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.

EAPs, Robberies, and Probation

So it has been awhile since my last post... 5 months now. As Erica reported, we had a rough time toward the end of the year being robbed the day after Christmas at the Tarija bus terminal. What Erica did not say is that I was also robbed about four weeks prior while in Santa Cruz with my mom. This robbery complicated things for us in more than one way. I´ll try to make this tale as short as possible...

My mom visited during the Thanksgiving holiday and we had a great time. She flew into Bolivia via La Paz and we met her at the airport in Tarija. We spent one night in Tarija and then headed out to our home in El Puente. Mom brought us lots of goodies and presents from Erica´s parents as well. Here we are looking through our booty.

We spent five tranquilo days in El Puente. We cooked some good food, took mom on some short hikes, and she met our friends and work partners in town. She had a wonderful time in our site and fell right into sync with the slow campo lifestyle. We headed back into Tarija for Turkey Day and so that she could meet the rest of the Tarija volunteers. Here we are waiting for the bus in El Puente.

We enjoyed a nice traditional US Thanksgiving meal and had a rare opportunity to be with all 20 or so Tarija volunteers. After Thanksgiving we went on a hike just outside of Tarija to a set of twin waterfalls. The same place that Erica and I would later spend Christmas day. We took a lunch and spent the day at the river enjoying the water.

After almost two weeks in Bolivia it was time for my mom to return to California. We do not have an international airport in Tarija so she was flying out of the city of Santa Cruz on an early morning flight. Because the flight was so early she had to leave Tarija one day prior and spend the night in Santa Cruz. Mom did not want to go alone, so I bought a ticket with the plan to accompany her for the night and then get back to Tarija. Well things did not work out so smoothly.

First of all, Bolivia is a very passionate country and is currently going through a sort of political identity crisis. Just before we arrived last January the country voted on an "Autonomia" referendum. A choice was put to the people whether to grant greater power to the departments (states) and therefor take power away from the federal government. Well 4 of the 9 departments voted in favor of Autonomia and one was 51%-49% against. Offically the referendum did not receive a majority of the total votes and lost, but the four departments that voted in favor believed they had a mandate from their people and moved forward on the path toward Autonomia. The federal government disagreed with the local governments and there has been tension ever since.

Tarija is one of the departments which voted in favor of Autonomia and we have seen countless marches, work stoppages, hunger strikes, and massive roadblocks (known as bloqueos.) Whenever things start to get a little crazy Peace Coprs activates their Emergency Action Plan. (EAP) In the year plus that we have been here we´ve experienced at least 6 EAPs. During an EAP we are not allowed to travel and have to call into the central office every day. The central office then reports to Washington DC on each volunteer´s whereabouts and status. We were told during training that one of the easiest ways to be kicked out of Peace Corps was to be non-compliant during an EAP. Follow? OK, back to the mom story...

So in the days around Thanksgiving things were again heating up in the political spectrum. There was talk of huge marches and department-wide work stoppages. The morning my mom and I were to fly to Santa Cruz, Peace Corps initated an EAP. To make my situation more complicated, I had not applied for vacation leave and just hoped to travel to Santa Cruz and back under the offical PC radar. So with an EAP in effect, and traveling without permission, I flew with my mom to Santa Cruz. We checked into a hotel and went out to a movie. When we came back I noticed that some of my things had been gone through. Upon closer inspection it was clear that I had been robbed. My iPod, GPS, and a decent amount of cash was gone. We found evidence that someone had climbed through the window and helped themselves to my things. My mom was quite angry and we tried handling the situation ourselves but were really getting the run around. I made the decision, knowing I was in violation of PC policy, to call the central office in Cochabamba and essentially turn myself in and ask for their help. We had purchased PC insurance for our stuff but needed an offical police report and a PC report in order to make a claim.

In regards to the robbery, PC was wonderful. There was a US Embassy police unit there within 30 minutes and they walked me through the whole process. They brought out their own investigative unit and dusted for and found a good set of prints on the window and in the room. Eventually we got back cash value for everything lost. On the administrative front, I was worried. The next morning, as half the country was honoring a two-day work stoppage, I had to call the head administrators and hear what my fate would be. I was told not to return to Tarija, as they were considering begining Administrative Separation procedures. I had to write a letter pleading my case and had to submit copies of my flight to prove that I had not been traveling illegally for an extended period of time. After two days of sweating it out, they allowed me to return to Tarija and El Puente and to continue my service. Erica and I both received memos that we were on notice and any further violation of PC policy would earn us a ticket home. Officially, I was busted for "Non-compliance during an EAP" and Erica for "lying about the whereabouts of her husband."

I felt pretty shitty and was really down for awhile after. We were both embarrassed for a number of reasons and of course did not want to have to explain why we were kicked out of Peace Corps. The incident also made me realize even more how blessed we are to be here in Bolivia and how fragile the situation can be. Even though we`d been here almost a year and had some rough times, we were no where ready to go back home.

So after I got back to Tarija we went back to El Puente and immersed ourselves even more in our small town life. We spent a solid month in site before returning to the city for Christmas, when we were robbed again. Blah!! Peace Corps security was wonderful again and helped us through the process. We went back to EL Puente for 5 weeks this time and didn`t return to Tarija until Carnival in Feburary. Again, the extended time in site was great as we attended several b-day parties and other various fiestas. Without a doubt the robberies have helped us integrate even more into our small town culture.

We are enjoying cooking and learing new recipes and improving our chopping techniques. Some of our favorite meals are: spaghetti, beef & broccoli, tacos/burritos, Thai peanut chicken & vegies, and various soups and breads. We´ve also established a mini-routine of cooking with neighbors and have learned a few bolivian dishes that we look forward to bringing back home with us. Here I am rolling out tortillas with our wine-bottle rolling pin.

We have also been enjoying getting to know better our fellow volunteers. It has been great to meet good people from all over the country. We visited our friend Emilia in her site a few hours south of Tarija. Emila is from Virgina and is in the same project we are, but a year ahead of us. She has been a great source of info and help for us.

We´ve also grown close to a couple who met down here, Dan and Julia. Dan is from Minnesota and is a Micro-Enterprise volunteer and Julia is from Florida and is an Environmental Ed volunteer. Both of them are city volunteers so they enjoy getting out to the countryside (campo). They came out to El Puente for a few nights and we had a great time. One day I took Dan on one of my favorite hikes to the top of a 10,000ft. peak a few miles from our house. Here we are relaxing after our outing.

So overall things are good, we are happy and healthy and continue to marvel at this amazing country. We´ve learned to better appreciate the good and the bad and can hardly belive we´ve been here well over a year now. We´ve become pretty good at washing clothes by hand, have totally adapted to only 1/2 days of running water and electricity, and are still surprised that we´ve lived without a refrigerator for a year and eaten as well as we have.

One thing that is still a little difficult for us is the amount and frequency of drinking in the campo. We´ve seen things pass as normal here that would be scandals in the US. Here is a shot of a restaurant that was right across the street from our house. Can you spot the man who maybe has had a little too much vino?

Finally, we´ve loved our cat and being friendly to all the animals in town who look like they could use a good scratch behind the ear. They all most definitely help keep us sane and remind us of home.

Hasta luego,

Marcos

We done got robbed...

The day after Christmas we were at the bus station waiting to return to our site. Mark left for about two minutes to check which bus we’d be on and to get some food. A man sitting next to me asked me a question, and I wasn’t sure whether he was speaking Spanish or English or Quechua, or just mumbling. I asked him to repeat himself several times and finally said I couldn’t understand him. He got up and walked away and I got a bad feeling. So I checked our luggage and noticed that Mark’s backpack was gone. I was hoping that he’d been wearing it but when he returned it was clearly not so. The guy who was asking me questions was just distracting me so another guy could swipe Mark’s bag. I was so mad- I’d never really felt like I could punch someone until that day. I ran around the terminal looking for the guy and of course didn’t find him. We filed a police report and I got to look through a digital mug-shot collection, where I may have identified the dude. Unfortunately, they didn’t know where he lived or how to contact him. Luckily, we have insurance, so the cost of the items stolen would be replaced. What is lost forever are 3 months worth of pictures on our camera and about half of Mark’s wardrobe and personal things. Mark was really good about it, as I felt bad that I’d been the one in charge of our things. I guess the lesson we learned is that we may be safe and known in our site, but that in Tarija we’re just a couple more gringo tourists. So we’ve cranked up our travel security and smarts to avoid future losses, such as camouflaging our gringo backpacks in colorful plastic bags that all Bolivians use to travel.

I finally attached legs to the worm bin, after searching for a way to pre-drill holes into the hardwood so that I could tighten screws all the way by hand. The last step was to collect enough shredded paper (2.5 kg or about 5.5 lbs) to compose the bedding that the worms will live in and eat, along with food scraps from the kitchen. I had shredded about 1 kg by hand, and then I discovered that the PC office in Tarija has an electric paper shredder. The shredding advanced much faster with the help of this wonderful tool. When I got back to our site with everything ready but the worms, I found that our neighbor had moved the bin, thus bending some of the legs that were already a little unstable. At first I was pissed, but then I realized it was good that this weakness was discovered prior to adding another 10-15kg of mass into the top-heavy bin. So I’ll have to redesign the legs, maybe using large PVC pipe. Perhaps the bin will have to be floor-bound for the first round of worms, but I’m concerned that it might leave the bin more vulnerable to unwanted bugs.

I broke my first guitar string ever-and replaced it!

I’ve been able to integrate a little better into our community by attending birthday parties. The first one I went to was for Alan, the grandson of our landlady, who was turning 3 years old. I was invited to help “motivate” the kids at the party by our neighbor Eugenia. At first, she was trying to get me to dress up as a clown, which was way out of my comfort zone. Eventually I got her to compromise for me bringing our Frisbee and my watercolor set to give the kids temporary tattoos. When we got there, we hosted a kids dancing contest. Originally, we were going to award prizes to the best dancers, but once we started handing out the prizes, those who didn’t win started getting upset. Especially Alan’s older brother, Erik. I took some short videos on our camera and played them back for the kids, who were in complete awe. Then I started giving tattoos. The kids loved them… it was hard to get them to stand in line, and many were demanding more than one picture. The boys’ favorite tattoo was a spider on its web and the girls preferred butterflies and flowers. Dinner was served- a plate of potatoes, corn on the cob and chicken, then we sang Happy Birthday in English and Spanish and Alan cut the cake. It seems to be custom here for the birthday person to take the first bite directly from the cake, no hands. As you can imagine this often leads to the birthday person´s face being slammed into the cake, even if done gently. The last party of Alan´s party was the piñata. I was a little disappointed that there was no blindfold or baseball bat, only a string in the bottom that opened up the thing to greedy little hands below. It also seemed that the kids took as much joy in the confetti that came out as they did with the candy and toys. Little did I know that after all the kids left, the adults would keep partying. Pitchers of ¨chuflay¨ (clear soda and singani or pure alcohol) were brought out and there were only about 5 adults to drink them. I got some of them to play with the frisbee, but that became a lost cause after a short period of time.

There isn’t a recycling program in our site, so we’ve been stockpiling cans that we’ve used in cooking. One day after working on the worm bin and gathering up bent nails left over from hammering, I realized that the nails made a pretty sound when they clinked together. So I took some cans and lids and nails and made them into this wind chime.

A new project that I´ve just started involves another volunteer, Alana, who lives to the south of Tarija where it becomes semi-tropical. Here is a picture of what it looks like when you get off the bus there.
The project is to paint a mural of a map of Bolivia at the local primary school in Alana´s site. So far we´ve covered up the orange brick surface with two coats of white primer and we´ve painted the outline of each of Bolivia´s 9 departments. I´ll go back in a few weeks to help her color in each state, add labels and state flags to each department, and help the students place their handprints on the wall as well. The high school in our site has requested a world map and south america map in addition to the map of Bolivia, so I´m looking forward to doing lots of painting!

Here´s Mark with two of our landlady´s dogs, Oso and Benjamin (from left to right).

Both of the dogs are very friendly and will follow us around town if they have nothing better to do.

Here are all three of our landlady´s dogs, hanging out on a gravel pile in front of her house. Bruno is on the left, Oso in the middle, and Benjamin on the right.
Here are the last pictures I´d uploaded right before our camera was stolen. The pictures show my herb garden back in November. I´ve been able to find plants of basil, oregano, rosemary, two types of lavender, mint, strawberry, celery, and swiss chard. I´m also using my new skills to grow cilantro and basil using a seed bed and later transplanting the small plants to larger containers. I´m going to try broccoli next, since it is not sold in our town.

Here´s the garden now, with the cat included for scale. I recently planted some California poppies- would it break the law to pick them here?

Christmas was a little strange here. We were invited to view the contestants in a holiday decoration contest in our site, which turned out to be funded by the local cement factory. There were only 4 participants, all of whom were administrators at the factory. The decorations were provided by the factory as well as the prizes- a flat screen TV and a DVD player. One of the participants was really excited to meet Mark and I and brought us into his house for us to see his fossil collection. At first we thought he wanted to have us buy them, but no. He was just really into his fossils. He had even drawn a picture of a dinosaur and framed it to hang over his cabinet of fossils.

On Christmas Eve, we were treated to an american style dinner at a local 5-star hotel courtesy of Winston´s mom and brothers. Winston is a Tarija volunteer who will be done with his service in April. His family brought cranberry sauce, stuffing, country ham, festive holiday music, santa hats, and even put together a little gift bag of chocolates for each of us. That night at midnight, the city erupted with fireworks as if it were the 4th of July. The next day, Mark and I hiked up to a set of local waterfalls and spent the day at the river. I was feeling pretty homesick, crying a lot, so we might have had more fun otherwise. I slipped on a rock and got the nastiest goose egg bruise I´ve ever had on my shin.

In order to process the melancholy I was feeling, I started to ponder ¨What makes Christmas Christmas?¨ For me, the answers were: family, fireplaces, wind up toys, homecoming, cold weather, football, and singing silent night by candlelight. Few of these things were available to me, so no wonder I didn´t feel too good.

New Year´s was a lot better for me. I decided to spend it in our site, rather than in our regional city, to see how our town would celebrate. It really paid off, because I was included in many festivities. It started by attending a service at the Assembly of God Church that´s pretty active in our town. I wasn´t sure what to expect, but it ended up being quite entertaining. They had organized skits performed by little kids to convey which actions will send you to hell, such as dancing to the wrong music or reading the wrong literature. There was a rock band (that was pretty bad) that took more time setting up their sound equipment than actually playing. My favorites were the break-dancing teenagers and the toddlers dancing and rapping to reggaetón music. Around 11pm I left to meet up with our landlady and her family to pass into 2008. I had made some cookies to share, and I got to try a tasty pork soup called picana which was outstanding. Alan, the boy whose birthday I´d attended, turned out to be her grandson, so I got to hang out with him, too. We toasted the new year with some apple cider at midnight. The next day, she had invited me to have lunch with her, which I figured was a New Year´s Day activity. About an hour before she was due to come get me, the girl who I´ve been teaching Engligh to next door, Adonia, came by to invite me to eat chicharrón with her family. Chicharrón is a slow roasted pork very similar to Mexico´s tasty carnitas. After a big plate there, I invited Adonia over to our place to hear some of our music, and the landlady showed up. I did have the heart to tell her I´d just eaten, so I went with her. The lunch turned out to be the 60th birthday party of a lady named Martha. We ate chancho al horno, which is yet another pork plate, simple and baked. It was good, but I felt as though I´d consumed an entire pig in the last 18 hours. There was a cake and lots of dancing. I ended up losing my voice because one had to scream to be heard over the loud music. After about 8 hours of this, I convinced my landlady that I couldn´t take any more and was allowed to leave.

On January 13th, our landlady invited us to have lunch with her and her daughters in the common area connected to our room. It actually turned out to be her birthday party which went on for a while with lots of dancing and sharing of food and drinks.

The most recent birthday party I´ve been to was for Alan´s older brother, Erik. It was pretty standard compared to the others except that once the adult part of the party started, the gate blocking the only exit was locked. I asked the hostess to open the gate for me when I was ready to leave, and she refused. She told me I needed to dance more. There were several Bolivians who were equally annoyed by this and we devised a plan to climb a ladder to the roof to escape if need be. I danced for a while, keeping an eye on the gate. Eventually a group of people left and I snuck out with them. By then I´d been there for about 8 hours.

One day I was sitting on our front step drawing as school was getting out. A group of school children passed by and only one boy had the courage to approach me and ask what I was doing. Once I showed him how I was drawing he asked if I could draw on his hand. He liked the spiderweb design I'd been sketching. As I began to draw on his hand, a group of about 15 children swarmed around me to see and eventually began to demand their own "tatoos." After adorning the students with spiderwebs, rats, hearts, and even my own initials, they eventually went home. A few weeks later, I ran into that first boy at a birthday party in town where I had brought my set of watercolors to give the kids tatoos. He introduced himself as Jaxel (pronounced Hacksel) and I gave him a new tatoo with a spider on the web this time. Shortly after the party, I was informed that Jaxel's mom had recently died in a bus accident and that he lived with his grandmother. He soon figured out where we live and now comes by on a weekly basis to refresh his tatoo. He turned 8 last week and I bought him his own set of watercolors so that he can practice too. I've been working with Jaxel to be more polite- saying "por favor" and "gracias." During school vacation, not many kids were around for him to play with and so my husband and I would play american football with him in the street or let him ask questions about the strange stuff in our room. It soon became clear that he was testing our limits on what we'd let him do (he would ask how much our things cost, or he'd come by 3-4 times a day and bang on the door until we opened it). We realized that we had a great opportunity to clarify our boundaries as practice for being parents some day, as well as providing a stable adult presence in Jaxel's life. Although I was uncomfortable at first, I practiced telling him no when appropriate and have continued to work on his manners by demonstrating and reinforcing them. If I haven't affected anyone else in our community, I'm sure that my relationship with Jaxel will be memorable for both of us.

Salta has become a pretty decent hunter. He has caught at least two birds, a huge moth, two mice, and a guinea pig. Unfortunately, he´d rather play with his prey instead of mercifully dispatching them. We usually end up having to take the victim away and let it go while locking the cat inside until he forgets what happened.

Mark and I made homemade tortillas for the first time, which was easy but a little time consuming. Salta, of course, was very helpful. Here he´s sitting on top of our water filter.

The weekend of February 2-3 was Carnaval in Bolivia. The Friday prior to Carnaval is ¨Comadres Day¨ when women get together and party. A friend of our 3rd year volunteer hooked us up with a comadres group called the Sanroqueñas. We got to wear bright pink shirts and we bought baskets full of colorful decorations, fruit, and bread. The baskets are traditionally exchanged between pairs of women who then become comadres by dancing all night long together. Here we are (Julia, Salta, and me) prior to starting the fiesta. Julia is about to finish her service but has decided to stay on as a PCVL/volunteer support person for another 6 months or so.

We paraded from the Church of San Roque down to the avenida in a snakelike fashion, dancing in pairs. We sang along with the band accompanying us... Somos, somos, somos, Sanroqueñas somos. Plata que tenemos, Plata que gastamos. This loosely translates to ¨We are the sanroqueñas. Money that we have, we spend.¨ There was a variation used that said, ¨Money that we have, we drink away.¨ Once we reached the avenida we danced the traditional Cueca dance which is done in pairs and reminds me a bit of the do-si-do from middle school PE square dancing. Each person waves a scarf in the air and it´s pretty fun. It was a little tricky because we couldn´t hear the music very well. Eventually down the parade route, the crowd seemed to be getting bored, so I entertained them by throwing grapes and pieces of bread from my basket at them and occasionally breaking into the running man or the sprinkler dance, both of which were big hits. When the parade ended, the sky opened up so we hunted down a taxi to get back to the starting place to claim a warm meal and drinks that we´d paid for. Unfortunately we would have had to wait in line standing in a flooded raquetball court to get them so we gave up and ordered pizza instead.

One of the most fun parts of Carnaval is the water-play. A little strange for a country where people deal with drought and water pollution, but ridiculously satisfying. During the period of several weeks before and after Carnaval, one can expect to be splashed with buckets of water or hit with water balloons or spray foam in any public place. The volunteers who were in Tarija for Carnaval decided to take advantage of our 3rd year´s 5th story apartment to take revenge for any attacks we´d fallen victim to in the past. Here´s a short, low-resolution video summary of what took place.

(Video coming soon!)

Previously Blogged Pictures

Photobucket Album

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.