Lost and Found in Bolivia

Chronicles of Rachel's Peace Corps service in Bolivia as an Agriculture Extension volunteer.  I hope not to get too lost during my 27 months, but I have a feeling I'm going to find some things.  Enjoy the stories!

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Picture-o-rama

lighting our smokers in our supercool bee suits!


some friends in Totora

erosion is not really good to be entertained by, but this does look really awesome anyways

road towards Totora...somewhere in the valleys

roadblock!

some friends during the road block protesting the bad road that runs through our town: taxi drivers pay a fare, but the roads never get fixed and it ruins their vehicles. p.s. my friends are throwing up the gang sign that we made up for our pueblo (neighborhood).
fun shot along the road connecting two of our neighborhoods where we live during training. that´s me on the right, and those just happen to be the Andes in the background.









so yeah...this says: yes the dollar is going down, save in euros!

Tech Overnight Trip

Well even though I haven’t had the chance to post my last blog entry until now, I’m going to write another one to describe the trip we just went on.

Split into our project group of Ag Extension/Ag business (Natural Resources and Environmental Ed went somewhere else…it’s sad to be split up from them), we took a 2.5 hour bus ride southeast, through gorgeous scenery, up and down and around mountain cliffs (Don Roque, our bus driver, is THE MAN). We went to a sweet little colonial-style town called Totora, to see a current volunteer (pair actually) and their sauce-making project. Local girls from the town learn about how to transform tomatoes and veggies into a sauce (it’s DELICIOUS), and sell it. So they also learn about hygienic processing of foods and business management. We also did our first session with beekeeping…another chance for me to thank my Cornell education (and my generous padres) that I felt I had a step up with the subject. Not that I by any means know everything or couldn’t use the refresher, but it’s fun to be able to know something already to help me move forward quickly with the topic. It was also a bit more intense working with Africanized bees. That means that they have more aggressive genes, so they respond more to hive disturbance. Forget what you’ve heard about “killer bees” because it’s not like that. You just have to be careful since if one stings you, there is a good chance that more will sting you if you don’t use your smoker device to quell the attack pheremone they release. If you’re dumb, and do something to really make them mad, they will become aggressive and follow you for hundreds of feet, which is a big difference from the gentler European bees in the North.

In that short trip, many of use found we were able to contract some new bacteria in our intestines! Bus ride home was uncomfortable for me, I had a very slight fever last night, but I’ve bounced back today.

Overall my favorite part of the trip was just being able to see more of Bolivia (though on a map it looks like we barely left the city of Cochabamba), see some real life roadblocks on the highway (Don Roque had no trouble getting around them though), and see what life is like in a real volunteer site. Tech week is coming up in a few weeks, I’m going to be really busy until then with my small group, getting our presentation to the community group together, also coming up with and implementing a business idea…So if you don’t get an update, that would be why. Tech week will be like this overnight trip, except we’ll go farther away and do a lot more, since it’s really 10 days!

Funny thing is happening to me...typing well in english is getting HARDER (though speaking is usually ok, though we tend to do a spanglish amongst ourselves if we can´t think of an english word!)

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…


Friday, February 15, 2008

Flooding, keep bolivians in your thoughts

Ok, so Bolivia may not be the best known country in the world, but I think it's ridiculous that I had to search so hard to find news about the flooding that's displacing tens of thousands of people in the amazonian regions of the country. Note: we and the other volunteers are safe, the worst is in a department known as Beni, where Peace Corps does not work (though i think we should do crisis corps there, every year the flooding gets worse). Check out the following, I feel obligated to spread awareness because this is absolutely sad and scary. Many people haven't died, but a LOT of livestock has been left to fend for itself, setting the country up for a compounded food crisis for loss of crops and quickly escalating meat prices (and there's the inflation as well!). I don't know if there's an easy way to donate funds, but I know some aid organizations are helping out. If you can, please donate or at least spread the awareness...this country and people are so beautiful and do not deserve to be ignored.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7243970.stm
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/SKAI-7BULXQ?OpenDocument

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Carnavale y Corso de Corsos

Me and my friend Lebo getting totally soaked. That´s my brother in the back, him wetting us was unplanned (by me anyways):
How to begin to explain Carnaval: it’s supposed to be like Mardi Gras, except here they throw globos (water balloons). And they throw buckets of water, use supersoakers, and the water isn’t too clean. Sometimes the balloons are frozen, filled with ink (con tinta), or mud. Sometimes there’s shaving cream or soap, so much so that there is now a type of spray foam marketed specifically for Carnaval (comes in a can like silly string). And it lasts from a few weeks before Ash Wednesday, escalates the week of, and still goes on until the weekend after (update: I hear there’s actually going to be some water all month). Thus, even though I’m writing this on the second day of Lent and all the mischief should be gone, I still have to worry about getting soaked (mojado…a word I’ll never forget) when I go outside. Of course the gringos, especially the gringitas (white girls) are a huge target. There will sometimes be huge trucks full of people with buckets, guns and globos, and we can hear them from afar shouting “gringos! Gringos!” It’s ok when you’re in the mood for it and you’re playing with little kids or people you know, but it gets really annoying when the offending party is above the age of 16 and you don’t know them. That feels more mean-spirited. You have to watch out constantly, someone could be hiding behind a wall or gate, or you could get a bucket from a balcony above. Like guerilla warfare, but with water (usually). If only real war were with water and not bullets, and whoever got more wet would lose. I’ve gotten used to the occasional splashes and small water fights in the villages…but I was not ready for Corso de Corsos (read below).

There’s a lot of ancient Quechua tradition mixed into this, like what we eat on the actual Martes (Tuesday) de Carnaval. We had chuño, which is freeze-dried potatoes, recooked (did not like very much), regular potatoes, rice, and a spicy chickpea sauce on top. We put some of that in a pot and buried it for pachamama (mother earth from the Quechua tradition) with some alcohol sprinkled on top. And in the evening we ate corn on the cob (HUGE kernels, it’s called choclo in the cob form, maiz if it’s the ground up flour form), sweet plantains, a bbq-ed squash (not sure if that was traditional or because my family likes vegetables) and bbq chicken (actually pretty big all the time here). I tried to explain about pancake suppers and eating doughnuts. I said it was a holiday about fatty foods (since you can’t eat them during Lent), my host mom thought that was hilarious. You’re supposed to Ch’allar (offer to pachamama) by pouring out your drink to the ground a little bit, and also burn something called a K’oa which I didn’t get to see first hand. I have two more Carnavales to get through, maybe next year I’ll see the K’oa. There are also cohettillos (firecrackers), music, lots of drinking (my family didn’t though, but in general the parties are wild…lots of Ch’alla followed by lots of drinking), and traditional dances as in the corso de corsos. The department of Oruro has the most famous Carnaval, that’s where the huge parade with dancers from all over occurs, but the Corso de Corsos (a similar parade) is a big deal here in Cochabamba.

Unfortunately, the water at Corso de corsos is a lot worse than the water wars in the smaller areas. We tried to get close to the parade yesterday and it was a disaster! Imagine a park full of vendors (mainly of globos and plastic ponchos), and people armed with water balloons, water guns and that shaving cream/foam stuff (espuma). Everyone is just constantly throwing water balloons randomly, so nobody is really dry. However, when a group of us walked in the park, everyone immediately started soaking us, coming up to us with the foam and spraying us in the ears, hair, face. We literally had groups of people following us launching balloons at close distance—it really hurts! I guess it’s “in good fun” but it doesn’t feel that way on the receiving end, when you KNOW you’re being especially targeted for a very specific reason. I felt embarrassed and humiliated! If the situation were reversed, I’d like to think that my friends and I wouldn’t sit in Central Park humiliating people who weren’t from the U.S. We didn’t get to see the parade on the first two tries, so we went walking and to a restaurant for a lot of the afternoon. We found other groups of trainees, everyone had had the same experience!

Then we decided to try again once more far away from that park, and still got balloons (close range, very painful), but it was less constant and we were able to see some of the dances. It was really fun, sad that we only got to see them for a little while before we had to get the bus back to our communities. Some of the dances are pretty simple, just look like (but are probably more complicated than) stepping to one side, and then another—there the costumes are more interesting. There’s one type that requires the girls to wear tiny little skirts, kind of like tutus, and mainly focus on swishing them side to side. They wear glittery headdresses and/or put glittery ribbons and giant pompoms in their braids (traditional women wear long braided hair with small decorations at the bottom, sometimes made from teasing and modifying their own hair I think…so this is an exaggeration of that). The guys are especially fun to watch because they have to wear really gaudy costumes. Sometimes they’re big structural costumes to represent animals, sometimes they look like really out of proportion mariachi/cowboy suits or something…always lots of sequins, and sparkly boots with bells. I loved that you’re really respected as a man if you can do these traditional dances with the intense costumes. They really get into it! The dances from the altiplano were totally different to the ones from the lower regions (like Cochabamba and Santa Cruz). The dress was much more conservative and the costumes weren’t all sequined and sparkling. One that I remember had hats with llamas embroidered on them, and of course there were lots of bowler hats. Sometimes the dancers had little props in their hands, noisemakers or something that was integrated into the dance. The bands were also great, playing songs corresponding to the dancers that were near them I think. The most different thing about this parade was that between groups of dancers or musicians, anyone could just hang out in the street and have water fights. There were also people always walking along the sides of the parade selling food. All in all, I’m glad I got to see the dancing in person for even a little while, but I don’t know if I’ll be going to any Carnaval celebrations in the cities next year…considering Cochabamba is apparently the most tame of all of them! Someone at the parade told us that in Santa Cruz all the water is con tinta, and I hear Oruro is just more wild than anything (plus it’s colder up there)! I’m sure I’ll look on this and laugh soon enough, but I’m glad that the worst (best?) of Carnaval is over for the year.

The next several weeks we are going to be super busy with the many different assignments we have to complete for Peace Corps, and I’m a bit worried about getting it all done, especially since a lot of it means talking to strangers to ask them about their lives in the community. However, I’m pretty happy to finally have a schedule and a purpose. I’ll keep you all updated.

Monday, February 4, 2008

Some Pictures

Not very flattering picture of me, but this is the sunburn I got after less than 2 hours in the sun, after I got my vaccine (no fainting!) on Friday. Two more vaccines Wednesday...thanks for paying your taxes, you´re keeping me and my friends healthy down here!

View near the training center outside the main part of Coch. Note the ridiculous view of the mountains.



A sign in our hotel room bathroom, care of the PC staff. We are getting used to this, can´t believe it´s only been since Wednesday since we´ve been here!


Cochabamba from the plane



May not be able to post as frequently soon, once our intense training schedule starts. I´ll shoot for once a week for e-mail and blog. So please keep those emails relevant, and try not to facebook random things to me...the internet isn´t very fast to check all that, though I do appreciate the thought. Try emailing me directly instead!

Superbowl en Bolivia

GOAAAALLLLL!!!! Is how the Spanish language broadcaster reacts when there is a fieldgoal in the Superbowl. Not that it’s the wrong reaction, but it’s clearly a crossover from “real” football (that is, soccer). After a day in our respective host family homes, we had a superbowl party where we got to speak English and watch familiar players on TV. The similarities basically stopped there. No beer (showing that we can be responsible PCT’s), no American commercials (the ones I noticed seemed to be the same people in a car to advertise a car sale, then drinking juice to advertise that…I think they were the newscasters), and the regional specialty called pico macho (not sure about that spelling). Pico macho is, I believe, hot dogs and beef all cooked up with French fries. It’s not potatoes, it’s actually French fries. They also show up in soup, and on plates with rice and pasta. We had the French fries separate from the meats, which I appreciated. Oh and Coke made with sugar, not corn syrup, and other fruity sodas. Was really fun to hear everyone’s embarrassing moments and “awww” moments from their first 24 hours with a new family… a great party in spite of (or because of) the departure from the normal. I wish I had the blue couch though…

My host family rocks, I am not roughing it at all (this will make the transition to my inevitably rustic rural site more difficult, but I am not complaining about my sweet set up). My host mom is very kind and well known in the community, just like another awesome mom I know J. I have an 18-year old sister, and brothers aged 16 and 12. My host father is also nice, very into spending time with the family when he can. They all speak slowly and clearly for me, though they claim my Spanish is very good (I have trouble believing that’s not an exaggeration). My favorite thing is that they will say “Raquel” clearly when they want to say something to me, and then make sure that I understand what they are saying as they go along. We also have 2 dogs, in very good shape, and a cat who had 5 kittens my first night here! They’re too small to be cute fuzzballs yet…but soon. I went to the market today with my host mom, we bought a lot of fresh veggies and fruits. She even asked if there were soy products around (no luck). This family eats very differently than others…more veggies, fewer carbs and meats. I shouldn’t have a problem being vegetarian here. My room is nice…just wish it was closer to the bathroom. To get to the bathroom, I have to go downstairs and out a door into the separate bathroom, passing the dogs which are nice but a little crazy, and if it’s night time I have to turn on a bunch of lights which might wake the others (but there’s a shower and toilet, so I am psyched!).

About not being sick…haha that only lasted for a few days. There’s something living in my intestines, but it’s not serious, just a little uncomfortable. We’re very well taken care of if anything should become a problem…there’s a 24 hour on-duty medical cellphone to call, plus a great med kit...better stocked than my own medicine cabinet ever was.

More seriously, I am starting to get homesick, even as I am surrounded by such a caring host family and group of fellow trainees (we all live in the same community, I have one next door, another around the corner, etc). It’s hard to handle so many differences at once…language, people, culture, food. Of course it will cycle through good and bad many times when I am here, but I think I’m beginning my first low in the culture shock graph that we’ve been shown (low points happen at specific times, I’m pretty much by the book, being sick giving me an early onset). Some friends and I have a yoga session planned for later, I think that will be a good thing. I hope all of you reading are well, I am dying to hear some news, mundane or otherwise, from your lives. Drop me a quick email or letter, I’d love it! Cell phone number may be to come soon (mucho dinero for you, but doesn’t cost me to receive calls).

Friday, February 1, 2008

Cochabamba Update

Wow!  Lots of hits on my counter...thanks for reading everyone!  I'm having a great time still, tomorrow we move in with the host families.  I am going to attempt to upload a picture here...to demonstrate how strong the sun is (I got a shot at 11:45 am, and wasn't in the sun more than 1 hour after that, yet I have a band-aid burn line).  Send me gummy sour candies, I ran out yesterday!  Actually the candy here isn't too bad, but I'm not getting enough fruits and vegetables...typically we eat a variety of carbs each meal.  Tonight I had some banana-milk smoothie thing (full fat milk, gotta get used to that) and some cooked veggies and rice.  Was excellent, but they actually forgot to make my food.  So when everyone else had finished, I had to communicate in spanish that i had not gotten my food....all was ok and i got a free pastry!  Hopefully I won't get sick...

In other news we got our spanish placements (tentatively), and it seems like i'm in the middle of everything, which is where I would have placed myself.  Lots of room to improve, but we're all supporting each other.