feeling a little ill

Here´s a little video I took while Anna and I sat for about two hours waiting for the taxi to take us to a community about 45 mins away where we ended up giving a spur of the moment presentation to about 30 people about bathrooms and grey water systems. All in all a productive day, Even though Anna wasn´t feeling well. take care everybody, we´ll write again soon.

Good morning America

thanks, ma and pa

We just opened a package from mom and dad Montgomery. It is full of the most valuable treasures imaginable: chocolate, fruit leathers, packets of seeds to start a veggie garden, letters from home, a good pen, dehydrated sour dough starter (my mom is a magician as well as a good cook), Dublin Morning tea bags, and a book on composting.

What a gift. My parents are endlessly generous and supportive, and I would like to make a little public announcement here about what rad people they are. A few thank-yous for all they do to show their love and make me glad to be their daughter:

Thank you, ma and pa, for the package. We are grateful and wish we could share the chocolate with you, but we ate it already.

Thank you, ma and pa, for your support. We’re far from home on this grand adventure, and it helps immensely that you are behind us in what we’re doing. Know that I cheer for you everyday, too.

Thank you, ma and pa, for believing in me. You have tempted me to think that I can achieve anything I set my heart on. So far, it’s worked out pretty well.

Thank you, ma and pa, for taking risks in your own lives. You have shown me that your path is what you make it, that no one else will make it for you, and that you should take the weird way sometimes to keep it interesting.

Thank you, ma and pa, for being fun. You played legos with me and laughed at my jokes and taught me to ski and played word games with me on our long road trips to the cottage. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t have a little fun, and I’ll credit you for showing me how to enjoy the small bits of each one.

Thank you, ma and pa, for being so freakin’ awesome. I admire our family tremendously and think we belong in a museum (plaque would read, ‘Freakin’ awesome family of six. Notice genial nature and general gayety of members’). Of course, we’d never stay in the museum –too many plants to be planted and trails to be explored to sit inside all day.

I love you guys and am grateful for all the hope and confidence and comfort you’ve put into me over the years. You did good. I turned out all right. My sister, too. And even our husbands and good. Consider the job well done.

So, a toast to my ma and pa, and all our ma’s and pa’s, for the good they’ve done in bringing us up. And thanks for the tea. It’s delicious.

so this is work?

This peace corps work is not your normal occupation. There are no office hours, no boss, no guidelines as to what we should accomplish on any given day, and no one watching, besides a few hundred curious neighbors. It’s a little unnerving to face the projects we came here to do without any of the structures we’re used to, but I tend to like it. Most days.

The first steps in our work as Basic Sanitation Volunteers are to meet people, get to know the community, and find out what sanitation needs we might be able to address in our two years here. Later we will ask someone important (local municipality officials or non-government organizations at work in the area) to give us money to carry out these projects. Once we have funding, we will find skilled laborers who are willing to work for next to nothing, decide which families are the most worthy of receiving a bathroom, water system, well, or worm farm, and then build something in hopes that it will make someone’s life healthier and happier. Where to begin . . .?

Today, I felt like I was on the right track when a woman I have met a few times invited me to the neighborhood mothers’ club. Mom clubs are common in Bolivia and are comprised of moms of all ages who get together to do something. Or not do something. Either way, they are well organized groups with elected presidents, treasurers, and the like, and they meet weekly or monthly to do an activity (knitting is a good bet) and chat it up. This is a good opportunity for me to get to know people, find out about the needs of the community, and enlighten a captive audience on my current favorite topics: the dangers of burning plastics, pooping in your yard, or eating without washing your hands.

A little before 3:00 I go out and sit on the log in front of our house to wait for my friend. At 4:00 she appears, no apologies or mention of the time, (an hour delay is pretty close to punctual here), and off we walk to the ‘club de madres’. The first to arrive, we find the host in the back yard at a table braiding her mother’s hair. The yard of swept dirt has a few smoke stained, grass roofed buildings, a fire pit, a concrete sink that drains into the street, and enough ducks, chickens, and dogs to staff a carnival. A rooster torments a small, half-haired, flea-carpeted puppy until a little girl comes to its rescue, picking up the pup by an ear and a leg. I think of the lucky dogs born in America –bags of lamb and rice kibbles, a bed in the house, baths, obedience school. Different world here.

After introductions the host shouts in a few directions, and soon other women appear. They invite me to a seat at the end of the table. I scrape the pile of fresh duck poo off the bench with my notebook before taking a seat. I just did laundry yesterday after all.

The women chat of this and that, show me the purses, dresses, belts, and blankets they’ve knitted, and explain that they don’t presently have money for more yarn, so there will be no knitting today. I watch a duck eat a bicycle tire while talking with the ladies about the projects I hope to carry out in Okinawa: bathrooms, trash programs, and the like. They seem mildly interested. I ask the host what she does with the ducks. “We eat them,” she says. “Ever eaten a duck?” Not that I can remember I say, and next thing I know a duck roasting party is in the works for next week. I am to bring nothing but a hungry belly and my husband, and they will kill their biggest baddest duck and roast it up for all to share. Awesome.

So this is my job. This is how we get started on the long, unfamiliar road of unfunded development work. We hang out with our neighbors, go to get togethers when we catch wind of them, and talk about bathrooms. If we ever come across some funds to construct one, the pace may change. For now, we will enjoy the newness of it all and eat the ducks when invited to.

This is a pretty tree in a pretty field near Oki. All is flat here. Kind of like a tropical Oklahoma

Exploring!

Hello Friends and Fam! Hope all is well in north america. Alright, I´m trying to load video on a internet connection that is similar to our old phone modems in the states, so, I hope this works. It is a brief video that my blossoming director of a wife made the other day biking down a gravel road outside okinawa.

This picture is of Anna´s never ending battle against the leaf cutting ants that play havoc upon her vegetables and garden.

The Rio Grande, this river, in places, is twice as wide as the Mississippi and drains into the amazon. The people standing with me are local community leaders. Anna and I spent about seven hours driving around with two other community leaders inspecting, interviewing and talking with the other communitys which are in our juristiction. We covered roughly 70 kilometers on gravel roads in a car with a large hole in the floorboard, the amount of dust covering us was astounding.

Anna and I with our new Bikes! Goldie and Shamoo, We love them. Anna and I went to Santa Cruz last weekend and bought two new mountain bikes for around four thousand Bolivian Dollars. A week later we have sore muscles we never knew we had but it is well worth it, I had forgotten how much fun (and quicker) traveling is with a bike.


Anna O., Anna Bird, and Kevin (a Catholic Saligence volunteer in our site) Making sushie in Japanese Bolivia.

Mango tree in our backyard!

The new fishing hole. Its a fairly large lagoon about two miles from our house on our bikes.

Usually what our free time consists of, I can´t and won´t put the other free time pictures on here.