Pictures of the first couple weeks

Día Mundial de Turismo

World Tourism Day announced itself a sunny, clear Tuesday in Cochabamba. We set up our booth with posters about natural resources and listed the “Leave no Trace” slogan translated into Spanish. We were one of the only educational booths, not offering package deals to the Chapare region or Amazonia, but instead offering games and conversation about responsible travel and saving what little natural resources we have left. The theme was Travel and Transportation, celebrating the centennial of Jules Verne’s death in 1905. This was a quote that struck me: “En 1950 eran veinte millones, el año pasado 760, y para 2020 se calcula que el número de los viajeros
internacionales superará los 1.600 millones anuales. “ Basically saying that the amount of travelers worldwide in 1950 was 20 million and by the year 2020 that number will be up to 1.6 billion. Our booth was one of the most popular, kids enjoyed the games and adults were fascinated with what the gringos had to say; I also think that the engaging manner of standing in front of our table, willingly entering conversations (and apologetically declining offers for dinner and tours around the town) was an approach unlike any Bolivians are used to.
What amazed me was the success of our presentation with the bare minimum supplies (markers, chart paper, poster board, and candy). PowerPoint, color copies, laminations, brochures, and advanced technology were not an option, and in hindsight would have been extremely unnecessary. The best part, however, was looking at my watch and realizing that Shannon, Sarah, and I had conversed with hundreds of people in Spanish for a 5 straight hours! I remember staring up through the jacaranda trees in the main plaza and thinking how lucky I was to be able to do this only a month after arriving in-country!
The days are getting warmer and my village of Bella Vista is getting ready for its annual festival. Each night in the church square, people are dancing the tinku, diablada, caporale, and cueca- all practicing for the big weekend. Unfortunately the same weekend we leave on our “tech week,” traveling to different sites and visiting current volunteers and observing their work. Tomorrow I am giving a presentation to 8th graders at the middle school about renewable natural resources and the physical characteristics of Bolivia; I hope to learn as much from them as I am teaching them- especially considering most of my information is out of a textbook and not through experience like them.
In other news, I have undergone a new Bolivian haircut, learned new card games, wandered aimlessly in Cochabamba, and fall more and more in love with Bolivia each day I wake up. I hear of my site announcement in about 2 weeks and am anxious to find out my new home!

Top 10...

Top 10 things I have learned this week in Bolivia:

10.When life breaks your camera, you start noticing things and paying more attention to the scenery that passes you by…
9. I am not as immune to amoebas and parasites as I thought I was…
8. Some of the best ice cream I have ever had hails from Cochabamba…
7. Trying to open a wine bottle with a utility knife is NEVER a good idea…
6. My favorite meal is Milanesa- a filet of beef breaded and fried with egg batter- and Relleno de yuca with queso…
5. Hand-washing my laundry, while much more time-intensive, is also much more effective…
4. Running every morning on a grassy path alongside the mountains while women pick their gladiolas to sell at the market sure beats running on a treadmill…
3. It costs $2,000 for a family in the campo to have a landline telephone…
2. There is a good chance I will be working at a site where I would be promoting a tourist destination along a CHE (Guevara) tour…
1. “Capacitar” does not translate into English (like I thought it would) as “ to brief someone on a specific topic”, but instead “to prepare a female, usually a cow, for fertilization”…

As you can tell, things have been going well for me… there is still nowhere else I would rather be despite the mishaps and cultural faux pas that I have encountered. Today we went to the famous Virgen de Urkupiña, where there were apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Every year on the feast of the Assumption there is a large festival and pilgrimage to this church. Farther to the south of Quillacollo, there are ancient ruins of silos where grains, maize, and even personal belongings were stored. They were placed very symmetrically according to the wind direction, and are located high atop a plateau- a view which yields an awesome sighting of Cochabamba and the large Christo statue.
Sunday, I went to mass at the Cathedral in Cochabamba. Built in the late-16th century, most of what remains today is restored and not original, but beautiful nonetheless! The plaza adjacent to it, Plaza de 14 de Septiembre is quite the gathering place on Sundays-for the young and old, rich and poor; jewelry vendors, ice cream carts, and shoe shiners all cluster in the park underneath the beautiful jacaranda trees; at times its nice to just roam and feel like a tourist and not like a resident!

The Chapare...

Woke up to the sound of my alarm clock at 6, praying that it was just a truck passing by my window selling bread and spreading political opinion throughout the campo. I rolled out of bed and went for a quick shower before our field trip to the Chapare region. Only once I was unclothed and freezing in my concrete bathroom did I realize that no water was coming out of the showerhead. My family was not up yet, and so I dressed, took a vitamin C and started walking the half hour to my fellow Tourism volunteer’s house. From there we started on our 2-hour ride to El Paraiso, a.k.a. Paradise, where we visited a trout farm and tourist destination. A PCV almost finished with her service came along and after exploring the cloud forest where this “paradise” was located, she gave us answers to questions that only those who have been here two years hold. A lot of it was about technical aspects, working with the local mayor’s (alcaldia’s) office, not playing a political role in your community, and what to do when nothing you expected to get done gets done. In the past three days, I have gone from feeling really frustrated with being able to make a difference, to feeling extremely eager to finally be applying some architectural/ planning elements to my community, to feeling utterly self-righteous in this new place. Thursday we went to a school where we spoke of education and natural resources. We tried to ask this 8th grade class what they thought were advantages and disadvantages of their school system, and using that same model, what were strengths and weaknesses that their community possessed in terms of natural resources. The best response we got to the latter question was a blank stare. I suppose that for me realizing that the level of education of one’s own surroundings and the opportunities and threats that exist not even a kilometer from one’s house is practically non-existent. On Friday, we visited the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d’Orbigny; here we met with the director who gave us a tour and demonstrated to us that he was a great asset to us once we are in our sites. He is an archaeologist who is an expert on local artifacts, and there is a great possibility that our location will be one where these artifacts are the goal of our tourist attraction. In this session we also were briefed on how to build a community museum with artifacts, epoch-clothing/ attire, and pictorial histories. I regained the glimmer in my eye when I thought of having to design the infrastructure, layout, and presentation of this community museum; I only hope that this is an activity that takes hold in my community! Today at the trout farm the other two tourism volunteers and myself led a workshop with the owner of the farm and two prospective trout farmers. We had about a minute to prepare what we were going to say, and then brainstormed activities that could be ameliorated in this specific case as well as prioritizing steps for the potential farmers to take in order to be successful. Perhaps this is the element of my job here, which is the most taxing on me, at least for the moment. The idea of myself conducting this workshop in my still sub-par Spanish and suggesting to this Don the best way to create a fish farm and draw Bolivian/International tourists is near impossible to grasp. I neither feel qualified academically nor feel it appropriate for me to be in this position! In perspective, now that the day is over, it was a great learning experience, if only for the practice in running a workshop and introducing ideas of tourism and visiting a site due to its natural attributes which are still very foreign to the typical Bolivian.
I guess the moral of this story is that in the end all things even out. The rollercoaster days are always balanced out by a good meal (trout and local white wine!), fellow volunteers experiencing the same frustrations, and having a family to come home to. The week has flown by… tomorrow I get to experience my first Bolivian wedding, I promise pictures when (IF!) I dance! Chao~

Escuelas y Fiestas

After a full week of language and community tourism classes, I am exhausted! Today we visited a secondary school about 20 minutes away to sit in a class and see the differences in educational settings between the States and Bolivia. A big part of our primary and secondary projects will be working directly/indirectly with young adults, and this was a great way to see how we could best suit the learning needs in a classroom setting. The school was centered around a rather large courtyard, and despite having large student-to-teacher ratios (about 30-1) the classes seemed well organized. There was a very different method in teaching, which for the most part is jjust lecture, with little room in the school day for analytical thinking and hands on activities. In the campo (suburban countryside) there are little resources and these students didn’t have any books. I attended an English class where they were learning names and colors of clothing. My friend Ashley and I were an interesting commodity in the classroom- after being asked every question from whether we liked Bolivian men to why we were in the Cochabamba region of all places in Bolivia, they wanted our autographs, phone numbers, and email addresses. Our session was meant as a brainstorming activity to which we later applied a hypothetical lesson plan based on our Tourism or Microenterprise sector.
I made the 30-minute walk home as dusk was falling, content to go home and ready for the weekend! Tonight we played cards with Romina, Theresa, and Wilhe. I taught them the delightful game of Gin, and they taught me a couple of Bolivian games. The wind at night gets pretty fierce and it cools off quite a bit; my family seems to take advantage of this and is always early to bed, early to rise. I almost feel as if I have been a part of this family for more than a week. They are in my thoughts when I am away from them, and today for the first time, they have conceded in letting me help in the kitchen! Tomorrow a fellow PCT's host family is throwing him a birthday party- this requires dressing up and going into town beforehand and buying a cake. It will undoubtedly be a rite of passage in my Bolivian culture, drinking chicha, eating more delicacies, and dancing to a new kind of rhythm.
Here are some pictures, there are few for now, but promise to put more up soon!