Doña Kati

Here’s a little clip of my friend Kati at the mom’s club in my neighborhood. She’s knitting up a purse out of plastic bags and telling a story about her wedding day when she was just a thirteen year-old girl.

Work update, apparently we just have to make our own sometimes.

I haven’t written a blog in quite some time, sorry for the sparseness, it was purely unintentional. I had wanted to write about a success but the successes like highway mirages keep moving away. I had left Okinawa for the jungle three days ago with the hope of drilling seven wells in ten days (which would be on par with congress solving the deficit in a day or so). The whole trip out started off badly. My ride, a disgruntled employee, was very late but that enabled anna to meet up with me when her trip out to another part of Bolivia fell through. We arrived two nights ago to downpours on a road that was dirt and quickly changed to a soupy muddy nearly impassable mess, not a good sign. Because of the rain the previous night the next day’s road was bunged and we could not travel to the well drilling site.

Anna, me, Ben and Bryan (Ben and Bryan are also Peace Corps volunteers) are now on are third day of waiting to go drill and being cooped up is starting to take its toll (we designed and built a walkway for Ben’s host family so they don’t have to walk through a mud pit every time they use the toilets or kitchen, at least we accomplished something). As Peace Corps volunteers we are not allowed to drive and instead we are to rely on others for our transportation needs. Unfortunately the gentleman we are relying on to take us out to the jungle has no concept of time. After this gentleman dropped us and the drilling equipment off in Ben’s site he left to retrieve more drilling equipment and he has yet to return, we think he may have just forgotten us. We ended up leaving Hardeman (Ben’s site) around noon yesterday and as of seven o’clock last night Ben said the truck driver had yet to show up, kind of a bummer.

Before brick walk way.

After brick walk way.

Other news from Bolivia; Anna and I are training for a marathon that will be in October in Buenos Aires, this will be our first and probably last marathon. My project for implementing a water lab in Okinawa might actually receive funding from the prefectura’s office (think governor’s office), keep your fingers crossed. Anna is making excellent progress with the first ever sanitation committee and we hope to start a composting yard (fruit peels, leaves, etc…) just outside of town in the near future, again, cross those fingers. I was elected by fellow volunteers to be on peer support network (PSN); there are eight to ten of us for about 150 volunteers. PSN acts as a confidential liaison between volunteers and Peace Corps staff, sort off an internal watchdog, psychiatrist, and volunteer advocate rolled into one.

Anna and I will be heading off to Santiago, Bolivia for a technical workshop between Anna’s work counterpart and Josh, a fellow volunteer, who has a successful composting operation. We will also be stopping off in San Jose de Chiquitos and Robore to see Anna O. Mathias and Abe. These sites are close to each other but are fourteen hours away from our site via train, which I hear ‘falls off the track sometimes’, should be an interesting visit. After this small ‘working vacation’ Anna and I will head off to Cochabamba for a little more than two weeks for some added training, workshops, and meetings.

As always more to come.
Take care. Tomas.

Happy Birthday America

We had a fun forth of July replete with fireworks a roasted piggy and plenty of patriotic wear. About thirty volunteers gathered in Machareti, Geoff’s site in the Chaco region of Bolivia to play wiffle ball, enjoy good food, company and sing our national anthem.

MMMMmmmmmmmm, Bacon.

A little plug for our favorite candidate.

Anna Bird getting ready to jack one out of the park.

The day after July 4th we went to Geoff’s host family’s farm and enjoyed a favorite local beverage named ambrosia, fresh cow milk with sugar and pure alcohol. One sip was enough for me. Thanks for having us Geoff, good luck in the states you’ll be missed.

baggies and soy cheese

Every Monday afternoon I go to the mom’s club in my neighborhood to hang with a group of Bolivian women who get together to chat, crochet, and sip on nescafe. I joined their group as soon as we moved here and have made some good buds over the last year. Wanting to make a contribution with my basic sanitation job in mind, I taught them how to cut up plastic bags to make string that they could use for knitting. Plastic bags are all over the ground here, and this is just one small way to help keep the streets cleaner and plastics from going into the burn pile. Plus, the ladies often can’t afford any yarn, and the baggies, which come with every purchase of tomatoes, t.p., rice, etc, are free. The women loved it and have since made the most astounding things out of recycled plastic baggies: purses, hats, tablecloths, handbags, doll dresses, and more. And while they give me crap every week for being such a terrible crocheter, I love their company and dig sharing a few hours of sugary coffee, cutting up bags, and failed attempts to learn to handle that little metal stick.














This week I gave a vegetarian cooking lesson to the club: tofu and lentils over rice. Tofu, another one of those perks of living in a Japanese colony. The Bolivians generally don’t touch it and skeptically call it ‘soy cheese’ (makes sense). I did my best to sell them on the health and cost benefits of using tofu instead of meat (it’s a third of the cost of beef or pork and has lots of protein, which most families don’t get enough of here, plus a lot less fat, which they get way too much of). Soy cheese with lentils turned out great! They ate it up, and I gave each woman a floppy slab of tofu to take home and try in another recipe.











I get a lot of blank stares in my work here (Sure, Anna, we’ll be glad to ruin our food with the white, tasteless stuff). But you know, sometimes the bizarre ideas I present actually catch on, and blank looks turn to smiles and nods. And they keep on trying to teach me to crochet, and I keep putting in my plugs for an improved diet, ways to recycle, and the importance of washing hands. And maybe in another year I’ll be cranking out table cloths and handbags, and they’ll be cooking up tofu pot pie for dinner. Doubt it, but maybe.

Livin in Japlivia

On Tuesdays I teach an English class to a group of Japanese women here in Okinawa. In addition to making my cheeks hurt from laughing so hard, they continually impress me with their dedication to studying and their natural aptitude for language. And they giggle like no one I’ve ever met.

My friend Yukari is a smart cookie and a dedicated student. She, like most of the Okinawa descendents, speaks a combination of Spanish and Japanese, with a Japanese accent. It’s a beautiful thing, sounds excellent over karaoke, and is just one of the perks of living in a Japanese colony in South America

Tom was away the other day, and Yukari, knowing I was home alone, brought me dinner. What a sweetheart, she showed up at my door with a big bowl of rice noodles and some sushi rolls she’d made for me –sushi a la South America that is: seaweed paper and rice with pickles, mayo, lettuce, and a hotdog in the middle. I wasn’t sure whether to put wasabi or ketchup on it.


That there is what you get when you cross Japanese and Bolivian cuisine. Amazing, eh.