we dug a hole!

Last week Tom and I joined some friends to drill a well a few hours from our site, prividing water for a family way out in the jungle. It´s a muddy business, well drilling, and I like it.

On the bus on the way to Hardemann, where our friend Ben lives. His cousin Seth came down from Cincinnati to play, too. And Brian and Andy, two other volunteers who know what they´re doing, joined up with us, too. Fun times.

Our bus, stuck in the mud, on the way to Ben´s site

The fam we dug the well for, and the truck we rode in to get there. Eight of us, along with a whole lot of pipes and gear for drilling, hung onto the back for the two hour treck into the jungle.

Tom and Andy working at the well rig. It´s pretty sweet business getting all covered in mud, which you can´t wash off until you hit water and get the pump running -good motivation.

I never realized, until this week, that rubber chickens are based on the dead, plucked sort. Look at that thing. Straight out of a bag of gags. The kid in the family chased it around the yard and caught it with his bare hands. His mom broke its neck. His dad plucked it. We ate it for lunch. It was good.

And then a dog tried to eat Tom for lunch. Not all bad though -he had to go to the city to get rabies shots, so we got four free days at a hotel chilling out at the pool. Life is good, even when it´s not.

A big, big bird. Up up in the sky.

Bolivia is full of beautiful things.

p.s. the title reference, ´we dug a hole!´is from the movie ¨The Castle.¨ Highly recommend it.

brief summary of our work and language acquisition

Wanting to give a little more structure to our jobs as basic sanitation volunteers, Tom and I typed up a list of the goals and projects we hope to accomplish in our time here in Okinawa. We presented the document to our work counterpart, Pedro, who is the president of the water cooperative in town, and is hopeful of being the mayor in a few years.

At the top of the page was the title, Metas por los Próximos Dos Anos, followed by our names and titles. This translates to Goals for the Next Two Years. Or it would have, had I spelled it right. Instead, it read Goals for the Next Two Assholes, Tom and Anna Sullivan, Peace Corps Volunteers.

Pedro chuckled and pointed out the error, kindly, before we handed a copy to the mayor and city council members.

Perhaps we have not made any great strides in our work yet because we are buffoons and no one takes us seriously. This is compounded by the fact that we can’t understand what anyone is saying, but we remain hopeful and enjoy the ten hours of free time we have each day.

I have started doing sit-ups and exercising daily along with Tom. Evidence of a six pack is emerging, which gives me reason to live. If I get nothing from these two years in Bolivia besides some abs of steel and a less embarrassing grasp on Spanish, we’ll consider it time well spent.

the days are just full of surprises

You know when you open the trunk of a car to put your bags down, and you find the head of a cow in there?

Yeah, life is just that weird here.

christmas in october

When we were in the city last week throwing down for our anniversary, we stopped by the office to see if we had any mail. Oh my lord. Count ém -one two three four -packages!!! One from my mom and dad, one from dear dear Cat who runs an orphanage in Columbia, and two (his and hers) from Anthony and Michelle in Omaha. It was Christmas morning when we got home and tore into them.

What can we say but thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. We feel loved. And we ate beef jerky for lunch all week, which, goes without saying, is the good life.

Q: sex, dating, and keeping the spirit fresh

Our friend Sarah from Duluth has posed some good questions for discussion: How’s the sex, have you gone on any dates, and what are you doing for yourselves to keep your spirit and soul fresh. I’m a little wary thinking of my parents, in-laws, and former bosses reading my response to the fist, but what the hey. I’ve never been known for my modesty.

Sex: While the Peace Corps isn’t a particularly easy job, it does allow for a lot of free time. If you had two to ten hours to kill every day, what would you do? I’ll leave it at that.

Dates: Not to be a sap, but every night is a great date with Tom. We take turns cooking dinner –whoever feels like it or has a good idea for what to make- and we sit in our hammock chairs side by side with a beer (cheap, not tasty) or a tin cup of wine (also cheap, and kind of tasty) and enjoy each other’s company over a good meal. My favorite though is our morning date when Tom brings me coffee in bed (my birthday present this year was free coffee in bed for the rest of my life –excellent). We sit under our big mosquito net and talk about the things we hope to do and the people and places we love. Don’t barf just yet. It’s not all peaches and perfect. But really, I landed an awesome man, and I enjoy his good company.

We go into the city every month to get our mail, monthly living allowance, see some friends, and have a nice dinner. La Casona is our favorite place to eat. It’s a German restaurant in a beautiful 150 year old house with an open courtyard, and they have the best bratwurst and mashed potatoes in Bolivia (maybe the only brats in Bolivia, come to think). And bottles of wine or jugs of passion fruit juice for three bucks. Can’t beat it. Last week we celebrated our four year wedding anniversary with lunch there, followed by a swim at the posh hotel where we were staying ($10 a night for both of us), a baseball game viewed from our big bed, and dinner at a French restaurant where we ate spinach and beef stroganoff crepes and filet mignon. Amazing. This might sound like normal life to some of you, but you’ve got to understand that watching a baseball game and going for a swim is the kind of thing we spend weeks fantasizing about.

Tom at La Casona

Keeping the spirit and soul fresh: I think the first two questions answer a lot of this one: love, friendship, celebration –that’s what feeds my spirit. Our job here is very undefined and, it’s not easy to see progress or know when we’re on the right track. I can get pretty frustrated with our work, and it helps immensely that we do a lot of things for ourselves to be proud of and excited about. We cook up great meals (weird sometimes, on account of the available ingredients, but great nonetheless), go for long bike rides, read up on things of interest, play the guitar, write letters, think, talk, nap, exercise, build things, plant things, plan things. And always there is music in our house. And a fan blowing. Which, anyone who has lived in the 100 degree, a.c.-less tropics can tell you, is a spiritual thing.

Nature has always been my outlet, the thing that refreshes me, and it’s harder than I thought it would be for us to get out in the midst of it here. What was jungle fifty years ago is now farmland spreading out for miles in every direction, and our only mode of transportation is our bikes. There is a small lagoon a few miles away, which is home to a bazillion beautiful birds, a pile of crocodiles, and a few jungle mammals that I can’t pronounce. We bike there every week or so to feel like we’re somewhere far from town, and for the hour or two that we are there I feel refreshed.

The lagoon near our house

why we do not swim in it

Q & A time

According to the tracker down to the right, fifteen hundred of you have been purusing our blog. I love it! But I figure the little stories and pictures we share don´t really paint a complete picture, and I thought I´d invite questions from friends, fam, and whoever else is reading our blog.

If you´re wondering what life in Bolivia is like, what we spend our days doing, why there is a Japanese colony in the middle of south america, what´s good to eat around here, why the weather forecast currently says 'smoky,' anything you´re curious about, just ask. You can create a comment on this article with a question or you can email me (annabsullivan@gmail.com). We´ll make a blog out of your question and give you our most colorful reply, complete with pictures and (slightly slanted) commentary.

smoky oki

clues that we are not in america

When you've been traveling a while you get accustomed to the newness of every day. You call any bed with your backpack on it home, you pick up enough phrases to get by in the markets and restaurants, you get used to throwing your t.p. in a basket instead of in the toilet. After a while the things that first struck you as bizarre and unfamiliar become normal.

Still, after five months in Bolivia, every day something reminds me just how far from home I am. This is not America (well, the north part anyway).

I discovered a street vendor selling a good array of herbs and spices the other day. She had about twenty bags filled with various dried leaves and ground spices, and while perusing the selection I noticed a dead mouse on top of the chamomile. It's not easy to find spices here, and I couldn't let a little rodent keep me from a good find, so I bagged up some rosemary and whole nutmeg, paid fifteen cents, and thanked the vendor. From my American point of view it's hard to figure why she didn't bother to get rid of the mouse –maybe it wasn't keeping other people from buying their chamomile tea, but I opted out on that one.

Driving is another thing – nothing like home. There are no stop signs or stop lights in town, and when you come to a four way intersection you either slow down to see who's coming or speed up and lay on the horn.

A lot of cars don't have headlights, but that doesn't keep anyone from driving in the dark. Sometimes you'll be cruising down the highway at night and come flying up on an invisible 18 wheeler loaded down with sugarcane. Same remedy as with intersections –either slam on the brakes, or fly around it with your thumb on the horn.

It's not unusual to see a family of four bouncing down the road all squished on a motorcycle. Six is the record we've sighted though. Incredible - flip flops and heads poking out everywhere.

I was hanging out with a woman at her house the other day, and her 18 month old was being fussy, so she asked her husband to take him for a ride on the motorcycle. Dad scooped up the baby and plopped him on the gas tank in front of him. The little guy grabbed the handle bars as though he'd done this dozens of times, and off they went down the bumpy gravel road at forty miles an hour, baby smiling and hanging on.

I like to imagine driving through charlottesville and being passed by a guy on a motorcycle with a barefoot baby sitting on the tank in front of him, chubby little fingers gripping the handlebars. Would that baby's delighted smile keep some horrified mom in a minivan from calling the cops? Doubt it.

When you're gassing up at the station, they ask everyone to get out of the car and stand to the side –apparently there is a frequency of blow-ups here.

Instead of cutting the grass, people just light the yard on fire every few weeks.

When you greet a woman you haven't seen in a few weeks she either tells you, "ewww, you've gotten fat, eh?" or, "ohhh, you're skinnier than you were last week." Apparently, they're both meant as compliments.

So while we're getting comfortable and accustomed to our simple, chill life here, there are still surprises to keep in interesting. And these are the moments that let me know I'm in the middle of the adventure I was hoping for.

I bet when we are back in the states it will be a struggle not to pack the children up and put them on the motorcycle for a trip to town –so fuel efficient and quite a bit more fun, anyway.