another good harvest

We’ve been here in Okinawa a full year now, and the days are flying by. Last weekend was our town’s annual festival, the Day of Good Harvest (Dia de Buena Cosecha). Last year this time, having just arrived in Okinawa, we watched the festival in wonder -the dances of Bolivia, the karate competitions, the Japanese performances –it was hard to believe we’d landed in such a unique corner of the globe. This year, surrounded by friends, we felt a part of it, proud of it. I danced the Tinku, a traditional dance from the highlands of Potosi, with a group of guys and girls from Oki in front of 4,000 people. And Tom and I, with the help of my counterpart and the women in my mom’s club, put up a booth to showcase the projects we’re doing with plastics and organic trash. The new hanging worm bin we built was a big hit, and lots of people expressed interest in getting one set up in their yards so they can compost their organic trash. Super cool.

So, a year behind us, another year to go. It’s going by so fast, and there is still so much work for us to do here. I don’t think a lifetime would be enough. But we have a year, and we’ll do what we can. We keep saying that the changes we make here will be small gains, and they will come out of relationships, and we may never even know about them. And that’s okay.

And so I think what we have before us is a year to enjoy friendships, to do our best at our projects, and to embrace the joys and frustrations and surprises that come each and every day. I think it’ll be a good year. Actually, I’m sure it will.

beautiful field of wheat, ready to be harvested

Awesome giant dog (lion?) that charges the crowd and freaks out the kids

our cool new okinawa coozies we got at the fest

yay! mango season is on its way again!

the hanging worm bin we built for the trash fair booth

no Oki fest is complete without some karate

doing the tinku

japanese kids parading

traditional japanese dance

dancing the tinku

Here’s a little background on the Tinku, a traditional dance from Potosi, Bolivia, which I danced in at the Oki Festival.

Potosi, resting at 13, 350 ft is perhaps the highest city in the world (depends on who you ask) and was for centuries the economic capital of Bolivia. Its silver funded the Spanish Empire for a solid two centuries, but its profits never spread to the people of Bolivia. Once a town of 200,000, its silver stores have been depleted and now it’s a small town that makes little off of its tin and other metals. Mining, in horrific conditions, still takes place there, and the life expectancy of its workers is somewhere in the mid-thirties. We haven’t been to Potosi yet, but I hear it’s a pretty grim place, and its history is as harsh as its wind whipped, rocky landscape.

The Tinku is the traditional dance of the indigenous people of Potosi. Both men and women take part but they do not dance together nor touch one another. The men form one group of three rows and the women another, and they dance their twenty-four respective routines, following one another up and down the streets, across fields, through plazas, and to the houses of friends and family where they stop to eat and drink. And drink. And drink some more. The festivities and dancing go on for three days. It ends finally in a circle, in which the well liquored men antagonize one another and duke it out. Sometimes to the death. This violence is generally regarded as a needed release from the strain of an impoverished and oppressed life; the killers are rarely avenged.


It’s cold up there in Potosi, and so the Tinku dress is a thick burlap sack. A dance with a skimpier costume could’ve been comfier given the jungle heat and humidity of Okinawa, but I love the Tinku, and I’ve gotten used to sweating through my clothes anyhow. So dance the Tinku I did, with all its twenty-four routines, up and down the streets of Okinawa, across the soccer fields, in the plaza, and to the houses of friends. We ate and drank what was offered to us along the way and ended each day with a friendly wrestling match in tribute to the traditional fist fights, then offered a prayer to the Virgin of Urkupina (still not so clear on who she is), along with the dancers of the traditional dances from other parts of Bolivia. It was exhausting and awesome. Sadly, I had to return my burlap sack, but I won’t forget the bouncing music or my Tinku moves anytime soon.

some pics from the festival days

stopping at a friend´s house for some chicha and a bite to eat

taking a break between dances

jeremy did the caporales, the dance from la paz

a group of girls doing the dance from Beni

kids watching dancers go by in the soccer field

the dress of the lead dancer of the Beni group

waiting for things to get started. We did a good fifteen hours of that.

basic santastic

Our project rocks. We get to build cement tanks to catch rain, drill wells that provide clean drinking water to families, design toilets and gray water systems, and play with worms. Basic Sanitation is where it’s at. Except sometimes, when it’s just plain gross.

We had our Basic San Project meeting a few weeks ago, together with all the other Peace Corps projects in Bolivia. 135 volunteers in one place. Oh my. Basic San is generally the envy of the other volunteers on account of all the fun we have playing in the dirt and the tangible impact of our projects. While the other groups were talking about bee hives and nutrition classes, the basic sanners were digging through the garbage of the hotel. It was awful, stinky, maggot-filled. And somehow, we were proud, and everyone else was jealous. Well, almost everyone.

A few of the basic san boys

It was a great week. We learned a lot about trash management, got to catch up with friends we haven’t seen in months, spoke English for a week (hands down my favorite language), even got to play in the pool and drink a piña colada. It was awesome, fun, informative, and refreshing. Those Peace Corps volunteers are good peeps.

After separating the hotel´s trash into organics, plastics, paper, and others, we weighed each category to see what percent of the trash total it makes up. Organics were the winners, coming in at 80% of the trash.

Yup, that´s gross.

After long days of meetings we chilled out by the pool at night, played a lot of texas hold ém, sang some karaoke, and enjoyed being in the company of 130 some friends.

me with the ladies

an emu that lives at the hotel

playing with fire

and some slammin beach volleyball. good fun

chicken lice

While hanging out on a farm in Josh’s site, I picked up a strong case of chicken lice. Chicken lice, almost as fun as it sounds, is mighty itchy and a little disconcerting watching hundreds of tiny bugs making their way towards your head. Fortunately, they go away with a good dose of soap and water, and within a few hours I was lice free, one more Bolivian ailment under my belt.

worms eat the garbage!

Tom and I just took a trip out to visit our bud Josh in the Chiquitania to see all the fun with worms he’s having over there on the Brazilian side of Bolivia. Awesome stuff! After a good twenty-four hours on trains and busses and taxis getting there, we spent a few days checking out his worm bins, talking trash, and walking the tranquil dirt streets of his little town.

Here’s some worm bins Josh has built to compost organic trash.

These little California red worms love eating kitchen scraps, grass, leaves and manure, which they turn into fabulous black dirt, excellent for gardening. My work partner Seberiano joined us for the trip, and we learned quite a bit about building the bins, keeping worms healthy, and getting people in the community involved. This specie of worm can live for 15-20 years and will produce thousands and thousands of offspring in a lifetime, plus a whole lot of nutrient rich, aerated dirt. Worm bins are all the rage in Josh’s town, and we’re hoping to start a similar program in Okinawa. I’ll keep you posted on that one.


Me and a donkey. Donkey's are my favorite animals these days.

No Bolivian house is complete without a hammock.

While out there on the easy east side, we took an afternoon hike up a mountain that looks over the flat, green vastness of the Chiquitania. What a beautiful place. Epic rocks.






While in Josh’s site, we also ate about a gallon of homemade guava yogurt that a friend of his makes, drank a lot of coffee round the kitchen table, and learned about rocket stoves, a genius design of a stove that uses very little firewood. We might try to get those going in our site, too, since most of the trees in the area have been cut down, and a lot of people in Oki still use open fire pits for cooking, which waste a lot of wood and create lots of smoke –bad for earth, bad for lungs. The rocket stoves are expensive to build ($75 each), but maybe we can come up with a cheaper design or find an organization to help fund the project.

It was a great trip and, as always, fun to get to see another volunteer’s life and work. Those Peace Corps volunteers do some cool things for the world.


These are two local artisans who make pottery, drums, and jewelry. I bought a tea pot and six mugs this woman made for four dollars. I wanted to give her more, it seemed like so little for such great work, but doing so would just contribute to driving the prices of artesania up to an inflated and unaffordable value, which would hurt local business, not help it. Funny how it all works.