Updates (written 2-14)

Well no major festivals occurred this week, so I’ve decided to write an odds and ends entry about the week. (It WAS supposed to be short. Enjoy the bullet points anyways…soon enough they will get short and maybe those of you with short attention spans will read them).

Topic 1: The Daily Grind (no, I don’t mean coffee, which would be Nescafe here anyways)
Yeah I’m sure it seems like all fun and games, but man we do a LOT every day. Hence, my bedtime has actually moved up to about 9pm and I sleep until about 6am (ambient noise here makes any later difficult unless you’re sick or deaf). We all talk about how tired we are each day, even while most of us are hitting a solid 9 or 10 hours of sleep. So what do we do? Well, to take today (Thursday) as an example: 8:30-12:30 Spanish lessons (M-F, and optional 2 hours of one on one convo on Saturday mornings). It’s really tiring to use the non-english part of your brain for that long (and it’s not like it starts or stops with Spanish class). Lunch. 2-6 pm: technical classes. Today we went over in more detail about our training assignment. Basically we need to find a target group in the community and work with them to identify a topic for a formal presentation that we make to them en español. Today was actually really great because my group of 3 found (we think!) a target group to make a presentation to. And in our “free time” we are also working on getting more baseline info about the community we live in. Oh also in our free time we have our vegetable garden plots (30m-squared, shared in groups of 3). Plus we don’t want to ignore our host families or miss out on hanging out with each other. Did I mention we also get written homework? But seriously…love it!!!!
Topic 2: Things I’m looking forward to
-Package from my parents!!!!
-Learning some traditional dances…we’ve been watching/learning about them in Spanish class but I haven’t actually learned steps yet. Plus the costumes rock (for normal parties, they’re not as flashy as the Carnaval costumes).
-Getting better in Spanish. A lot more fun than I expected, and every day I feel like I’m getting better (and every day I dig myself into a linguistic hole, at least once for lack of vocabulary or proper tense sequence).
-Adjusting to the altitude and getting up the courage to go running amidst the dogs and unwanted attention. (completed this one a few days ago)
-Teaching my host family how to cook tofu (carne de soya = “meat of soy”)-
Hearing from more people. Shout out to everyone that’s been in touch so far. Please forgive slow responses…clearly I’m not spending the days in an internet café.
-The predictable and the unknown—don’t know which I am more psyched about.
Topic 3: Signs I’m in Bolivia
-I almost forgot about Valentine’s Day, February and winter in general, and my mom’s birthday (but then I remembered, just in time!). Not to rub it in, but Cochabamba is [choose: hella, wicked, ridiculously, unbelievably] NICE weather. We get cold when the mornings and evenings are like…58F.
-I cleaned our bathroom (that is, the shower/toilet/sink all-together in a small space room) with a squeegee this morning to dry everything off from my shower.
-At lunch I had like 3 glasses of passionfruit (maracuya) juice.
-Children asking me my name in the street (and dudes…I can talk to them in Spanish! I can’t get over it!)
-A lot of blank stares from adults who can’t understand the accent in me and my friends’ speech. A lot of times a nearby child will “translate” our accents, saying seemingly the same thing with the right accent and then the adult immediately gets it. Happens a LOT.
-Dairy in plastic bags.
-Snickers bars = 5 times the cost of the junk candy bars here. That’s 5-7 Bs. (less than a dollar) but we don’t exactly get much extra spending cash. We’re finding out that we should just save up for them because the candy palate here is way different. Kinda dry/wafery/crunchy things are preferred over smooth and distinguishable parts. Someone recently returned from the U.S. with mini snickers and kit-kats, and that was great! Chocolate bars probably don’t hold up well in international air mail, so I wouldn’t bother trying to satisfy that need.
-Dubbed Simpsons. It’s really not at all the same without the original voices. EVERYONE knows Bart Simpson here (at least, anyone with a TV, which is most).
-Trash in the green/muddy/waste-filled/bubbling/contaminated street water.
-The taste of the water from my filter…kinda gross so you know it’s good for you.
-“Bien, no mas”: phrases using “no mas” are big here. It’s like, if you don’t want to really get into a conversation with someone, or there’s just not much more to say, you can respond to “como esta” with “bien, no mas.” I like it, but you gotta be careful to not come off rude (plus we trainees should not be trying to cut off conversations with anyone).
-They have lots of things for sale in miniature, to put on memorials, altars, and this good luck guy (forget the name). The good luck guy is a figurine who is fat, smiling and holds things you want to come to you, like cigarettes, food, llamas, whatever. I didn’t bring my camera to the big market (oh yeah…I should have written about that this week) because it’s pretty dangerous to bring nice stuff (my host mom had her earrings stolen off her ears there today), but I’ll try to obtain some pictures somehow.

Topic 4: Dad’s question: Is my family “Quechua”?
It’s hard to say who is “quechua” or not…everyone and everything is influenced by the indigenous culture around here, but there are degrees of modernity I suppse. A good way to draw a line would be who wears traditional clothes and speaks better/more/only Quechua over Spanish. Most grandparents, especially the abuelas, are the traditional type on the outside as well as inside. However, most people in the “adult” generation in this community can speak some if not very good Quechua. Culturally everything is mixed between Catholic and Andiano (Andean/traditional) beliefs, hence the ch’alla on Fat Tuesday. Everyone does the syncretic thing, and I haven’t noticed that everyone is really all that religious (some have pictures of saints everywhere, some don’t). My mom here speaks fluent Quechua and Spanish, but I wouldn’t consider this family a Quechua or traditional family. Quechua (the language) is absolutely amazing to hear, hard to describe but maybe one day I’ll get a sound clip up. Like nothing I’ve ever heard before with its glottal stops, unaspirated letters, german-like “ch” and MORE. I guess that’s a perspective thing, as English probably sounds weird to everyone here. The only thing funnier is the sound of us trying to get our mouths, tongues and throats around the few words that don’t have a Spanish equivalent.

Topic 5: Kitten Update!
Getting so damn cute…I think I have my favorite picked out. My host mom says I can take one to my site (they’ll be 3 months old then, I think that’s a safe age to take them, generally the mothers aren’t around from much younger around here)! However my favorite changes daily…