Erosion Control

I´ve gotten a little behind on my blogging, but there are some pictures I´d like to share from the last couple of weeks. Two weekends ago, my technical group (natural resources) went on our tech day to a village near Pongo about 2 hours away from Cochabamba. It was my first time out into the campo (countryside). The townspeople had apparently fixed up the dirt road to their town in honor of our visit and we were thankful for that since the roads were pretty scary even after being fixed up. We were close to the altitude of the altiplano at about 4100 meters. We met up with about 20 townspeople and they taught us how to do several soil conservation techniques. In the picture below, you can see the group we worked with and the stone retaining wall that we built together in about 45 minutes. It was pretty incredible to see how fast something like that can be built if you have plenty of people power. I got to learn some Quechua including counting up to four: uj, iskay, kimsa, tawa. Up until that day I had been feeling a little frustrated with my technical training because we had been spending a lot of time listening to people talk about the kind of work we´ll be doing and this was one of our first chances to actually do some hands on work. It was a very nice change.

On the night of Valentine´s day, Mark and I awoke at 3:30am to the sound of our host mother yelling for help. It sounded like it was raining, but it wasn´t. I went up to the balcony and saw that the road had become a river. Above are some pictures of how the road looked later that morning. The reason our host mom was yelling was because the river was also coming in through the back gate, into their yard where they have pigs, geese, chickens, and crops. They couldn´t find the key to the padlock on the back gate, so they had to break it off using bricks and a crobar. We spent the next two hours helping the family fill bags with dirt from the yard and drag them to the back gate where our host brothers were building a wall. Mark lost one of his sandals almost immediately in the mud, although we were able to recover it the next day. All throughout this incident my mind was actively preparing for what might have come next if our wall wasn´t able to hold back the flood. `How fast can I get all of our belongings back into our bags and up to the third floor? Would the Peace Corps send a helicopter to evacuate us if it were bad enough?´ Luckily, I didn´t need to know the answer to these questions because the wall worked just fine. Below is a picture of the road a week later so you can compare it to the flood pictures.

To add to the excitement for the week, our host mom went into town to do some shopping and brought back a puppy! Having him around has been a great comfort and a source of fun as well. Today, he even got a little vest that he seems to love to wear, with pockets and everything. He hasn´t been named officially yet, but I like to call him Machito. Apparently, black dogs are considered very good luck here, and are revered somewhat like guardian angels. My host sister and I definitely share a love for animals- she takes Machito up to her room each night so that he doesn´t catch a cold by sleeping outside with the other dogs. In the left picture below you can see Carola, Machito, and I preparing water balloons to attack some kids in the street- a very traditional Carnaval activity.

This week, I´ve been trying to be patient with myself and the program. It´s hard not to compare my experience to Mark´s. He understands and speaks a lot more Spanish than I do, and his technical trainers are younger and a little wilder than mine, so he´s having a lot of fun. The reality is that my work will be with adults and his will be with kids, so our trainers are well matched to their fields of expertise. I got to talk with my trainer today and I feel a lot better about giving her suggestions about how we might have more fun in our technical sessions that don´t involve hands on work. She and I actually have a lot in common and she was very supportive, so I feel better today after expressing my frustrations. Once we´re in our official site, I´m sure I´ll be able to work with kids as well as adults, and Mark and I may do some secondary projects together that integrate the goals of both of our projects. Tonight, we´re going to have dinner with some current volunteers that live near where our site will be so we´re looking forward to hearing more about how it will be.

Llamas, Parilladas, and Burros

So we´re now about to start our fourth week. Wow. Time has begun to go by faster, as most people said it would. The past two weeks were pretty busy with language, technical, and culture classes. This week is Carnival, so we have Mon and Tues off, classes start again on Wednesday 2/21.

We´ve been much more active with our tech classes -- learning skills we will be using for the next two years. Our group of Environmental Education (EE) is 9 people, with two trainers. I am very happy with my group and we are all getting along well. We believe we have the best trainers -- Armando and César -- although I´m sure the other groups would say the same about their trainers. We´ve visited a cross section of some really horrible environmental problems in Cochabamba and some places where they have begun to turn things around. Last week we visited the first watershed conservation projects in the city. They were started about 20 years ago to protect the city from flooding. We went up into the mountains to see the work and hear how they have managed the labor, costs, and various government bureaucracies. At the end of the visit we went up to the ridge, at almost 11,000 feet, and saw our first llamas. We were all excited, trainers included, to see such beautiful animals in the natural setting.

Later in the week we continued a project with a local school. I am in a group of three working with a 4th grade class. We talked with the teacher and decided to work on trash themes. We presented ourselves to the class, answered some of their questions about us, and had a short discussion about their trash practices. Trash is a major problem in Bolivia. Many smaller towns do not have regular garbage service, so families do the best they can to deal with their trash. Burning and dumping seem to be the main strategies. We had the students make drawings about how their families deal with their garbage. The students were great -- a bit hesitant at first to share their thoughts, but they warmed up quickly. Our group is going to return in two weeks to discuss their drawings and to teach them how to recognize and separate organic from non-organic garbage.


Finally, this past weekend EE spent two days together learning more techniques for schools and presentations and all day Saturday working in a nursery. We camped on Friday night and had a great time. Armando and César prepared a huge parillada (BBQ), we enjoyed some cerveza, and played guitar around the campfire. It was a great change from the city and more formal class sessions. (Cesér and I on left, Armando on right)

Saturday was spent learning techniques for planting, transplanting, grafting, and cloning different types of plants. The nursery was beautiful and was the first in Cochabamba, started by a German man before WWII. We learned from the second and third generation Bolivians/Germans who lived and worked at the nursery. They showed us how to manage small plots and also techniques for reforesting large plots of land. This was also a nice change for me from the school setting as everything was new and I felt like I was really learning.

In another week and a half we will leave for a 10 day technical training. We are going to southern Bolivia to visit some current volunteers and learn from them. On the agenda are more time with schools, an environmental fair, more nursery techniques, and maybe most exciting, we are supposed to produce a short radio and TV spot. We will be close to Argentina by the end of the trip, so Armando has promised an even better parillada. It should be great.

I´ll finish with this goofy picture. There is a university group that is concerned with how many cars, mostly taxis I think, do not stop and allow pedestrians to safely cross the streets. They stand in the intersections, dressed as farm animals, and shout at the passing cars. When a car stops in the crosswalk, they all come out, surround the car and begin dancing and singing. The driver is usually embarrassed and the donkey insinuates that the driver is also a jack-ass. Ahh, Bolivia.


Hasta lluego,

Marcos

1st week with families

Wow, hard to believe its been a week. In some ways it feels like we´ve been here so much longer already. In other ways, it has flown by. There have been many new things to get used to -- new food, new smells, new friends and family, new climate, new time zone, new transportation methods... the list could go on and on. But there have also been things that have seemed like home -- enjoying animals, being challenged each day, reading and writing, and of course time with Erica.

We are both very grateful to have each other through this experience. We´ve heard many times about the loneliness a volunteer often faces during their service and the long, difficult days of learning a new culture. We feel very lucky to be at the point in our lives to share this adventure.

One of the most shocking things to me was the concept of living off less than 20 Bolivianos per day (about $2.50). To my surprise, we´ve been able to do it and have money left over. This includes going to the town fiesta, buying towels and other toiletries at the Cochabamba market, having ice cream a few nights, and celebrating a fellow trainee´s birthday with a few cervezas. The concept of money and wealth is sure to be one that we all ponder during our service.

Most of the group is looking forward to the Superbowl this weekend. Go Bears! Again, hard to believe I was 9 years old when they were last in the big game. I´ve waited a very long time for this weekend. And to experience it while here in Bolivia is quite surreal. We will be watching the game at the house of another host family who has cable, maybe the only one in the village who has cable. It will be nice to experience a bit of US culture so far from home. Too bad we´ll miss all the commercials!

It has been great to finally have a free day today, our first. Training has been intense as promised. Four hours of language each morning, lunch, then tech and culture training on alternating days until about 6pm. I have really enjoyed meals with our family. Simple breakfasts of bread and bananas, then rice, potatoes, chicken or beef, and some veggies for lunch and dinner. Lunch has been in soup form every day so far -- slightly hard to get used to when it is about 80 degrees in the afternoon. We´ve had lightning and thunder at night three or four nights.

Today I learned to wash my clothes by hand. Amazing how much time it takes. A normal sized load would be cleaned in 25 mins in the US then dried in another 30 mins. It took me just over an hour to wash and the clothes will be drying all afternoon. I better remember to bring them in before the night´s thundershowers.

Hasta Luego,

Marcos

Our First Week

We were dropped off at our host family´s house a week ago in a little neighborhood about 10 miles outside Cochabamba. All 29 volunteers are within walking distance of each other and most of us have flushing toilets and hot showers, two very important factors in describing what your home is like here. The alternative would be a latrine and a ¨bucket shower.¨ Our host family is very nice and immediately fed us and let us rest a little. We are all required to sleep under mosquito netting because bugs are quite common and friendly here.

The second day we spent with our host family, there was a celebration in a nearby town. Our sister, Carola (in the yellow baseball tee), and her cousins, Karen (middle), Lisbeth (right), and Carla (the little one), took us to the celebration. It took about 30 minutes to walk there from our house, and when we arrived I was surprised to see everything that was set up. It was as though we´d entered the midway area at the state fair. There were airguns to shoot down prizes, various other gambling-oriented games, and then trampolines for the little kids to jump on. For sale were different pastries and beverages. The first hombre who greeted us may have had a bit too much chicha (local alcoholic fermented corn beverage) because he wouldn´t let go of our hands when we were greeting him. He thanked us in English and then went on his way. We played a little footballiza (see above) against the girls, and then the music and dancing began. The band consisted of trumpets, baritones, bass and snare drums. There were tons of people in traditional constumes and it must´ve been 90 degrees out. They danced for hours and we sat in the shade, people watched, and shared a 2 liter of Pepsi.

Karen, Lisbeth, and Carla left on Tuesday night in the back of a pickup truck to go home to Santa Cruz, which was going to be about a 12 hour drive. We were all sad to see them go because they were lots of fun. School starts for them on Monday as well as for Carola. No more summer vacation for them!

Gringita, soy yo!

Hotel Regina, Cochabamba
Last night we had a great mexican meal including burritos with guacamole, pico de gallo, chicken, beans and cheese. Each burrito cost 10 bolivianos (Bs), which is about 1.25 american dollars. I tried to change our 100 bill into smaller change because our host villages may not be able to. We found a little grocery store and I bought come gum and some cookies. When I got up to the cashier, I greeted her and she told me it would cost cinco bolivianos. I put down the 100 Bs and she asked me a question that I didn´t recognize and then I realized she was ready to type something into her computer. I realized she said something about numbero, so I figured I was supposed to give her a phone number. Of course, I don´t have one, but I wasn´t sure whether I´d be able to buy the stuff if I didn´t give her a number so I just started saying numbers in spanish. I wasn´t sure how many digits there are in a Bolivian phone number, so I just kept saying numbers until she didn´t ask for more. Then she asked me for my name and I said Erica. She typed it in as Ericka, so I tried to ask her to take out the k, but I sais ¨cu¨ which is how you say Q. She thought I was saying that my last name was Cook, so she typed that in. I gave up on correcting her at that point. She gave me the change as a 50, two 20s and a 5 boliviano coin. I wasn´t sure how to ask for a smaller bill (I´ll be asking my language teacher about that today) than the 50, but I got her to change a 10 into moneda, which is coins. They have coins in 10, 20, and 50 centavos and 1, 2, and 5 Bs, which are the most useful. After I returned to the group I told this story to one of the current volunteers and she told me that the number I´d been asked to give was my Income Tax number. The cashier must have thought I was insane. Overall, it was a good learning experience, and I´ve got the receipt to remind my of my undercover name, Ericka Cook.

First Meal in Cochabamba

25-1-07

5:00pm- Training Center, waiting to return to hotel

Here's Mark and I last night at the restaurant that current volunteers took us to. It turns out there's a girl here who rowed on the Crew team at Davis with me. She lives in the city and works in Integrated Education. The dish we ate was called Pique Macho, which consisted of french fries, chunks of steak and sausage, tomatoes, onions, peppers, and optional mustard and mayo. We opted out of the raw vegetables, mustard and mayo and it was quite good. We were told to avoid the sauce you see in the blue bowl, called Yaqua, due to its spiciness and tendency to interrupt normal GI function. Better safe than sorry, although we figure it's inevitable that we'll get sick at some point.

Finally Here

25-01-07
12:15pm- Training Center
We made it! All went well with our flights and all of our luggage made it. Almost everyone in our group experienced symptoms of altitude sickness during our first stop in El Alto, Bolivia. Thankfully, we were greeted by Peace Corps staff to help us through customs and dealing with luggage. I'm trying to figure out where I put the cable for my camera (it's somewhere in my luggage) so that I can upload pictures soon.