Back to the grindstone.

This is a copy from the yearly budget, which shows money for one of our projects. We were pretty darn excited.......still are.

All fun and no work………
I know that to some, well, maybe all of you out there looking at our blog, it looks as though we are having a heck of a lot of fun and not really doing anything constructive for the people that live here. We are having a good bit of fun however the truth of the matter is that we are helping people it is just that the time frame for getting things accomplished here is ridiculously slow. I would love to write blogs about how Anna and I research why fecal coliforms are so bad for you and why chlorine is measured in milligrams per deci-liter, but I don’t much like reading about such things and I am definitely not going to put you, the reader, through such a miserable read. Hell, I can hardly write well in English let alone the subject of diarrhea and why it happens. No, we like to write about our fun times and we realize that we should be telling you all that we are getting some good things done here in our hot mosquito infested nook of the world with your hard earned tax dollars.

We are very used to things being accomplished at breakneck speed in America, ordering food, high speed internet (good lord do I miss that), driving, shopping, having babies (well I guess that is nine months everywhere) actually I think this fast pace thing is a bit of a problem back home, this whole idea of “I want results and I want them now”. What they would say here is “tranquilo, no mas” which basically means, relax dude, it’ll get done. I want “results” for this country, kids are sick, old folks are sick, obesity, cancer and diabetes are major problems and I want these things dealt with ahorita, but trying to get things done very quickly here is just not possible.

We have been in our site now for almost eight months and we just got our first (major) project pushed through. Anna and I gave a presentation to all the OTB’s (basically town representatives, there are 26 “towns” in our “county”) on the need for a water testing laboratory in which water quality would be tested by this “county” and not a town forty miles away and that doesn’t give us the results until a month later. The OTB’s loved us (I just held up our laptop - they thought that was pretty funny - in a small room of twenty odd people and Anna read the slides) and the plan and approved the project and presented there approval to the mayor. The next thing we know is that the mayor has given us two thousand dollars to fund the lab, almost 45% of the cost of the entire project. We were so stoked!!! Anna and I were amazed usually things like this take the entire two years of a volunteers peace corps service to get done.

More details to come!

viva la paz!

All carnied out, we left Oruro and took the short trek north to La Paz, the beautiful and enormous and very high capital city of Bolivia.

These are some flea bites I got from the hotel bed where we slept in Oruro. Seems the fleas were not pleased with me.

La Paz is a cool ancient city, its streets lined with vendors selling all sorts of beauties and uglies, artisan goods, 100 year old blankets and rugs made of llama wool and natural dyes, incan figurines, dried llama fetuses, you name it. We ate some of the most delicious food Bolivia has to offer -indian, lebanese, and local, all done right.

But we didn´t come to la paz to play in the city! We came to be hard core. So we signed up for an ice climbing trek with a nice little tour company, and headed our for Huyana Potosi, one of Bolivia´s modest 20,000 foot peaks. Our guides, two Aymara men, kicked ass. Scaling ice walls with ungloved hands, they lead us over a glacier and kept us alive as we scampered up and down its mighty walls.

This is the refugio where we slept (and did not get bitten by fleas). A lovely lady made us breakfast, lunch, and dinner while we played by the lake and lounged by the fire at the base of the mountain.

The trek to the glacier. Me, Tom, Ben and Britta our good buds from Santa Cruz, and two fly canadian kids we met along the way.

Mis crampones

Super bad guide number one

Super bad guide number two

Super bad glacier.



Tying in before dropping over the edge into a little glacier gulley.

Big crack in the glacier.

There are probably words for these things, but our guides spoke Aymara, so I don´t know them.

Climbing a big face of the glacier, an axe in each hand. So cool. But not particularly easy.

Made it to the top! I couldn´t make a fist when we were done, my hands were so exhausted.

A view of the top of Huyana Potosi with a fresh blanket of snow and an avalanche that had just come down.

rockin the carnival

Tom and I were back in Coch last week, me to welcome in a new group of 31 volunteers and to attend a Volunteer Advisory Committee (VAC) meeting, Tom for more Spanish classes. I got elected president of VAC, which is cool, and Tom passed his Spanish exam with flying colors. This verifies what we´d hoped, that we´re both smart and likeable people.

From Cochabamba, we headed up to the altiplano to celebrate Carnival in Oruro. Holy crap.

Carnival is a celebration of all things Bolivia: ancient culture, dancing, drinking, water baloons, foam in spray cans, and deep fried sausage. It was a city-wide battle, with every man, woman, and child equipped with a bag of water baloons and a can of espuma (think silly spray, but with more cfc´s). Throughout the city there were dancers, following a three mile path down ancient city streets. They danced from dawn until dawn, while everyone around them cheered and drank, and threw baloons, and ducked, and get espuma in the face. Ponchos were sold on every corner for 25c. a piece. Thank god.

Groups came from every part of the country to do their traditional dance in the parade.

I don´t know how many owls and armadillos gave their lives to garnish these costumes, but they were incredible.

We had seats right on the plaza to watch the parade. It was a war-zone, and every one of us was plastered with water balloons and foam. And beer.

The public bathrooms weren´t hard to find. They were manholes, opened up for the weekend, with aluminum walls wrapped around them. I don´t know how keen your sense of public sanitation is, but this is a pretty dirty thing to do to your water. CleanerI guess, than pooping on the street. Which plenty of people were doing. (sorry, didn´t take any pictures of that).

We got to catch up with some good buds

Watch the super bowl (complete with bean dip and pigs in a blanket)

Launch some water balloons a few hundred yards

And cheer on our friends from team zero who were dancing the tincu with their crew from Oruro. Super cool.

From there we went to La Paz, the capital of Bolivia and the highest capital city in the world, where we became ice climbers. Coming soon. . .