Siste time!

I can't even think of where to begin this post. I feel like I should be finding some way to conclude this whole incredible semester, but I know it's absurd to think that I'd be able to do that, even with pages and pages of writing. I'm flying home on Tuesday and I really can't wrap my mind around what it will be like to leave this place.

We had our final presentations of our projects this past weekend. Most of the projects were thirty minute presentations about our topics, methodology, and findings, but for me and Laura (those who wrote children's books) and Nicole (who wrote a week-long curriculum for a fourth grade class), they consisted of a brief presentation to the group and then we got to read our books to a group of kids who came to the evaluations specifically for story time. It was without a doubt one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life. This project felt more meaningful than any other work I've ever done, and to have the opportunity to present it to the people it was meant for was absolutely incredible. Afterwards, the kids asked me a bunch of questions about the book and gave me terrific feedback. I went back to my seat glowing after the presentation. It was one of the best feelings I've ever had.

Evaluations made the previous week, when I got approximately 3 hours of sleep over a five-day period, completely worth it, which is impressive, considering the illustrations were the most daunting task I think I've ever taken on. I had decided that, since I'm hardly an artist when drawing by hand, I would undertake an alternative form of art for the illustrations for the book. Inspired by the Eric Carle books I read so often as a child, I decided to make collages. The Monday before the projects were due, I went to a paper store to buy my supplies. I learned several new words when trying to explain to the woman behind the counter that I needed thick paper (cartulina), paint that works on that paper (tempera), and a brush for the paint (though I forget that word), among other things. When I asked for scissors, she brought out a pair that may have actually been made of paper themselves and told me they would cost 2 bolivianos, approximately 26 cents. So I asked for a more expensive pair and we settled on a 5 boliviano pair, which comes to less than one dollar. Okay. They were essentially those scissors you used in third grade, before you were allowed to use scissors with points and metal handles. But the woman assured me they would work on the cartulina, so away I went with my bag full of art supplies.

The illustrating process then proceeded to take me all week, possibly a result of the spontaneous study break I took in order to, oh, you know, take an eleven hour bus ride to the salt flats of Uyuni, widely known as one of the most beautiful places on earth. Okay, okay, so maybe I shouldn't have impulsively left the department of Cochabamba during the last week of our final projects, but I have wanted to go to the salt flats all semester and never had time, and my friend Angela (a Bolivian friend, no less!) called me on Monday night and told me she had free bus tickets to Uyuni and we'd only have to pay for the tour. This is unheard of, and there usually aren't even buses that go from Cochabamba to Uyuni; you have to go to Oruro and find one from there. And need I say that typically you have to pay for the bus fare? There was no way I was passing up that opportunity. I agreed on the condition that she promised that it would be only one night, so that we left on Wednesday morning and would be back on Thursday night. I told myself I needed a study break, so on Wednesday morning, after pulling one of several all-nighters that week, I hopped on a bus with Angela and three of her friends to Uyuni...only to find myself at a blockade about twenty minutes outside of the city.

Blockades are the Bolivian way of getting demands met. Since many cities are connected by only one major road, anyone who wants to make an annoying scene just has to get together a group of people and a pile of rocks and no one is going anywhere all day. What I don't understand is why they don't find a way to blockade the airport instead. I find it very frustrating that typically all they manage to accomplish with road blockades is piss off the working- and middle-class people of Bolivia while the elites, the people they are trying to move, continue to jet around the country in the air. But road blockades are an age-old tradition of the Bolivian people. We pulled up at the blockade, only second or third in a line of cars and buses that continued to grow in length and in restlessness all morning. Almost immediately, all of the street vendors in the area began to load up their trays and circulate throughout the crowd with chicharrón con maíz tostado (little fried pork bits with toasted kernels of corn), choclo con quesillo (corn on the cob that you eat with a salty cheese), pollo frito (fried chicken), helados (ice cream), and cold bottles of water and soda. Needless to say, I bought everything in sight, being an American with the tendency to hoard and the constant terror that at some point I might actually run out of food. I paced in anxious circles around the area, occasionally participating in the increasingly irritated chants of "queremos pasar!" ("we want to pass!"), though not too actively for fear that I would be caught on the news cameras that had begun to accumulate around the scene (we weren't allowed to participate in street demonstrations). Eventually, four hours after we got to the blockade and about twenty minutes before we were about to give up and go back to Cochabamba, the police showed up and cleared the blockade in some way that I'd like to think did not involve tear gas, though I really am not sure. And we continued on our way to the salt flats!

We got to Uyuni a little after midnight that night and asked the bus to drop us at a cheap hotel. Upon entering Hotel Avenida, also known as Ciudad del Gringo (that may not have been its official name but that's what we called it), we discovered that it was indeed quite cheap, possibly the cheapest option in the entire touristy city of Uyuni. The narrow passage that led to the rooms was lit by a single flickering bulb hanging from the ceiling and the peeling salmon colored paint on the walls gave away that it probably had not undergone any renovations in a while. I am used to sleeping in places like that, being a budget traveling gringa myself, but Angela and her friends were less pleased. We had a light dinner of sardines with lime on crackers (that which remained of the snacks we had packed almost an entire day earlier) and went to bed.

We woke up to a bright, clear day, perfect for visiting the brilliant and expansive salt flats (provided you have a good pair of sunglasses). We bought a tour from the agency next to the hostel, grabbed a quick breakfast of coffee and toast (and in my case, scrambled eggs-need that protein), and got into a Toyota SUV to begin the trek out to the flats. Our group consisted of the five of us and a hilarious French boy who we soon discovered was deaf (after Judy, one of the girls, asked him, "So, are we going to be friends?" to no response). Luckily, Angela speaks ASL, so although it's different from French sign language, we were able to communicate with a mixture of signs and other hand motions and writing. I was so impressed that he was traveling alone in a country where he doesn't really speak the language. I'm so glad he was on our tour; he really made it an even more beautiful experience.

Our guide brought us around to various places around the flats, and as we got further and further into the flats the salt got whiter and whiter until suddenly it was blinding to look out of the windows. We asked him if we could stop to take pictures, and when he pulled the car to a stop, we jumped out and scattered in all different directions, running as fast as we could. I think it must be a human instinct to run towards the horizon when you sense you're standing on the edge of something infinite. After a few seconds of instinct, however, reality took over-we were something like 4000 meters above sea level, and running is not easy when you're not used to living in the altiplano. We collapsed on the ground, which was so bright it looked like its own source of radiant light. Then we took the standard salt flat pictures-posing with someone standing far behind you so that it looks like they are miniature, and jumping because it just seems like the right thing to do. Then we got back into the car and continued on to eat lunch at a salt hotel (yes, a hotel made of salt) where Marcus would be staying for the night. Afterwards, we visited La Isla del Pescado, the most touristy part of the whole trip, but it was worth it. We climbed to the top of the hill on the island and looked out at the entire flat (and the sea of Toyotas down below-it looked like a commercial) and it was completely breathtaking. I realized afterwards that I hadn't thought of the work I should have been doing the whole time, and it was really refreshing. We headed back to Uyuni, hopped on the bus, and slept. Despite a slight inconvenience in Oruro, where we stopped at 2:30 in the morning to change buses and didn't leave again until 4:00, it was a relaxing trip and we made it back to Cochabamba around 8:00, when I proceeded to get back to work and try to make sense of the fact that I had just taken what will probably be the coolest, most spontaneous trip of my life.

I just realized I haven't mentioned yet that Ali is here! She bussed down from Colombia starting about two weeks ago and arrived at 5 in the morning on Monday! It's so incredible to have her here, not just because I've missed her painfully so much of this time but because I'm finally getting to share this beautiful new home of mine with someone from what seems like my previous life. I know I won't ever be able to convey so many of these experiences with anyone who hasn't been here for all of it, but I'm also thinking that it's kind of special to have something that is only mine. Not like a secret, but just something that I can close my eyes and think of and smile. I don't feel ready to leave, but I know that I will be back.

Thanksgiving is gone; Capitalist Christmas is here

Christmas decorations have been up all over the city for a month. I guess with no Thanksgiving to get in the way, it makes sense to start capitalizing on the holiday season right after Halloween (which is also becoming a major holiday here, and is pronounced "HA-low-een", which for some reason is so much more fun to say than hall-0-WEEN. Try it.) but it's still strange to have to squeeze by plastic Christmas trees covered in an abundance of gold garland every time I go to my favorite salteñería. It seems to me that there are not stores specifically meant for trinkets like there are in the US (i.e. the aptly named Christmas Tree Shop), but rather arbitrary restaurants and clothing shops have put out their Christmas stock as if it were to be expected that you would only have to make one stop for all of your empanada and ornament needs. I've stopped trying to make sense of things here and I'm just trying to soak it all in before I leave in three weeks.

Speaking of leaving...I don't even know what to say about it. I feel so torn between how badly I'm going to miss this place and how excited I am, for instance, to have the luxury of pants that fit because they have been dried in a dryer. I swear I'll never complain about having to walk down a flight of stairs to change my clothes from one machine to the other. When I feel really sad about leaving, I remind myself that first of all, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I'll be back someday soon, and second of all, there are countless amenities that I had no idea I would miss until I got here. For example, bathrooms. I've come up with a list of criteria (complete with a point system) for the ideal bathroom here (I've yet to find it), all things that go without saying in the US but are quite the luxury here. It is something like this:

BARE NECESSITIES
light (2 points)
working flush (2 points - or 1 if the "flush" is a bucket that you dump into the bowl to flush it)
sink with running water (3 points - I'm an avid hand-washer)
toilet paper (4 points - although this could go under "bonus points", it's so rare)
trash can (1 point - you can't flush toilet paper here)
paper towels or electric hand dryer (2 points)
lock (5 points - I've upped this point value after too many walk-ins to count)

BONUS POINTS
toilet seat (1 point - you learn to squat)
soap (2 points - you learn to carry hand sanitizer)
window or fan (3 points - as you can't flush your poopy paper, this is a welcome addition)

I think I may be missing some from the list; I haven't ever written it down, I just think about it every time I'm squatting in the dark and scrounging in my pockets for substitute toilet paper.

Thanksgiving was last Thursday (or for those of us on this program, Friday) and it was such a lovely and crazy experience. Heidi offered to host us all at her house if someone else planned the whole thing, so Laura took on that task, while Luis and I agreed to do the turkey. You may ask, why would you offer to cook a turkey for over 30 people when your oven is probably the model that came out immediately after the Easy Bake Oven and you are in the middle of a week full of interviews all over the city and, oh yeah, you've never cooked a turkey before? Well, I don't really have an answer for that question, but we did it! I went with Antonio (one of the people who works in the office of our program) to the supermarket on Tuesday and we picked out the biggest turkey they had and I lugged it back to my apartment and rearranged all the shelves in the fridge in order to begin the long defrosting process. Alas, when after two days it was still a solid block of ice, I turned to the "cold water bath" method. I think that the cold water bath implies more of a bucket or a large sink, but as everything in this country seems to be slightly smaller (or maybe I'm just sensitive because I'm an extra large gringa in a short person country), the only place where the turkey would fit was Luis's bathtub. We dumped the bird in the tub and began preparation for the feast. We managed to procure a meat thermometer from Heidi, as well as a bottle of rosemary and another bottle of some other unidentified spice, which we mixed together along with other unmarked bags of spices we found at the corner store near Luis's house. Presumably we used olive oil, pepper, garlic, rosemary, bay leaves, sage, and thyme, but we're actually pretty unsure of the exact contents of the rub. Still, I must say, when we slathered it on the (finally defrosted by 5 am Friday morning) turkey, it smelled reaaaally good. Luis's oven has no temperatures written on it, so we popped it in at "level 3" and waited. We had gotten up at dawn because we were worried it wouldn't be done in time for lunch, and of course that little plastic tab popped right out at 10:30 am. Awesome. Still, I think the sitting in its juices did it good, because that bird was de-licious. And now I can say I've cooked a turkey. In Bolivia. It was quite the experience.

As for my final project, which I suppose I should mention, it's been going really well! I haven't finished writing the book yet, but I've been writing it simultaneously while conducting my field work, and I think it's good I haven't finished yet because everyone I speak with gives me new ideas about what to write. It's so rewarding to present my idea and my partially written story to people and have them say, "Wow, that same thing happened to me!" I met this 18 year old girl who literally gasped at every plot point I described to her and then excitedly gave me her number so that I could run the story by her when I'm finished. I'm so encouraged by the excitement that others have about my project. I'm excited about it too, of course, but to hear it from others is so much more satisfying. I really hope that I can reciprocate all of this support and assistance that I've gotten from so many people.

That said, I do have my setbacks, of course. Today I hopped on a taxi-trufi out to Tiquipaya, which is about a half hour away, to interview a teacher and (I hoped) the director of an alternative "eco-active" school there. To get there, I have to take a trufi (public transit) to the main street in Tiquipaya, then hop in a taxi that knows where this school is (it's pretty much in the woods). I was planning on stopping by the school to talk to the director and then going to teacher's house, which is close to the school. I stopped by the school and the secretary told me the director had just left and would be back tomorrow, so I went on to the teacher's house. When I called him from outside his house, he answered and said, "Oh! I'm actually at the airport right now; I forgot we had a meeting!" Frustrating. I know I should have called him before I left my house but I'm still not used to the Bolivian way of checking in over and over again about something. So I walked back to the center of town, and by the time I got there, I was in a great mood once again because literally every person I walked past on the street greeted me with a smile and a "how are you?" I wish people were this kind in the US. I'm not looking forward to arriving in Boston in bundle-up-in-your-coat-and-don't-talk-to-anyone times.

I can't believe how much everyone is willing to help me with my work here, and not resignedly but enthusiastically. I genuinely think that I'll be a kinder, more open person when I get back to the states because of the generosity of almost everyone I've met. It's a totally different world here.

The procreation of inanimate objects; new friends; a very clean scorpion

I'm not sure how it happens, but I have no doubt that when you leave your personal belongings alone in a room all day for several months, they find a way to reproduce. I'll leave the scientific explanation to someone better equipped to analyze such phenomena but suffice to say that the three bags with which I came to Bolivia have no chance of containing the contents of my room. Hence the decision to blog at three o'clock in the morning, since certainly no more packing will be done until I can procure another vessel for my things. I'm moving into a new apartment tomorrow for the last month of the program, and in the meantime getting a taste of what packing to go home will be like. It's going to be difficult to avoid the impulse to give away half of my clothes around midnight of December 21st.

I should probably be going to sleep but in addition to the packing-induced adrenaline coursing through my veins, I'm kept awake by the excitement of the Leonids shower that I might get to see in an hour or two! My host brother is the only other person in my family interested in getting up before dawn (or staying up most of the night, in my case) for the slight chance of seeing the meteors. It's cloudy here right now, and the shower isn't expected to start until around 5, and all of the articles I've read about it say that the places to see it are North America and Asia, yet I am holding out hope that the skies will part and the sun will wait a half hour or so to rise and the Earth will tilt a little bit back on its axle and the sky will be ablaze with streaks of fire. We'll see.

In all honesty, half of my excitement about the meteor shower comes from the fact that my brother offered to wake me up to see it. Before yesterday, we had exchanged approximately thirty five words throughout the whole semester, most of which occurred when my host parents and I came to a language barrier during lunch and all eyes would turn to the end of the table, where Bruno would glance up from under the brim of his baseball cap and enlighten us all with a single utterance: "meat-ball," or perhaps "goblin". He speaks English and German in addition to Spanish, plus he studies medicine, so he is the source of all answers that the rest of us seek. Okay, maybe I'm being a bit dramatic, but he is certainly intelligent and chooses very select moments to reveal the information he hides under his long black hair. But as of last night, he suddenly decided to be my friend! My host dad had been waiting all day to watch "Inglourious Basterds" as a family, which seemed to me a peculiar choice for family movie night, but nonetheless we all piled into the living room for the movie. Before my host dad could get the machines all working, Bruno asked me if I had a program called Mojo on my computer. I said no, and he explained that it's a program for downloading music from someone whose iTunes library is on your network. Apparently he's been listening to my music all semester and wants to take some of it. For those readers who are not of the music downloading generation, asking to steal someone's music is a pretty big compliment, ranking up there with what I imagine asking to borrow someone's groovy polyester top would have been in your generation. So needless to say I was flattered, and he tried to copy the program to my computer after the movie. It didn't work, but the seeds for friendship had been planted. Then tonight he came into the kitchen while I was eating dinner (mini tuna melts on crackers) and began to prepare his own meal. We don't eat dinner as family, and as we both have had a lot of work this semester, I rarely see him at night. I offered him a tuna melt cracker, and he not only obliged but made a face of sincere enjoyment at the new snack, and then introduced me to his concoction: octopus with "salsa golf" (mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together), also on crackers. Food has a lot to do with social relationships here, far more than in the US, and I think our sharing of dinners was the second step to our new friendship. That's when he took the third step, inviting me to watch the Leonids shower with him tonight. It might just be my tendency to look for patterns, but something makes me feel like now it's concrete. I feel so accomplished, but a little disappointed that I'm leaving tomorrow. It's not as if this whole time I was longing for him to be my friend, but as awesome as Lucia (my younger host sister) is, she is fifteen and thus the pastimes we have in common are limited. It would have been cool to have someone closer to my age to go out with, since the law, my host mom, and rules of age-appropriate behavior all prohibit Lucia from coming out with me at night.

The one other event of note from today also has to do with showers, but this time the literal kind. Earlier tonight, I went into my bathroom and noticed a peculiar shape on the floor of my shower. I leaned towards it a bit to figure out if it was a strategically arranged pile of dead pill-bugs, which is commonplace in my bathroom, then jumped back with what I'd like to say was an uncharacteristic yelp upon realizing what it was: a scorpion, its translucent tail poised delicately above its back. I haven't seen a scorpion in my whole time in this country, and now on my last night in this house, there it was, taking a rest in a place where I soon would be barefoot without my contacts in. Even right now, hours later, the thought of it makes my stomach flip. I have no idea if the scorpions here are deadly or just sting like wasps, but I would very much like to avoid both of those experiences. I regret to admit that rather than dealing with it the way I could have (I was wearing sneakers), I sheepishly went into the house and asked none other than Bruno to help me deal with the situation. Judging by the look on his face, he was no more confident about squishing the creature than I was, but in this case I was thankful that machismo lives on in this country, because he seemed to feel obligated to rescue me. Before stomping it to an indiscernible smear of what might as well have been the pill-bug pile after all, he took the opportunity to educate me about the lifestyles of scorpions, including the oh-so-encouraging fact that they travel in pairs, and that the smaller ones have the most potent venom (this one was no more than four centimeters long). Hopefully this one's partner will hang out somewhere outside until after I leave tomorrow afternoon. I want to feel that it's unlikely that I'll see another one in my time here, but something tells me that scorpions don't follow the the same myths that govern lightning. I might make it into a saying just to comfort myself, though. "Scorpions never bathe twice." However, as with everything else here, I can't plan on that. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

Food policy, school observations, and the long weekend

Getting behind on this blog is fatal because I feel like so much is happening all the time that I never get a chance to catch up. I realized I wanted to write at least one more thing about my experience in the rural village: my experience in trying to explain the problems with US food policy. It was really surreal, in a way. One night while I was there, my family and I were all sitting around after dinner before we went to sleep and someone asked me what it was like in the US. I feel like it's hard enough to describe and explain (and defend) my life at home to city dwellers here, let alone to people for whom half of my daily activities have absolutely no relevance. As foreign as it was for me to live in a house with a stove made out of mud, washing clothes on the rocks outside, I'm an anthropology student and these things at least exist in my mind, if only in readings that I've done. But when my host dad asked me what products we grow where I'm from and I just answered "corn," we got to this surreal point in time where I knew I couldn't possibly explain the way the food industry works. It's just so absurd. The conversation went something like this:

Dad: "What products do they grow in your country?"
Me: "Well...corn."
Dad: "That's it?"
Me: "Some other things, but mostly corn. You see, we make lots of things out of corn."
Dad: "Like what?"
Me: "Like sugar. And food for other animals, like cows."
Dad: "Your cows eat corn?"
Me: "Well, yeah, to make them fat. Even though it makes them sick, and then they have to give them medicine."
Dad: "They should just let them eat grass."
If only Cupertino Guzman could talk some sense into policy makers.

Anyway, once we got back to Cochabamba, we had a crazy week of work ahead of us. We had our group projects due last Friday, so Nicole and I spent most of the week observing in classrooms around the city for our comparison of urban and rural education here. I was sort of bummed because I had missed my family (the Cochabamba one) all week and my older sister was here from La Paz with her beautiful baby daughter, but the school observations made it so that we barely had time to make it from one school to another, let alone to come home for lunch. We spent the mornings in a K-8 school in the center of town and we got to see a fair where they displayed all of the "manualidades" which are like crafts I guess, but practical ones like tablecloths and ponchos and home decorations and things like that. I was really impressed by the level of work that even the fourth graders were doing, but Heidi told us afterwards that a lot of times, the mothers do a lot of the work for them. I'd like to think that at least some of them did their own work, though, so I'm still impressed.

Then in the afternoons we went to a school in the Zona Sur, which is further south than the city center and requires a 30-minute trufi ride to get there. It's the school where Heidi's husband works in the morning, so he got us the personal connection, which we found was so important. The director of the school in the morning was the aunt of Nicole's host mom, so we had a personal connection there as well. Without the help of those people, we wouldn't have been able to do any observations, despite the fact that we have official authorization from SEDUCA, the public school board of Bolivia, to observe in the classrooms. Anyway, the school we went to in the afternoons was a convenio, which is a public school sponsored by the Catholic church (the government gives them money to sponsor the schools). I don't understand how that works, but apparently there is not exactly a separation of church and state here, because every public school we visited had an obvious Christian or Catholic influence. The school is great though, and we got to observe in a fourth-grade class, which was simultaneously so helpful for our project and so emotionally enriching. The kids were so endearing and the teacher had great classroom management skills and they all seemed genuinely happy to be there. What a great experience. At recess, the girls would all fight over who got to hold our hands (mine and Nicole's) and drag us out to the playground and then just fawn over us. They would ask us how to say their names in English, and how to say our names in English, and play with our hair. They even told Nicole she had pretty arm hair. Such a crazy but lovely experience. We are going back for the last week of classes (they're about to start summer vacation) when we get back from Santa Cruz next week, and despite the sometimes overwhelming attention, I'm looking forward to seeing them all again.

This weekend was a long weekend because of Todos Santos, the holiday when you remember your deceased relatives and friends. My family didn't go to the cemetery to celebrate, but traditionally the celebration is huge, especially if someone has passed away in the last year. They stay in the cemetery all night with a sort of altar dedicated to the person and celebrate the person's life. It sounds so beautiful and I really wish I had seen it for myself but like many city families, my family doesn't get so into the traditional ways of celebrating Bolivian holidays. We did have company yesterday, though, which was nice. They came over around lunchtime and I assumed they were just guests for lunch, but more and more people showed up and they ended up staying until around 10:00 at night. It was a lot of fun and by the time the evening came around, we had brought out the guitar and we were all singing along and it was really my favorite type of party. I even played a few songs at the request (insistence, really) of my dad, although it took me a while to get up my nerve, and although I couldn't play anything they knew the words to. But I genuinely enjoyed myself and was kind of sad when everyone finally went home. I think the hardest part about being here is being alone at night, because college is such a social place and I'm used to having people around at all times whether I like it or not. Here, I find I'm always alone by 10 or 11, unless I go out to a bar or club. It gives me a lot of time to think, which is sometimes good but other times I wish I could be doing something else. I've taken to playing the guitar a lot, though, which helps, and hopefully by the time I get back I'll have improved.

I have to leave for the airport in about six hours so I should really get some rest. We're leaving for Santa Cruz, a big city to the northeast of us (so it's a lot warmer and more humid than here). I'm really excited! We'll be there for the weekend, which is the first time we're getting to spend the weekend in another city, so we'll actually get to experience the social life at its best there. It's our last excursion as a group, which is strange because we've been together a lot for the past two months and the end of the trip marks the beginning of the independent study time. I'll miss everyone but I'm also looking forward to getting started on my book. It's really wild to think we're here already, but I think I'm ready to take what we've learned and go with it.

Halfway through

Happy Halloween! I just realized that we're more than halfway through the semester now and I can't believe how quickly the time has gone by. I'm starting to tell people that I'm coming back in the summer (although I really have no idea when I'll be back), half as a means of preparing for how sad it's going to be to leave, and half to convince myself that I really will be back. I love this country and I'm starting to feel like I belong here not just as an anthropologically minded gringa but actually as a part of the culture here. I can't imagine what it will be like to go back to the US in December.

I spent last week (the week ending last Friday, not this past week) in a rural village outside of Cochabamba. The bus ride was only about two hours to get there but it's such a world away. We were all assigned homestay families like the ones we have here in the city but they were Quechua-speaking campesinos (I guess the closest translation for campesino would be country people) who are generally subsistence farmers, although some families also sold goods at the market in Punata, a small city about an hour away.

So we all got dropped off with our bags at a school in Pairumani, one of the villages where we would be staying (we were spread out among several communities), and representatives from our families were waiting there to bring us home. The homestay coordinator read off our names and then our family names and they came forward to claim us and it was deliciously awkward as all of these huge white people bent down to greet these short brown people, not knowing if we should kiss on the cheek (the Bolivian city greeting) or both cheeks (an alternative) or do the handshake and the pat on the arm (often the campesino greeting, but not always), or some poorly coordinated combination of the three. Then we all piled into taxis to go to our new homes, and somehow we managed to fit four students and our family representatives into each taxi (at least eight people, occasionally more), and off we went. It was a great introduction into how the week was going to go because we got to see how welcoming these families were as well as how awkward and bumbling we were going to be all week.

My family consisted of: my dad, Cupertino; my mom, Paulina; a 21-year-old sister, Elizabeth; a 15-year-old sister, Aida; a 12-year-old brother, Milton; a 9-year-old sister, Gladis; and Aida's 9-month-old son, Alex. We also have a sister Miriam, who lives in Punata and who I got to meet on market day, but she doesn't live at the house. I loved that they named their kids names that are difficult for Spanish speakers and almost impossible to pronounce for Quechua speakers. Elizabeth was more like "Elizabed" and Milton was "Miltu" most of the time. Aida was the one who came to get me and we got to the house, which is three separate rooms and a kitchen around an open patio. There were about four people sitting outside eating lunch number one (they eat two lunches, one in late morning and one in early to mid afternoon) and I made the decision to greet them all in Quechua. Big mistake. The floodgates opened to a sea of words and verb tenses I haven't learned yet, uttered with a different accent and at a much faster rate than my professors ever spoke. I caught some conjugation of the words "sit" and "eat" so I took a seat on a stool on the patio and someone brought me out a huge bowl of soup filled with pasta, potatoes, chuño (potatoes that have frozen underground before the harvest--they're delicious), and vegetables.

The campesino culture, like every culture I guess, has a large focus on food not just as sustenance but as a means of social interaction, so even though I had already eaten, I couldn't refuse the soup. Unfortunately, I also could not refuse bowl number two that they offered me. I finally managed to convince them that I have a weak stomach and was spared a third bowl, and just as I finished washing my bowl with the water that they bring in with a hose from the nearby river, my sister Aida (the 15 year old) asked if I wanted to go with her up into the hills. She lent me a sun hat and we started the trek up the hill, me with my asthma and her with her 9-month-old son (such a juxtaposition with Lucia, my 15 year old sister here, who seems so young to me) slung across her back in a large blanket. We hiked for what felt to me like several hours but I think was probably less than one, and when I asked her why we were going up the hill (she spoke some Spanish) she said, "We're just walking." It was gorgeous and luckily she reminded me before we left to bring my camera so we stopped every once in a while so I could gawk at the incredible landscape that they see every day. The hike probably should have been good way for me to orient myself and figure out where everything was, but I was distracted and still had no idea where we were or which of the tiny tin roof houses below us was ours.

After we got back to the house I helped my host mom with the laundry. She didn't speak any Spanish but I knew the word for washing clothes so I think I proposed my help to her kind of like a cartoon cavewoman might, saying "I wash, no?" and gesturing around at things. That was how most of my communication went for the week, although my host dad spoke almost as much Spanish as me so talking with him was usually pretty easy. I love to think about what I must have looked and sounded like all week, pointing at everything and saying things like "What that?" and "What dog name?" On the rare occasion that I recalled enough Quechua to say a brilliantly complex sentence such as "Where did your dad go?" I typically did not understand the answer, and the person I was speaking to and I would come to some sort of agreement about what we were talking about via waving around and acting out various verbs. Luckily the days were pretty standard, with breakfast, chores, school (for Milton and Gladis), lunch, going to plant potatoes or beans in the fields, lunch again, more chores, dinner, and then bedtime, so it wasn't so hard to figure out what I was supposed to be doing all the time.

Out of sheer luck, Luis, who has become my closest friend in the group, was my next-door neighbor in the campo. It was so strange, because we were all pretty spread out and some people didn't live near anyone at all, but my house was about two hundred feet from his. Our families were related to one another (his host dad was my host dad's brother) so we did a lot of planting together and sometimes I ate dinner at his house. He also had younger host siblings and at night sometimes we would all go to the basketball court at the school (which was about a ten minute walk) and play soccer with the kids. It was so much fun and really speaks to the welcome nature of the people there that we could go with any age group of people and they would include us in what they were doing.

On the last two days Luis and I got to observe a classroom in the school, which was great for me because it was something I'd be interested in anyway, plus it worked as research for my group project with Nicole about rural and urban education here, as well as for my final ISP (independent study project), the children's book. I've now observed in five or six different classrooms here, and the kindergarten classroom in the campo was one of the best.

Okay I'm about to go out but I'll try to write before I leave for Santa Cruz on Tuesday!

End of classes, curse of the Inca, ALBA summit

This is from yesterday, but just before I posted it, the power went out, and I have hardly been home since then! I’ll be living in a rural village outside Cochabamba for the next week so I won’t be writing until at least next weekend (apparently there are still places in the world that don’t have high speed internet—who knew?) so once again, mom and dad, don’t worry!

Today, I am blessed with the treat of a free hour of daytime without rushing through lunch or running to class. It's been a while, and it's really nice. I had my Quechua final this morning and for once, the time they allotted was an overestimate and the exam only took about an hour, although we had anticipated over two hours. So after discovering yet another new route home (I'll explain later), I'm basking in the Cocha sunlight and taking advantage of electricity and downtime in preparation for our trip to the campo (rural village) this coming week.

Last weekend was a disaster for my health. Soon after arriving at my house, I had a bout of the ever so pleasant "Montezuma's Revenge," complete with a touch of the Curse of the Inca, a name I've come up with for the specific series of symptoms that come along with food-borne illness in Bolivia. Luckily I have a bathroom immediately adjacent to my room, and for your sake I will leave you with no more detail than that. Lessons learned? First of all, chorizo from a street vendor, a chicken salad sandwich, an entire bag of fine chocolates, and a dinner of costillitas and poroto (pork ribs and beans) don't treat the gringo stomach very well. The other valuable piece of information I learned was that you can go to the pharmacy and buy yourself an anti-emetic and the pharmacist will give you an injection in your right butt cheek, and the vomiting will cease soon after. Cool, huh? I also have a mini stash of anti-emetic pills (although I'm not sure how much good an oral medicine does when you're puking constantly). Ya pues, enough of that.

This week was the last week of formal classes, meaning the days that I will have to wake up before 8:00 from now on are (hopefully) few! It also meant that I had a large assignment to complete pretty much every night. I can't remember if I wrote about this already but I interviewed a children's author before I went to Potosí, which was really cool and extremely encouraging, and I had to write a report about that this week. It's crazy to think we're about halfway through already. The end of classes means the beginning of the independent study project. I had to write a preliminary proposal for my project this week and I realized how much I really don't know yet, and how much work I'm going to have to do. I found out that public schools go on summer break in a couple of weeks, so all classroom observation that I planned on doing during the official ISP period (the month of November) I actually have to do as soon as possible. It's stressful but I'm hoping it will keep me on track with the project, since I really can't procrastinate at all. I'm observing in a kindergarten class this afternoon! I've chatted with a lot of children since arriving here, but I haven’t really been around a large group of kids interacting with each other yet. I’m really excited, but also a little nervous. If there’s one thing this semester is teaching me, it’s how to have serious social skills.

As for the ALBA summit, remember the Día del Peatón I wrote about when I first got here? Well, apparently they liked it so much that they decided to institute it again in my neighborhood and surrounding area. Okay, so it’s actually just that they closed all the roads around the hotel near my house to protect our dear Hugo Chavez (who is staying a block from my house!) from terrorists or something. I’m not exactly sure what the purpose is, but it’s really frustrating because I haven’t been able to get a taxi to bring me to my house in a few days, and they’ve rerouted all of the public transit in a completely illogical fashion so that I have had to learn several new routes to my classes. I’m going to be a Cochabamba public transit expert by the end of the summit. Anyway, the ALBA cumbre is essentially a summit of important leftist Latin American leaders. I can’t believe it’s happening right here in this city! I literally haven’t had a free moment to see if there is anything going on that is open to the public but it seems like everything is closed off with pretty high security, so I’m going to assume that the best view I’m going to get during this thing is a line of police dressed in riot gear (yeah, seriously, that’s what I walked home past this morning).

Now I’m off to grab lunch before my first classroom observation! Uj ratu kama!

Casa, dulce casa!

We're back in Cochabamba and I'm happy to be home. Potosí and Sucre were great (especially Potosí) but so much traveling gets exhausting! I feel like as soon as my ears stop being clogged after one flight, we're on another. It's really incredible how many places we get to experience here, though, and I am grateful for the diversity of the trip. I'm just happy to be back in my own bed.

I can't even think of where to start. As soon as we arrived at the Sucre airport, we got on a bus to Potosí, a "three hour" bus ride, which in Bolivian time meant something like five, although I didn't keep close track of it. Actually, now that I look at the schedule, I'm realizing it says "aproximadamente" (approximately) 3 horas, so I should have known then that we'd get in late. Anyway, the ride was gorgeous, and we even crossed a bridge that Simon Bolivar crossed during the fight for Bolivian independence (this is a picture from the top of one end of the bridge) so it wasn't so bad, but even breathtaking scenery doesn't make an entire afternoon on a bus completely worthwhile. We got to Potosí around 8 and had dinner in the hotel, accompanied by a traditional Potosina music group with pan flutes, drums, charangos (little string instruments), and other folk instruments. We all danced for a while and then went to bed as early as we could. Potosí is the highest city we've been to so far (I think it might be the highest city in the world, but I'm not positive), so just walking up a flight of stairs wiped us out.

On Monday we visited a mine in Potosí (this picture is of the entrance). It was a really intense experience. Miners work under some of the most abominable conditions in the world, with very little improvement in conditions since the mining began in the colonial era. They don't have health insurance, the pay is pretty awful (since many of the mines are now cooperative mines, they don't have salary or hourly wages, they just get paid for whatever minerals they can find), and the life expectancy is around 40 or 50 years because most miners die of silicosis, a lung disease, at which point their children take their places in the mine. We were in the mines for two hours and we all literally breathed a collective sigh of relief when we got out, half because we could finally get a decent lungful of air, and half because of how dismal it was inside. At one point, we turned off our headlamps (we were all dressed in mining clothes, including boots and helmets) and it was unbelievable how dark it was inside. You can't see half a centimeter in front of your face. We had all read about the working conditions of miners, but seeing it and experiencing a little bit of it was a different story. I think it took everyone an hour or two to recover from it afterward. It really was very intense.

That afternoon, we visited a school for children of miners and it definitely lightened the mood a lot. The kids were really excited to see us--almost as excited as we were to see them. They gave us a tour of the school and then we danced with the kids for a little while and played with them in their playground. They don't all come from great home situations but they are lucky because the school is very integrated with the families and tries to incorporate the parents in a lot of the programming to help give the kids a better chance at life than entering the mines, which is what an overwhelming percentage of miners' children end up doing. It was so much fun just running around with the kids (who range from 6 to 18, although most of the students are between 8 and 12) and listening to what they had to say. One little girl took my camera around for an hour and just took pictures of her friends and the other students on the program and it was really great to look through the pictures afterward and see what she had done. I think I might go back and visit the school during my ISP, but I'm not sure if I will have time or if it's exactly pertinent to my topic.

The next morning we swam in aguas termales (hot springs) that the Incas used to use. It was so amazing! The laguna is in an inactive volcano, which is why the water is heated, and we just swam in this warm pool in the middle of the mountains all morning. It was so gorgeous and so relaxing. We even gave ourselves spa treatment with the mud. It was extremely refreshing and such a nice recovery after such an active day the day before. We ate lunch there, llama meat on a grill and potatoes cooked underneath the ground. It was so rich! I love the food here so much. It was especially exciting for me because we had just learned in Quechua class about that way of cooking in the countryside, by creating a hot pit in the ground and burying the potatoes for a few hours. It was delicious. Then we had the afternoon free, and since we accidentally missed the tour at the Casa de la Moneda (which is supposed to be one of the best museums in Latin America), we went to an old convent that's been around since colonial times and is still in use. It reminded me of the monastery that Ali and I visited in Arequipa. It was a convent where the richest Spaniards would send their daughters for the rest of their lives, and it was so interesting to see how they lived in luxury at the same time as living very strictly structured, solemn lives. Plus our tour guide was a blast and kept asking Nicole if she would stay and become a nun there. It was a lot of fun, and made missing the Casa de la Moneda a little less painful.

We went to Sucre that night and just went to bed, and the next morning went to Asur, a museum and organization that is working to recover the ancient art of Bolivian textiles. They have an indigenous art museum and also hire women to come to the center and learn how to create the art as it used to be done. It was really gorgeous and so impressive to see the women working so intently. It takes them a day to finish about 1-2 centimeters of a piece, so I can't even imagine how long it must take women in the campo to do it while they're also working the fields, taking care of their children, and cooking all day. It's extremely impressive. That afternoon we visited a cultural center of musicians. We spoke with the director of the group and then ate dinner and watched the musicians perform. There is a core band of them called Los Masis ('friends' in Quechua) and then younger students who study and work there during the day. It was so exhilarating and really a lot of fun. We dance so much in this country! It's exhausting, but it's so much more fun than just sitting and observing all the time. I really love the energy.

Yesterday we went to the Zona Tarabuca, which is an area just outside of Sucre, where they make textiles and play traditional music and essentially incorporate all of the different cultural aspects we learned about all week. It's in the country, so the people speak Quechua, and Luis and Nicole and I got to practice a little with them! We helped chop onions for lunch, then participated in an offering to Pachamama, then watched them perform some music and traditional dances, then ate a delicious lunch once again. I haven't been disappointed for a single meal in this country. I also bought a bag that they had woven right there. It's gorgeous and I feel great about it because I know the money actually went to the artist. It was a really warm experience because the people were so welcoming to us, despite the fact that for all they knew, we were just another group of tourists barging in to examine their quaint customs. I had a great time and I think they appreciated that we were trying to speak Quechua, although the experience made me realize just how useless I am when trying to speak. I need a lot more practice before our rural homestay in a week.

This morning Luis and I explored a bit before we had to leave for our flight at 1. We checked out the famous chocolate place, Chocolates Para Ti, and I bought way more than I should have ("for my family," though of course I've eaten almost half of it already). Then we ended up getting lost and having to take a taxi back to the hotel, which was embarrassing and frustrating, especially since we are supposed to be two of the three excursion leaders. Whoops. Ismael and Lupe were understanding, though, and we made the flight with plenty of time to spare. Now this afternoon I've just relaxed in my room and snacked on expensive chocolates and I'm really happy to be home. We have so much work to do this weekend and I spent so much money this week that I think I probably won't go out much. I'm happy to be here just to relax. I really love this country.

Potosí and Sucre tomorrow!

My mom and Lucia and I were going to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies this afternoon but Lucia had too much homework so it's going to have to wait until I get back from Potosí and Sucre on Friday. Bummer. We leave tomorrow around noon for the ancient mining city and what was once the capital of Bolivia (it might still be the legal capital of the country, although the government is now in La Paz). I'm excited for another excursion! This time, I'm not at all reluctant to leave Cocha because I know I'll be back next weekend.

I interviewed a children's book author on Thursday night for an assignment for our field study seminar class (essentially an applied anthropology course--how to interview, how to ethically research human subjects, etc.) and it was so excellent! Her name is Gaby Vallejo and she was a famous adult author, having won a national prize for one of her novels, for years before she even thought of writing for children. She was struck by the lack of children's literature in the country and decided she'd do something about it, and has since written something like 15 books for children, opened up the only children's library in Cochabamba, and started all sorts of literature programs around the country. Her NGO even has a "sister library" at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. In other words, she's one of the coolest people I've met, and she's a terrific resource for my final project. I can't wait to meet with her again.

Last night I met up with Kirsten, a girl who did this same program a year and a half ago, for dinner and drinks (okay, dad, dinner and one drink, don't worry). She's now working in Punata, a town just outside Cochabamba, in a maternity home where women can go to give birth using traditional methods that are often not honored in hospitals here. I love meeting people who did this program and came back to Bolivia. It's so encouraging and indicative that living here really is a life-changing experience.

I'll probably write from the hotel sometime this week but if not, hasta viernes!

Interview, Sunday lunch, Politics

I interviewed my mom this weekend for an "oral history" assignment to hear her life according to her and to relate her experiences to the political climate at a given time in history. It was really cool to hear the personal story of someone who has lived through a lot of political turmoil and social change, especially because a lot of the guest speakers and lectures we've had have leaned toward the left and/or openly supported the current government of Evo Morales. I was pretty sure my mother and I didn't agree politically but after hearing how the politics have affected her life, I can understand much better why she thinks the way she does. She's really intelligent and really thoughtful and I think she genuinely wants the standard of living to increase for all Bolivians, but like in so many countries, she's of the middle class and hasn't reaped vast benefits from either far right or far left governments. So I'm realizing that while the country is undergoing some seriously much needed changes right now, it's understandable that the middle class feels left out. In conversations with my mom, I've only sort of brushed upon the idea of privilege and how when there is an underprivileged sector of the population, there is inevitably an opposite group that is receiving the benefits from the oppression of the others, but since the interview we've talked a lot about politics and I think we'll get to it eventually, when I'm a little more comfortable having opposing views (and when I'm sure I actually know how to say all the words I want to use).

On Sunday we went to the campo (the countryside) to eat lunch and it was really gorgeous! We brought a picnic and drove up to Parque Tunari, which is a national park just outside the city, and ate there. Afterwards, I hiked for a bit with my dad, Lucia, Carmen, and Matias, and it was so much fun. It reminded me a lot of Prospect Hill, the hill right next to my house at home. We followed the trail for a while and then sort of took off on our own following what used to be a series of waterfalls but is now just a trickling stream running down the rocks. It was really beautiful.

Monday we had two candidates for senator come to our class and have a political debate! There was a moderator and they started out with their own topics but then we got to ask questions of both candidates. It was great to see representatives of political parties that we've read about. One of the candidates was the MAS candidate (Evo's party, I think one of the most left-wing parties), and the other was from Unidad Nacional, a more moderate party (who actually ended up being one of my mom's good friends, which didn't surprise me because he expressed almost exactly the same views as she did in our interview). I loved that we got to ask questions and witness a real debate. Once again, I'm thrilled by the connections that we have through this program to get these busy people to come and give us our own presentation. So cool.

Then today we stayed after Quechua class for almost an hour talking to our professor about politics (she's an avid Evo supporter). I like that everyone wants to talk about politics here. It's so different from in the US, where it's inappropriate to discuss politics unless you know you're in agreement with the other people present. Here, everyone has been sharing their points of view, even if they know that we don't think the same way. It's been really challenging because I find myself questioning and then strengthening my points of view because I'm forced to bring them into play a lot.

Nicole came over after class today to study Quechua, which doesn't sound at all noteworthy, but to me it was because I felt like I was showing her my home, not just some place where I live. It got me really excited for when Ali comes to visit because I'll get to give her a tour of my new home and my new city. Sometimes I forget about all the things I have and appreciate here because I'm not talking about them, so bringing them up to someone else reminds me of what an amazing experience this has been so far.

Back in Cocha

I'm back in Cochabamba today and it's nice to be home with my host family in the warm weather again. It's also nice to be back where my meals are covered and I don't feel compelled to spend so much money. I like it in Cocha because it's a smaller city and it reminds me of Boston. I think it's a great fit for me.

Anyway, I'm still trying to catch up with what we did all week in La Paz. I forgot to mention something really important about Thursday in El Alto. Before we had our coca leaves read, we went to UPEA, Universidad Pública de El Alto, to talk with the public university students who are majoring in Ciencias del Desarrollo (Development Sciences). It was really interesting, especially since we haven't spent much time with Bolivian students (except for those of us who have host siblings in college). It became a discussion with all of us sitting in a circle and posing questions to the group and exchanging opinions and experiences. My favorite part was that this one girl kept posing really challenging questions to our group. For instance, when someone from out program said something like, "I'd like to know what your impressions are of the United States," the girl replied with a really right-on critique of the government, of society, of US culture, ending with, "Why does the United States feel like it has the right to use half of the oxygen on the planet?" It was really challenging, especially since I think almost everyone else was trying to be really diplomatic and hyper-respectful to the other group's culture, and she just came right out with a no-bullshit response. I think it was uncomfortable but productive, especially since she listened intently and respectfully to everyone's response, and it became a real conversation instead of a mutual ego boost for both groups of students. A bunch of us exchanged email addresses at the end so hopefully we'll be in touch and be able to have more conversations like that in the future.

That night Luis, Nicole, and I went back to the Cafe Carcajada because they were having a showing of Boys Don't Cry and we wanted to take part in one of their meetings before we left La Paz. There were actually a lot of people there, but most of them weren't watching the movie (we found out later that night that it was the birthday of the daughter of one of the women and they were there for the party). It took the three of us a while to get out of the funk that the movie put us in (I think it hit us a little harder because they hadn't put the Spanish subtitles on, so we were the only ones who could understand all of the dialogue) but they kept offering us food and drinks and eventually we got back into social mode. There didn't end up being any discussion of the film like we thought there would, and we had already eaten dinner, so after about a half hour or so we were going to leave, but we stopped at the bar to chat with Julieta and she convinced us to stay. I'm so glad we did! Right about then, they turned down the lights and put on some music and we started dancing. They had made this thing called "te con te" which means tea with tea if I understood it correctly, but it's cinnamon tea with whiskey in it, served hot and in a shot glass. It was SO good. It wasn't very strong and it tasted really spicy and Julieta kept walking around and filling a shot glass and giving to everyone one at a time, and it was really social and welcoming. We chatted and danced with some young anarchist guys, and once again the United States was on trial (but we averted the tension quickly once we clarified that we were socially liberal, not fiscally liberalist) and sang and danced around to remixes of Manu Chao, and at one point a guy came up to me and told me he was surprised because when he walked in, he thought I was a "really cute guy". He was loaded and told me this about nine times before I finally said bye to him and went to dance with my friends again, but it was really entertaining. The night was so much fun and it felt like a success specifically because we were finally hanging out with Bolivians instead of just our big group.

We had to get up around 6 yesterday morning (which was rough after dancing until 2) to go hear a talk about Andean cosmovision, which is the name for the belief of Andean peoples (like Quechuas and Aymaras) that everything is interconnected and in equilibrium. It was really interesting and helped illuminate the basis of much of Bolivian culture. I wish it hadn't been so early in the day (and that I hadn't stayed out so late the night before) because I had trouble concentrating on the discussion at times. At least all of the programming we have is interesting, because I think I would have actually fallen asleep otherwise.

Afterwards, we went to talk with Mamani Mamani, an Aymara artist who paints really vividly about themes that have to do with Aymara culture, specifically around La Paz. His work is AMAZING--some of my favorite paintings I've ever seen--and we got to have a conversation with him. At the end, he signed postcards of his works for us and he even drew pictures of some of us. I'll upload the one he drew of me on here.

We had the rest of the day free until our flight, and when I got back to my house I talked with my family for a long time about what we had done and what I'd learned. I think my Spanish has gotten better since last week, which I'm really excited about, because the conversation got to the point where we were having an intense discussion about radicalism and social change (because I told them I went to Mujeres Creando and my mom sort of raised her eyebrows and said they were too radical for her), and I was able to voice most of my opinions about it, with some help from Bruno, who translated a few words for me. Still, it was really cool to have a serious discussion that I would have had in English, and to be able to have it in Spanish. Once my mom went to bed, I had a beer with my dad and brother and we chatted for a while more. I really like my family. I think we're not in agreement over a fair amount of issues, but we're all respectful enough to discuss them productively anyway. I also know that I have a lot of beliefs in theory but I haven't had to live them out in my life, whereas they have (being politically moderate and of the middle or upper-middle class in a country where the government has swung wildly back and forth from right wing to left wing, from oligarchical to socialist, and where the marginalized lower classes are making sweeping advances, inevitably at the expense of those who have held all the power for hundreds of years). I really like the conversations we have. I get to interview my mom for an assignment this weekend and I'm looking forward to hearing more of what she has to say.

The photos I'm posting are: 1) Tiwanaku, 2) Lake Titicaca as seen from la Isla del Sol, 3) me jumping off the boat into the lake, 4) La Paz from above, 5) a Mamani Mamani painting, 6) my personal Mamani Mamani portrait!

Back to Cochabamba tonight

We're leaving for the airport soon but I'm going to try to write about the last few days as quickly as I can!

So we arrived in the city of La Paz on Monday and had the afternoon to explore before we were supposed to meet in the evening at Cafe Carcajada (Cackle Cafe), a cafe run by a feminist anarchist group here called Mujeres Creando (Women Creating). We were supposed to meet at 7 but we got there and the woman we were meeting with wasn't there. Ismael called her and we couldn't get ahold of her so after waiting for about a half hour, we just left. It was a bummer but Julieta (the woman who was going to meet with us) called Ismael back the next morning and we made plans to go back on Tuesday night to meet her. So Monday night we didn't have any classes or meetings or anything, we just hung out. Luis and I went to this cafe run by an LGBT advocacy group to see what the organization was about, but they were closing, so we just got a quick rundown of what the organization does. Luis is going to do his project about LGBT/queer issues in Bolivia so I think it will be a really great resource for him. Then it was kind of late so he and I just bought 20 bolivianos (the currency here) worth of chocolate bars and watched The Parent Trap (the Lindsay Lohan one) in Spanish in the hotel room. Sometimes you just need nights like that. It was great.

Tuesday we went to see a filming of Chuquiago, which is a film about social class in La Paz. Chuquiago is the Aymara (the main indigenous group around this city) name for La Paz, the original name for the city before the Spaniards founded it as La Paz. We watched it in the Cinemateca Boliviana, which is really cool and has a lot of local films showing, and we got to talk to the director afterwards, which was awesome. It made me wish I were doing a documentary for my final project. Then we grabbed lunch at a Thai place near the theater and it was really delicious. The ambiance was really relaxing and it was a nice break from the bustle of the city. Then we went to meet with an artist who is also a close friend of Ismael (and was tortured and exiled during the dictatorships, as was Ismael) and he showed us some of his work and its relation to Bolivian culture and politics. I love how much we learn about Bolivian history through the arts on this program. It makes it really engaging and it's cool to have a variety of media displaying how society has changed over the years.

Afterwards, we had our rain date with the Mujeres Creando, and it was really awesome. Julieta was so cool; she was really intense but really kind as well. She told us about the things that the Mujeres Creando do (one of those things is strategically placed, tongue in cheek graffiti, written in cursive, about the rights of women and indigenous people) and the events they were having this week and we made plans to come back.

Wednesday morning we went to the World Bank, which was interesting but also kind of frustrating, since we talked with a high-up representative and he didn't give strong opinions either way about anything we asked (surprise). Then we had the afternoon free so I did some shopping, and then we went to the premiere of two of Ismael's documentaries at the cinemateca. They were both cool, although the first one was less structured and made me kind of dizzy with a lot of shots fading into one another throughout the whole thing. The second one was about the Plan 3000, which was when there were terrible floods outside Santa Cruz (a region/city in the east of the country), and the government relocated 3000 people essentially to the wilderness, where they built shantytowns and developed into a city that still exists today. It was really interesting, especially since I hardly knew anything about the Plan 3000. I liked seeing Ismael's work, since he's the adviser for the film students on the program and we hear advice and criticism from him but hadn't seen anything he'd made yet.

Yesterday we went to El Alto, a city immediately next to La Paz that gets its name ("the high up" or "the tall") because it's almost 1000 meters higher than the center of the city. It's interesting because the geographical location of people here inversely reflects their social standing, so the people who live the lowest (in the most temperate areas) are the wealthiest and whitest, and those on the mountain are much poorer and typically indigenous. El Alto is a rapidly growing city (I can't remember the population right now but it's several million, a big difference from a few decades ago when it was barely a few thousand). Because of that, however, public services such as water and electricity can't expand as fast as the city is growing, and many of the residents don't have basic services. It was really interesting to see the difference between the cosmopolitan La Paz and it's next door neighbor, where most of the streets aren't even paved and much of the economy is "informal"--people selling fruits, candy, and other things on the street. In the afternoon we got to have our coca leaves read, which was really cool (although mine was vague--everything I asked, the answer was "está bien": "it's fine"). Ali, your trip is going to go well because you're very lucky, according to my fortune teller.

Okay we're leaving for the airport now so I'll write from Cochabamba!

Tiwanaku, Lago Titicaca, Copacabana, La Paz!

So much to write about! I can't post pictures yet because I forgot my camera cord in Cochabamba, but I'll put some up when I get back this weekend.

Saturday morning we flew from Cochabamba to La Paz but we left right from the airport to go to Tiwanaku, which was the site of the oldest and longest lasting civilization of the Americas. They lasted for almost 27 centuries until changes in the climate finally drove them out of the altiplano in the 1500s. It was incredible to see how much knowledge they had so long ago (extraordinarily precise means of measuring time, of predicting weather patterns, of cultivating the extremely hostile land). I felt so disjointed, walking around the ruins (only about 5% of the original constructions exist because the conquistadors destroyed almost everything in the name of Christianity) with my foil-wrapped alfajor and my factory-made clothes, embodying the supposed progress of our society but acutely aware of the knowledge that we no longer have because machines know it for us. It makes me kind of sad to think of all that we've lost despite the "advancements" of modern day life. It reminds me that what we have could be lost as well, since we're in a relatively new and quite unstable era of technology. I feel like we don't really know anything. But enough with the existentialism already.

After Tiwanaku we got back on the bus to Copacabana--the original sacred town on the shore of Lake Titicaca, not the beach resort or whatever that place in the song is. We got there pretty late in the evening so we just grabbed dinner at this really great restaurant owned by an Argentine guy (I had Hawaiian pizza, which was the standard ham and pineapple plus slices of peach!) and then I went to bed, although some people went out afterward. The next morning we left early for Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun), which is a large island in the lake. We spent most of the morning walking from one side of the island to the other, while our tour guide (the same guy who gave us a tour of Tiwanaku) stopped us every once in a while to talk to us about certain aspects of the island that people have considered sacred for years. Our tour guide was so knowledgeable and well-spoken, and we found out by chatting with him that he didn't go to college or anything for his job, he just grew up with a father who was a film maker and an anthropologist (I think an archaeologist but I'm not sure) so he learned everything from his father and his father's friends. He was an incredible resource to have for the two days.

We ate lunch on the island with this really kind family and we had trout from the lake (which was INCREDIBLE) and corn, potatoes, and beans that were all grown right there. It was so delicious! I'm going to miss the food here so much. Afterward, we walked some more on the island and drank from a sacred spring where three rivers on the island come together and it was so delicious and it really did feel sacred. We stood barefoot in this little stream and put our hands under the running water (they had redirected it so that it came out of little openings in this rock wall, like faucets) and drank from our cupped hands and it felt so fresh and cleansing. It helped of course that we were with Ismael's wife, Lupe, who can make any experience feel spiritual and meaningful. Then we took the boat out to a little island that they (Ismael and the others) call "Isla SIT" because I guess they swim there every year. So yes, we jumped off of the boat and swam in the sacred Lake Titicaca. The first jump was brutal--it knocked the wind out of us, it was so cold. But after I climbed out once I wanted to jump in again, and by the third time I was swimming around (I swear I felt sacred, or at least totally numb, so it was really enjoyable). On the way back, we visited "islas flotantes" but they were just tourist replicas of the real floating islands built entirely of reeds, so although they were cool, I've seen the real ones in Peru and was kind of disappointed by the replicas.

We went back to Copacabana that night and once again, I went to bed early because I wasn't feeling very well (the swim in the lake wiped me out entirely), and we came back to La Paz yesterday morning! I'll need to write about yesterday and today some other time because we're getting up early to go to the World Bank tomorrow--probably the first speaker we'll have that won't be tearing neo-liberalism to shreds. It will be interesting to have another point of view, but it's one that I will really need some sleep to process. I'll write again when I can (we have internet in the hotel so hopefully I'll write before we leave on Friday) and post photos when I get back to Cochabamba!

Huelga, trufi adventure, Heidi, Oscar Olivera, etc.

It's been a busy couple of days! Yesterday there was a huelga de trufis (a trufi strike--trufis are minivans and taxis that follow a set route like buses) so my micro (a small bus--another form of public transit here) that I take to class in the morning had to stop outside the center of the city because the trufis had blocked up the roads, and I walked the remaining blocks to school. I get the feeling this happens kind of a lot here, and I have mixed feelings about it, because I'm happy that there is the freedom to go on strike here and that the people can speak up when they are unhappy with something, but of course it's also frustrating to see the city essentially paralyzed for a day. I'm still getting used to the mentality here; everyone around me seemed to take it in stride so easily but I'm not so good at dealing with changes in plans (yet!).

Thankfully, the strike was just in the center of the city, so the trufi that I take to Quechua class was still running. I went and it was great (as usual) and then I took the same trufi home for the first time, because all of the other times I've had a ride home or walked to the center or something. I didn't know, however, that the trufi takes a slightly different route back, so when we passed the plaza a few blocks from my house I figured we'd continue on to my house (because that's where it picks me up) but instead we took a turn away from the plaza and went east for several kilometers. I kept figuring we'd turn back toward my house at some point but we just got further and further from the city, and eventually I figured I'd just take it for the rest of its route to see where it went and then take it back home when it turned around. Finally, I was the last person on the trufi and it pulled to a stop on a little dirt side road. I asked the driver if we were going to my street and he said "we already went past Plaza Recoleta (the plaza near my house)!" and I told him I wanted to see where the rest of the route went. I think he thought I was dumb. Anyway, he let me get off without paying so I could get back on another that was going back (because he was going on his break) and I took it back to my house. When I explained this to my family, they also thought it was ridiculous. I guess it could have been dangerous but we were still within the city limits and it wasn't dark out yet so I figured I was safe enough. Anyway, now I think I know the public transit system better than my family, since they drive almost everywhere.

Then today the other academic director, Heidi, arrived (so far it had only been Ismael because Heidi was sick and back in the US for treatment) and she's SO great! Ismael is wonderful but sometimes he seems a little cold and of course I took it personally and felt like he didn't like me that much, but Heidi is so warm and sweet, and when she talked to us today she said we could always come to her to talk about anything, in English or Spanish, and I think she's going to be a terrific resource for me this semester, academically and emotionally. She is the one who started the option to write a children's book for a final project (that sentence sounds strangely Spanish in its syntax--I think that while my Spanish and Quechua get better, my English is getting worse, but it's totally worth it), so now that she's here I feel like I can get started on coming up with a topic for my project.

Most of us ate lunch in town today (it was the first time I didn't go home for lunch and although I missed the family gathering a little bit, it was cool to explore the food in the city on my own). We went to a place called Yerba Buena ("good grass") and had a delicious three-course meal which was a cucumber salad, a corn and potato and beef and barley soup, and then a vegetarian lasagna. It was incredible. The food here is so rich, and with two glasses of freshly squeezed lemonade it cost Bs. 19, which is slightly less than $3. Amazing.

This afternoon we had the opportunity to meet Oscar Olivera! He played a major role in the Guerra del Agua (Water War) in 2000, when they privatized the water industry in Bolivia and a company you may have heard of named Bechtel (shocker) essentially took from the people a natural resource they had been using forever and charged them for it. He was really interesting and humble and talked to us about how they mobilized so many people to fight back against Bechtel (they eventually succeeded in expelling Bechtel from the city!) and it was such a cool experience to have. I can't believe the connections that we have here. Even the visiting professor who taught us about Bolivian history for the past two weeks is pretty famous here, since he's served in the government in several departments and worked closely alongside Evo Morales (the current president of Bolivia). I feel so lucky to be here, not only during such an exciting time politically and socially, but with the resources to help illuminate the radical changes that are occurring right now.

We're going to La Paz, El Alto, Tiwanaku, and Lago Titicaca for a week on Saturday. I don't know what the internet situation will be like there so don't worry if I don't write for a while (mom). It's funny--even though I'm excited to know another part of the country, I'm a little bit sad to leave here already, although it's only for a week. I feel like there's still so much more to see and I can't wait to see it.

Día de Cochabamba

I'm realizing how lucky I am to have arrived here when I did. The festival of contemporary dance won't be happening again for another three years, pedestrian day won't happen until next year, and today is Cochabamba Day! There have been parades and fireworks all weekend and it's been so lively throughout the city. I love it here.

On Friday we had our second "drop-off." I didn't write about the first one because of its epic degree of failure (okay, so it wasn't that bad, we just didn't get to where we were supposed to go because it was several kilometers away and we didn't figure that out until there wasn't enough time left to get there) and I was so frustrated that I didn't want to write publicly about it. Now that it's in the past, though, I feel better about it. Plus, my second drop-off was so successful and enriching that I'm comfortable that my experience the first time won't be repeating itself every time. Anyway, the point of the drop-offs is to get us practicing for our ISPs (independent study projects) where we'll have to interview, take field notes, and orient ourselves very clearly, both geographically and culturally. This time it took place in Tarata, which is a pueblo just outside Cochabamba (or it might be considered within Cochabamba but it's far less urban than the city itself). Tarata was the second town in the region to be declared a city. It has existed since colonial times so the architecture there is incredible and varies through the generations. Claire and I received the assignment to find Huayculi and learn about its production of ceramics. We took a radio taxi from the main plaza in Tarata, which is where we got dropped off, and went several kilometers south (once again, we had one of the farther locations, but this time we were prepared to have to take a taxi). The taxi let us off in a completely deserted plaza, which was eerie, so we walked a few blocks from the plaza to see who was around. We met one man who had clay all over his shirt but when we talked to him, he said he would give us a demonstration if we paid him 50 bolivianos. Neither of us had brought much money so we had to thank him and go on our way, which was embarrassing because I'm sure he thought we were just being stingy and I would have liked to support his work, but I had only brought a little bit of money and it ended up being just enough to cover the two taxi rides.

Anyway, we continued on further down the road (there seemed to have been very few roads and the neighbors were really spread apart) and found a house with an open front yard where a woman was standing. We walked in and this time I tried to establish more rapport with her before diving into my spiel that was probably perceived as "we're students, now let us study your strange culture!" with the first artist. She told us her husband made ceramics and he came out into the yard and talked to us, and after a few minutes of chatting he told us we could watch the process and even film it, as long as we didn't film him. It was incredible! Claire had brought her video camera (she's doing a documentary for her final project) and I brought my notebook and together we took an account of how he does his work. It was so rewarding and the artist was so helpful--I even exchanged a few words with him in Quechua (I'm not being modest; it was literally very few words, but it was still really cool to put the classes to use for the first time). After a tour around his house/studio and then a chance to watch him make a few "cuellos" (necks) for some decorative vases, we had to go and meet up with the group again. Claire and I are going to try to go back this Friday because he said he would have all his pieces ready to be sold and we want to see them and possibly even buy one.

I just realized how much I have written already and how much more happened just that day, and I still have this fear that I'll never be able to really convey my experiences here and do them justice. I'll try to summarize with the disclaimer that the afternoon was equally incredible (all this happened before noon) and that if I could, I would recall every single taste and smell and sight because it was so vivid. We went to lunch at a huge house in Tarata, which, since its peak as a city about two hundred years ago, has become a town of campesinos. The house has been passed down through the family for over three hundred years and is made completely from the land around it (rocks, wood, and clay). Lunch was delicious (and enormous--the first time I physically had to leave food on my plate since I got here) and then Don Sánchez, the older gentleman of the house, gave us a talk about the history of Tarata and today's society there. I regret to admit that it was difficult to stay focused the entire time because my stomach was about to burst, but the talk was so rich and fascinating that it made it easier to pay attention. Don Sánchez is 86 years old and more lucid than plenty of people I know who are half his age. He spoke about the history of the town and of his personal experiences there and closed with some lines from some Quechua poetry about our relationship to the earth and our duty to maintain her (Pachamama, the mother earth). It was incredible and I didn't want to leave except it was evening at that point and we had to get back to the city. I wish I had brought a video camera because I don't think my words can do this place justice.

I'll leave you all with a picture of a drawing that Matias drew for me. I don't think it would be appropriate to post a picture of my family on this blog since it is public, but I am going to ask them this week if I can take their photo so that those of you who would like to see what they look like can email me and I will send it to you.