Visiting the Altiplano

In October I had the opportunity to participate in a "tech exchange" with other volunteers in my group. The Peace Corps promotes these Technical Exchanges as a way to see other volunteers in action and share experience, ideas, and motivation. The PC usually pays for travel expenses and some meals, and the volunteer writes a short report before and after the visit. This tech exchange would take me to the Altiplano and the surrounding communities of Oruro.

I was invited by a fellow Environmental Education Volunteer, Chelsea, to help with a trash management/recycling workshop at a school in a small community near her site in the Altiplano. During our three-month training in Cochabamba, Chelsea and I were in the same group for our major school teaching event. We presented a very similar trash workshop and worked well together and had fun, so she asked me to help. Another EE volunteer, Tiffany, lived near Chelsea and was going to help, as well as Chelsea´s boyfriend and my Tunari hiking buddy John. I was very excited to see the Altiplano, visit my friends, and do some good work.

I had a 14 hour bus ride from Tarija to the city of Oruro where Chelsea would meet me, then we would travel another two hours to her site and deliver the workshop the following day. The bus ride was remarkably smooth. We´ve heard many horror stories and have experienced a few breakdowns, so I was pleased to arrive in the city only two hours late. I left Tarija at 5:00 pm and arrived in Oruro just after 9:00 am the following day. Most of the ride was in the dark, but I could see the looming mountains and could feel the change in altitude. I had my GPS with me and would turn it on mow and then to check my location. I was amazed when around midnight we crossed the 10,000 ft. mark and never went below it again. In fact the highest point I was awake for was just over 13,000 ft. and I could still see huge mountains all around me. It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that I was riding in a bus at almost the same altitude of the highest point in the continental US.

I arrived in Oruro (12,150 ft) and Chelsea met me in the plaza and showed me around a bit. Like other places I´ve been so far in Bolivia, Oruro was like no other place I´d ever been. There are virtually no trees in the Altiplano, and it really is very plano. It reminded me of a trip I took with my friend Jeff into the deserts of Baja California where it was so flat you could look out and see for miles and miles in any direction. Wierd. And very hard to capture on camera.

(Oruro Witch´s Market selling assorted dried animals)

We did some shopping in Oruro and then left for Chelsea´s site. The next morning Tiffany and John met us and we set out for the community of Avicaya. Chelsea warned us that it would be a bit of a walk... With the help of the GPS we realized we walked six miles at an altitude of around 12,500 ft.

We were pleasantly surprised to find the school expecting us and prepared. The four of us went through a basic lesson of trash practices, how long it takes things to decompose, alternatives to throwing stuff out, and some basic demonstrations of how to reuse some common items.

We´re never sure how much impact, if any, this type of work has on the students. We know they enjoy having us in their classroom and for many of them we may be the only real exposure they have to US citizens and maybe white people at all. We always leave time at the end for the students to ask us questions. They are always shy, but usually can get started and then have some really good questions. This group was no different. We got the usual questions of what we eat, what the weather is like, what languages are spoken, which religions are practiced...etc. We also tend to always get questions eventually about September 11 and the war. I think those discussions may be just as important as the day´s topic of trash.

After the day in the communities we went back to Pacñea and waited for transport to Huari, Tiffany´s site. Huari is a slightly larger community another few hours south, closer to the mountains and Lago Poopo. It is also home to the Huari Brewery, pretty much the best of the limited Bolivian beers. No buses were passing so we got a ride from a passing city government worker Tiffany knew from Huari. John and I rode in the back and enjoyed great views of the mountains and the shores of the Lago.

We also came across a crash of a Huari beer truck which had spilled its sweet contents all over the road. Back in college I think many of us dreamed of finding an overturned beer truck, unfortunately most of the bottles had spilled in the road.

In Huari Tiffany showed us around and we played frisbee and watched the sunset over the lake. It was nice to see the sun setting on the horizon over water. I could almost believe it was California and the ocean.

We left later that night and spent the night in Oruro. The next day before I left John took me out to see his site. John may have the most rural site of everyone in our group. He is only about an hour out of the city, but to say he lives in a town would be wrong. He lives in an area made up of about 30 families spread out through a high valley (over 13,000 ft.) John loves it, but I´m sure some people would not be able to handle it. We rode in a local taxi out to his area and stopped to drop people off and the car only broke down once.

John and I spent the afternoon hiking around his site. He showed me the project he was working on -- designing and constructing a retaining wall for a mismanaged riverbed that has been slowly eroding away its banks. John is a Natural Resource volunteer and has done a great job organizing the people in his area.

We had a great time and I vowed to return to do some more hiking in the area and see more of the Altiplano. I went back to Oruro city and caught a bus for Tarija. This time my bus had more problems and we had to stop and change buses in Potosi. Way back in the day the city of Potosi was the richest city in the world. There is a huge mountain that contains a wealth minerals, mostly silver and tin. The city also lays claim to the "Highest City in the World", sitting at 13, 497 ft. Again, it was amazing. I only spent an hour or so, but I did get this picture of the famed Cerro Rico.

The story of the city is quite tragic as it was built up during the 1500s and then ruthlessly exploited. The mountain which gave the city its wealth has also taken the lives of many thousand Bolivian miners. There has also been extraordinary environmental damage and pollution of the air and watersheds. Despite its rough history, Potosi retains a charm and is major city along the "Gringo Trail" of Bolivia. It is another place I want to visit again.

So overall my trip to the Altiplano was wonderful. I did not like Oruro city too much, but the surrounding communities were beautiful. It was great to visit other Volunteers in their sites and see their work and explore their communities. I think that may be the best way to really experience the true Bolivia and see things that are certainly not in any guidebook.

As any trip though, it was great to get back to Tarija, and then home to El Puente. Erica and I continued with the school garden, continued honing our cooking skills, and continued being entertained by the cat. We also were preparing for my mom´s Thanksgiving visit.

We are coming up on one year now in Bolivia. So hard to believe. The time really is flying by and we´ve consistently heard that year two is even better than year one. We are looking forward to the holidays and my mom´s visit. Soon the schools will go on summer vacation and we´ve heard our town will mellow out even more. That is also hard to believe.

Until later...

Marcos

Back in Bolivia

They say that the process of adjusting to a new culture has it´s ups and downs. You suffer from culture shock, you adjust, and then you become shocked again. I definitely feel like I´m adjusting well right now. After returning from the states at the beginning of September, I spent five days in Cochabamba, and then met up with Mark in Tarija. It was great to be back with him, my best friend and companion. Also, I was amazed at how small our cat Salta is compared to Javier at home, who weighed about 14 pounds last time I heard. We spent the weekend in Tarija, and then made the trip to our site (which can take anywhere between 2.5-14 hours, depending on your luck), which was pretty uneventful. I was feeling pretty good about being back, with some goals in mind. I actually had experienced more culture shock by being back in the states than I had returning to our small town. In the states, it took me awhile to get used to air conditioning again, which I came to appreciate, as there were several 100+ degree days. I was amazed at how easily it was to consume things while I was there, although it was pretty fun (and dangerous, with only a volunteer´s salary) walking into a Target. I also appreciated driving my mom´s car around and being able to call people on her cell phone whenever I wanted (thanks, mom!)

Before I got to the states, I was a little concerned about not speaking Spanish for almost two weeks. My concerns were pretty much discarded when I had an improvised conversation with a maid. I forget sometimes how much my spanish has improved since being here. I can remember talking with a parent of one of my science students several years ago and accidentally requesting to leave a massage (masaje) instead of a message (mensaje). I´m sure I still make some mistakes now, but I think I´ve gotten past the point of being embarassed about those mistakes. Mark and I have even been asked if we were Venezuelan, which I thought was pretty rad.

On the last day of my visit, my parents and I spent a beatiful, although overcast, day at the beach. My dad even had a close encounter with a sea lion that was pretty magical. It was hard to tear myself away from the ocean at the end of the day, but I was thankful that we had decided to make the trip. When it came time to go back to the airport, there were many tears, and we decided it was best for all of us if my parents dropped me off at the curb rather than torturing ourselves with the vagueness of a security checkpoint goodbye. I was blessed with on time flights all the way back to Tarija, and I even got to sit in a spacious exit row on one of the longer flights. I had a really short layover in La Paz and was worried that I wouldn´t make my connection flight to Cochabamba. When we arrived at customs, they seemed to be searching most people´s bags. My bags were stuffed to the brim with goodies and it would have taken a long time even to jam everything back in, let alone explain why I had so much with me. Luckily, when I pressed the stoplight-esque button that declares whether I´d be searched or not, I got the green light.

Earlier, I referred to having some goals for my experience here. I had been feeling pretty crappy, which I figured nobody really would want to read about. Mostly, I was having a lot of anxiety about speaking in Spanish and getting out of our room into the town. Part of what was happening is that I was under a lot of stress, which is pretty natural for someone in our position. I´ve now started a self-care regimen that includes daily yoga, journaling, and cooking, as well as some sort of project work each day. As I discovered when I was getting in shape for the wedding, I tend to not give myself much credit for my accomplishments and I´m always pushing myself to do MORE. It helps me a lot to write down what I´ve done so that I can see it in writing. So I´ve started adding little symbols to my calendar to show myself when I work and work out. Since then, it´s been a lot easier to get out of bed in the morning, knowing that I´ve got at least a little bit of a plan for the day. It took some humility to admit to myself that I needed a little structure and routine, which I think I had been seeing as a weakness I didn´t want to have. I give myself credit for even the smallest thing, and I still have plenty of free time.

As far as my work, things are really picking up with the school garden project. In the pictures above, you can see how much the parcel of land we work on has changed since July, when the first picture was taken. Mark and I have been mainly responsible for the construction of two seed beds, where seeds are grown closer together until they are ready to be transplanted. I´ve never been very good at keeping plants alive, so I was really excited to return from the states and see our first bed thriving with greens. We had planted lettuce, bell pepper, cabbage, swiss chard, spinach, and cauliflower in mid-August and as of now, all of those seedlings have been transplanted into larger plots. Here´s the before and after pictures of the first seed bed. I put my hand in there for scale, but in case you can´t tell, the dimensions are 1 meter wide and 5 meters long.

____________________________before

__________________________(August 15)

______________________________after

______________________________(date)

Since then we have built a second seed bed, with a little better design in mind than the first one. The soil is very clay based, and so we tilled in sand, manure, and ¨tierra colorada,¨ which is a rockier, better draining soil brought down from the surrounding hills. It was quite an adventure bringing the sand from the river bank, during which my wheelbarrow and I became intimately aware of every small irrigation ditch between the garden and the river. There were many places where the front wheel would get stuck and I´d have to walk around to the front and lift the wheelbarrow to keep it going. Only once did I lose about a third of the load of sand in a slow-motion sideways collapse into a small ditch. I felt a little bad because I couldn´t clear all of the spilled sand out of the ditch and I knew someone would be using the ditch to irrigate his crops. Mark was busy tilling up the area where the seed bed would be with a pick and he said watching my return trip from the river reminded him of a scene from a monty python movie where the same clip is used over and over to show a group of people rushing a castle. Everytime he looked up to see how I was progressing, I didn´t seem to get any closer.

The onions that we planted around the same time as the first seed bed will be ready to harvest in February, when school is back in session. Something that isn´t working out so well is that most of the crops that are growing right now may be harvested during the school vacation, which is during the months of December and January. I guess next year, we´ll need to start the whole process earlier so that it works out better.

My other project, which is moving slowly along, is to construct and manage a worm composting bin. We had some wood left over from a home-improvement project, so after reading ¨Worms Eat My Garbage¨ which is an excellent guide, I built a table-sized bin. The worms will live and work in a bed of moist recycled paper with some added grit to help their little gizzards grind up potato peels and other kitchen left-overs. I´ve been weighing our kitchen scraps, which has averaged about 2.5 kilos per week, which will be about enough to feed 1 pound of worms. I need to gather 2.5 kilograms (about 5 pounds) of paper, which I then shred by hand or with scissors. The cat really enjoys playing in the bag of bedding. I have added ventilation holes to the box using a hand operated drill and one of the next tasks will be to visit a nearby community that has a thriving project already going. I may be able to harvest and buy some of their worms, otherwise there´s a store in Tarija that I´ll check out. I´m not sure whether worm composting will be picked up by people in our site because they tend to feed their kitchen scraps to their pigs, which is another good way to recycle them. I just want to know how to do it for myself so I can do it when we come back to the states.

With all the dust in El Puente, there´s always sweeping, mopping, or washing of clothes do be done. I´m really enjoying the simplicity of those actions, as well as the cooking. Since the supply of fresh produce is a little irregular in our site, we have to improvise meals based on what´s available, which can be both fun and challenging. We´ve got a decent recipe book put together by PC volunteers, titled ¨Donde no hay cocinera.¨ (title translates to ¨where there is no chef¨ more or less) I also got an excellent Thai peanut sauce recipe from an outgoing volunteer that was really easy and super tasty, so I figured I´d share it here:

Thai Peanut Sauce (serves 2 hungry people)

2 Tbsp oil

3 scallions, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, mashed

1 Tbsp freshly grated ginger

½ C peanut butter

¼ C white vinegar

¼ C soy sauce

1 C water

3 T brown sugar

¼ tsp hot pepper flakes

Saute the scallions, garlic, and ginger in oil for 1 minute. Then add the remaining ingredients, heat and stir until it reaches the desired consistency. Yummy with stir-fried chicken and steamed vegetables (we recommend broccoli and carrots) over steamed rice.

________________________________________________________________

And lastly, some important family pictures, for you animal lovers out there...

__________________________ My furry boys___↑

____________________↑ Salta helping out with the chores

____Yes, that is the place in the roof where we once saw the centipede.

Cochabamba, La Paz, Sorata

Wow, so hard to believe we are in October now. We've been eight months in country, and even though we are still pretty new, time is flying by. It seems the past two or three months have been particularly busy with visitors, traveling, and finally some work. The seasons are changing and we can feel the beginning of our first hot/rainy south American summer. We've also had more adventures with our house in site and the electricity of our little town. Never a dull day in Bolivia.

It was great to see other volunteers from our group at our mini-reunion in Cochabamba. We had time to share stories and discuss any challenges we were having in our sites. We also met with others working on similar projects and exchanged ideas. There was also a little time to explore Cochabamba again and have some fun. During the weekend, a group of twelve of us climbed 17,000 Mt. Tunari. The weather was much better compared to our last trip up the mountain in March and the views from the top were much more spectacular than before. It was so clear that we could see the huge Cordillera Real near the city of La Paz over 300 miles away. We had views of 21,000+ foot Mt. Illimani and 19,900 foot Huayna Potosi, two classic Bolivian peaks that are relatively non-technical and accessible to amateur mountaineers. A few volunteers have climbed them in the past, and of course there is talk of making an attempt before our time in Bolivia is finished. We´ll see what happens...

(John, Phil, and I around 13,000 ft)

(L- View from summit of Cochabamba Valley)

(R - View from summit toward La Paz)

(Summit of Mt Tunari)

Anyway, we had a great time in Cochabamba with everyone and are already looking forward to more stories and fun during our 1-year medical checkups in March when the whole group will be together again.

A few weeks after we returned from Cochabamba Erica left for an almost two-week wedding filled trip back to the USA. and I stayed in Bolivia and traveled a bit. Erica and I flew to La Paz the day before her flight and had one night together in the city before she flew out. We went out to the Zona Sur, an upper class neighborhood in the south of La Paz and walked around and had Mexican Food for dinner. Unfortunately the food was nothing special but we had a nice night and were marveled by the amazing city and scenery of La Paz. Erica flew out the next morning and I met my friend John who happened to be returning from a similar USA wedding trip that same morning. In fact, John was landing in La Paz on the same airplane that Erica would be departing for Miami on. So Erica left for her US trip and John and I set out to do some hiking around La Paz.

We had read about two popular day hikes, the Valle del Luna and the Muelle del Diablo. We checked out the Valle del Luna which was pretty, but turned out to be a fenced in area with paths and picnic tables. It was not exactly what we were looking for so we headed for the Muelle del Diablo (the Devil's Molar). We'd read that is was a rock formation about 45 minutes from the city on the rim of the valley with views back to the city and also out into the Altiplano. We were much happier with our choice as we had the place to ourselves and did enjoy great views of the Cordillera Real and of Mt. Illimani.


(L - Muelle del Diablo, R - Mt. Illimani in distance)


(Views back into La Paz city valley)

(Muelle del Diablo from below)

We went back to La Paz for dinner and then John left the next morning to head back to his site near Oruro, about 4 hours away. I stayed in La Paz one more day to do some shopping then I left the next morning for Sorata, a town in near Lake Titicaca in the beginning of the Yungas region of Bolivia. The Yungas is the area where the Andes drop off and become the Amazon basin. The altitude drops dramatically and there are high green valleys situated between snow capped peaks. As you continue down in elevation, it becomes more jungle like and soon becomes full Amazonia. Sorata is a small town at just under 7,000 feet (compared to over 11,000 for La Paz, and over 12,000 on the Altiplano) that has gained popularity as a starting point for hiking and trekking into the Andes or down into the jungle. Providing a backdrop to the town are Mt Illampu (20,892 ft) and Mt Ancohuma (21,068 ft).








(Views from Sorata)

I had bought a nice map and planned a long hike up to a glacial lake at 10,000 ft. Somewhere I took a wrong turn and found myself exploring a riverbed instead of heading up the mountain. I found some small waterfalls and ate lunch by the water. It turned out to be a much shorter hike but still enjoyable.




I spent one more night in Sorata and left the next morning for La Paz. The weather was overcast and I was sorry I hadn't taken a picture of the plaza earlier, so this is what I got. I rode a micro, basically a minivan back to La Paz. As usually I was the only non Bolivian in the vehicle, but what was different compared to Tarija was that the people were speaking Quechua rather than Spanish. It was cool to finally hear the old Incan language spoken by a group of traditional Bolivians. Again, I wanted to take a picture from my seat in the back but I had to be sly. I hope the picture captures some of the feel of the ride.





I was amazed at the city of La Paz and definitely want to go back. I'd never seen such a mix of cultures and flavors in a city so large and modern. We saw high rise buildings next to colonial churches, we could buy cell phones and DVD players in the markets or llama fetuses and dried armadillos right next door, we could eat expensive sushi or a huge plate of picante de pollo for around $1.00. In addition to the cultural buzz is the incredible scenery of huge snow capped peaks in virtually every direction. I think La Paz is one of the most unique cities I've ever visited.



(L - National Cathedral, R - National government building)

(Cathedral and Peace monument)

(L - Muelle del Diablo from city, R- Mt. Illimani)

(Market street in La Paz)

So after my travels I flew back to Tarija and bussed back to El Puente and our home. Erica still had a week in the US so I spent time in our town with the cat trying to get work going again. The town was still having electricity issues and we were getting about 5 good hours of power every evening. When Erica got back we went back to work on the school gardens and a worm bin. We mixed and prepared soil following what we were shown in training. After a while we even forgot we were digging through pig, chicken, and cow poop with our bare hands. We expect to transplant the plants coming from the seed bed in the next week and harvest everything with the elementary school kids before the end of their school year in late November. I've also begun helping the high school English teacher a few hours a night with his pronunciation and grammar.

(Sitting on a heap of "natural fertilizer", poising with the onions)

(Our seed bed with 12 different species of veggies)

So we've had a good last month or so and are looking forward to Thanksgiving and a visit from my mom and our first Christmas in Bolivia. The cat is also doing well and has his special appointment with the surgeon next week, he will not be a papá.

(Salta taking a siesta)

Hasta lluego,

Marcos