The Day I Made Our Landlady Cry

I´ll start by going back to Good Friday, when I was invited to participate in a Bolivian tradition. Sulema, who runs a local restaurant, invited me to join her to make 12 different plates of food without using red meat. I peeled potatoes with a knife for a while and then gave in and fetched our peeler, which all the women were amazed by. Sulema told me I must leave her all of our things when we leave. Earlier I had given her two cat toys (which she offered to buy from us) for her youngest daughter, Mallen (pronounced My "N"). After peeling potatoes and fava beans, we cooked up several plates- falling short of the required 12. The various dishes were: sardines with potatoes, squash and potatoes with fresh cow cheese, chicken foot soup (also featuring chicken stomach), and arroz con leche. I didn´t get any of the latter which was the plate I was looking forward to the most. Later, Salta feasted on the leftover foot and stomach that I brought home for him.

On Easter morning, I attended Catholic Mass, which was originally planned to start at 8am but didn´t start until after 10am. The church was overflowing, with lots of people standing. Inside, there were very few decorations, one being the currently vacant glass display case normally encasing Jesus. Marigolds were used as "Easter roses" to decorate the pews. The service included a wedding, multiple baptisms, and communion. This was my first Catholic communion, and I didn´t get any wine! Only the adults from the wedding and the priest got wine, the rest of us only got a little dry wafer (and a blessing). The priest took an extra couple of swigs to empty the chalice before rinsing it with holy water, which he also drank. After the service, I joined a group of older women and the priest to zapatear (literally ¨to shoe¨ but meaning to dance) in front of the church with a fiddle player, Don Ramon. He invited me to the wedding reception to drink chicha and wine, eat soup and a plate with chicken, potatoes, and corn on the cob.

Work at the school garden has slowed down since the weed takeover during the rainy season. I did get to help the principal harvest onions we planted back in September. We dug up 10 kilograms in about 1 1/2 hours, using pickaxes. Unfortunately, about a third of the crop had been ruined by an accidental flooding during the time that the onions should have been drying out.

I completed my first mural ever, in La Merced, the site of Alana. We started by preparing the wall, then traced on an outline of Bolivia.

We then had the elementary students help color in each of Bolivia´s 9 departments. I added BOLIVIA over the top.

The final steps were to write in the names and paint the flag of each department. It was dark when I finished, so I wasn´t able to take a great picture of the finished product. Tuesday, April 1 was the anniversary of the school, and we finished on March 29th, so it´s good we got the mural done in time. Here´s one of my helpers.

During the second to last day of painting, the river nearby got noisy all of a sudden. We ran down to see what was happening and saw it rising. Along the banks of the river were 40 year old peach trees growing and cows grazing. I spoke with a worried farmer who said that in 1992, the river rose above where we were standing, up into the town itself.

On the last day, Alana and I ate lunch with the kindergardeners. There was one 4 year-old girl with strawberry colored hair who in the middle of her meal announced, "I like to kill birds and eat them."

In order to get from Alana´s site back to Tarija, I had to flag down a mini-van sized taxi on the road. The ride was very entertaining since it included a soundtrack of Dire Straights, Rod Stewart´s "If you think I´m sexy," Men at Work, the original "I will survive," and "Eye of the Tiger."

Another map project I´m working on is creating a manual for Peace Corps for other volunteers to be able to paint South America maps in their sites. This would complement the already existing World Map project, which is distributed to PC volunteers worldwide. I figure my manual would be useful for volunteers in latin american countries in particular. Below is a picture of a the World Map project completed by a previous volunteer in Alana´s site.

We have begun the World Map project in El Puente as well. There is a large cement retaining wall behind the high school that is a perfect location. The oldest students are working on their own map of Bolivia while Mark and I lay out the grid to enlarge the world map to the appropriate size. The dimensions of world map will be about 2.25 X 4.5 meters. That´s over 6X12 feet.

Below is Adonia Chambi, our neighbor and one of my best friends in our site. I help her with her English and her family gives us fruit and vegetables from their store. We´ve gone to play basketball a couple times but then the ball got punctured by a variety of spiny plant parts on the court. We decided to try leaving Salta in our site while we traveled, and so asked Adonia to feed and water the cat as well as making sure he comes in at night. An additional benefit of having her watch the cat is that she was able to save our vacation by sending us our passports, which I had left in site when I came into the city. Luckily I´d gotten the phone number of her house before I left. I called her and described where our passports were (and what they looked like, since she´s probably never seen one before) in our room. She then put them in a plain brown envelope and sent them to us in Tarija through a system called ¨encomienda¨. Encomienda means you send stuff on the bus to be dropped off (with receipts) at an office. We´d asked her to use one of the bigger buses that passes by in the morning, but she must have missed it and used the smaller, more local bus called the Guadalupana. The "office" of this bus is located in the busy campesino market, and consists of a public storage unit sized garage with a teenager keeping track of what comes and goes with a handwritten roster. As we approached, I saw our envelope sitting on top of a bunch of others and was relieved to know that the system really worked, even for somewhat irreplaceable documents. I now have more faith in encomienda than I do in the national mail service (which recently ended a 2-week strike).

Another girlfriend of mine is Eugenia, who runs a store across the street from us. She and I decided to make a birthday cake for a community member. Another of our neighbors, Dementia, has a store as well. One day she was washing her hair, which is normally stored in braids. Once we took this picture, she asked us to take a picture in her store as well.

So you´re probably wondering what this entry´s title is all about. We live in a complex with about 5 other rooms, all under the roof of Doña Nely. She´s a 67 year-old Bolivian who has never been out of the department of Tarija. Her husband died about 20 years ago, her only son lives in El Puente, and her daughters live in Santa Cruz and Spain. Recently I´ve been becoming aggravated over the fact that whenever I see her, she tells me I´m doing something wrong. For example, I have lots of potted plants and she complains about how much my watering increases her water bill. I have offered to pay a little more, but it seems she just doesn´t want me to have the plants in the first place. She doesn´t like cats, saying that they are from the devil and that they are ¨cochinos¨ (pigs) because they poop in the dirt. Yesterday, she started up about my plants again and it was the last straw. I started to cry, which is what I do when I´m angry and not expressing myself, so I went inside to hide. She figured out I was crying and asked about me so I came out and did the best I could to explain how frustrating it is to always be criticized. Of course, I was still crying a bit and she started to feel bad, too. All in all, I´m glad I told her to be nicer, I just wish I didn´t have to cry about it first. We´ve noticed that she´s often nicer when she´s a little drunk, so maybe I should just invite her to a beer when I want to talk to her. Here she is with her dog, Benjamin.In early April, we spent a great week in Cochabamba getting to catch up with other B44 volunteers as well as some of the new B47s and outbound B41s. The first three days were spent attending personalized appointments with physicians, dentists, dermatologists, and orthopedists. Mark and I each had only one cavity, due to older fillings. It was by far the most painful drilling experience I´ve had, due not to lack of technology nor talent on the dentist´s part, but because it was a deep cavity in a back molar. It´s all fixed now. Mark had a better experience with the dentist. We both got flu shots, which left me with a dark bruise on my arm and Mark with the flu itself. Unfortunate timing, considering that we left for Costa Rica the following weekend (see more about that below). The last two days in Cochabamba were spent discussing our projects, visiting various NGOs in the valley, and getting security updates from PC staff. Here is our group (down to 21 from the original 29 members)

That´s right, Costa Rica! We went to see one of my best friends, Marina, get married at her Irish fiancé´s parents´ house in San Isidro de Heredia, about 30 minutes northeast of the capital city, San José.
Costa Rica was far more developed than Bolivia is, with metered taxis, highways casinos, and TWO Denny´s restaurants. Of course, we had to take advantage of classic diner food. On three separate occasions.After the wedding, we headed out to the Caribbean to get some much needed beach time. On our way there we stopped for a lunch break and were left behind by our bus. A man at the rest stop helped us flag down an emergency taxi and called the bus driver to wait for us. Miraculously, the taxi caught up with the bus and we were able to continue our trip.

We passed through Puerto Viejo to Punta Uva, where we stayed at a small resort called ITAITA. We highly recommend that place if you ever go to Costa Rica. There were very few guests at the resort, which was composed of small bungalows with patios and hammocks- a five minute walk from the beach. That night we were unable to find an open restaurant to have dinner at, so the resort manager offered to make us a plate of gallo de pinto. As we were eating, a crab crawled onto the patio trying to get into the kitchen and was shooed away by an employee. The next day we realized that the ground around the resort was covered in crab holes. As we walked around, the crabs would retreat into their homes almost mechanically. It reminded me of some sort of amusement park ride. Hanging around the bungalows were small, chirping geckos, which reminded me of our visits to Mexico. Punta Uva is about 5 km from Puerto Viejo, a very touristy place. We rented bicycles and rode there the first day for lunch and to act touristy. We found a great restaurant with strawberry daquiri happy hour and delicious coconut shrimp and spent as much time as possible there. The next day we rode our bikes south to Manzanillo, where we ate a picnic lunch on the beach and later got ripped off at the only restaurant there. We do NOT recommend Maxi´s restaurant because it was expensive and the food wasn´t that great. However, on the road between Punta Uva and Manzanillo we heard an explosion of howler monkeys and were able to locate them hanging out in the trees. During our picnic lunch, I carved up a fresh mango and chowed down (the mango juice all over my face can´t quite be made out in this photo).



On May 10th, we were invited to Bobby and Rocio´s wedding in Tarija. Bobby is an agriculture volunteer from our group who had been dating Rocio, a bolivian, for about a year. He plans to stay in Bolivia after completing his service, and his mother is going to move here from Florida to retire as well. The photo below includes (from left to right) Bill, Dan, Bobby, Christian, Mark, and Tim.

Here are the ladies: Stephanie, me, Julia, Rocio, and her friends.