbook we bought called ¨Donde No Hay Cocinera.¨

Mark completing the last step of the tasty refried beans.

One night were were enjoying our homecooked meal of refried beans, rice, and tortillas when we heard a horrible noise on our roof. We ran into the common area between our room and our neighbor´s and found that two cats were fighting INSIDE the roof, between the corrugated metal outer roof, and the plaster and wood false ceiling. It was one of the most horrible things I´ve witnessed so far in Bolivia (besides seeing the old man in Cochabamba who had stepped in front of a bus) and there wasn´t anything we could do about it. Eventually, the aggressor cat calmed down and they left the building. As we went back into our room, Mark noticed a large bug hanging out near a hole in the wall/ceiling in our kitchen space. We stared at it for a while, I with goosebumps and making disgusted noises, took a couple photos, and watched it crawl back into the wall. After consulting with a coworker at the mayor´s office, I confirmed that it was a centipede, that if it bites us that would be ¨malo¨, and that I will kill it the next time I see it. Now, every time we pass through the kitchen into the common area, I have to look up and make sure it´s not dangling down ready to attack. Did I mention it was about 6 inches long? Sorry I didn´t include my hand in the picture for scale.

We officially started work this week with a computer class that we´re going to teach at the high school for the next seven months. Right now we have four 2-hour classes of 10 students, which is way easy compared to our previous school schedule. So at least we´ve got something to do every Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon from 2-6pm. It´s really amazing to see some of our students struggle with moving the mouse and understanding the concept of click-and-drag, since those are things we´ve been aware of since 4th grade or so. The computers are new-ish and in good shape, and the students are really well-behaved and excited to learn. Our first lesson included names of the parts of a computer, how to open a new Word document; change the font style, size, and color; save the file; and create a folder to save it in. For the last 20 minutes of class or so, we made them type up a synopsis of Harry Potter and the sorcerer´s stone (in Spanish, of course) off of the blackboard.