January 2008

Well, I’ve made it there and back again. After a well-needed and absolutely amazing vacation home, I’m back in Spanish mode again, where it is OK to speak to everyone in Spanish, get excited about collecting rain water, buy quinoa for $1.50, and bring home a huge sack of fresh vegetables ‘package-free’. My newest and I suppose cleanest new addition to my life is Clorox. Wow, I never know I’d love it so much. It stripped that black and green goo from my water filter and made my SODIS bottles good as new. SODIS is the method of filling 2-liter clear bottles with water and leaving them on the roof until the sun’s UV rays kill bacteria and any other lurking organisms wanting to give me diarrhea. It works for 8 hours of sunlight or multiple cloudy days and works even better at 12,000 ft. But after a 2 week vacation back to the states, the water I’d left in those bottles in my kitchen was the hue of new spring lettuce. Once cloroxo got a hold of it, however, they are as good as new. So, yes mom, I’d say occasionally from now on I might even dip my dishes in a mild solution of the chemical that kills everything just because.

Other than that, I finished a 3 week English teaching extravaganza in Huari where I (and my site mate Brandon) taudh kids and adults in the town ¨library¨ which is a long, narrow, empty, other than a long table with chairs, room with squeaky wooden floors and random posters hung all over the walls. If you want a book, you have to ask the librarian who then gets it out of a small back closet. Oh, and there is also a really old piano in the room which I’ve asked about and he waives me off saying it doesn’t work and no one is to play it. Hum, there is probably just no one who can play it and therefore it isn’t to be played. So nothing like the libraries of the states, but it is at least something. My favorite part of English class was teaching the kids ¨Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes¨ and then taking a video of them doing it, it was great.

I would say the rainy season is in full swing these days with predictable clouds and unpredictable amounts of rain, with my layers of clothing increasing as the sun fails to warm us with its sunshine. I’ll refrain from complaining, since you all are experiencing negative Fahrenheit temperatures, but when I have to sit on a bus where windows don’t close all the way and the roof leaks on you and my hands and toes start to go numb from the cold, I try to remember that at least in the future I could curl up next to a fire on a couch and read a book on a rainy day. As for here, I’m doing well with my book collection and new movie options in the midst of other things. I still play Little House on the Prairie (or Plain), collecting water and cooking and trying to find a sunny enough day to justify washing my clothes in the cold water or strategizing on bathing options. But time is not the issue here, I have plenty of it and it gets done if it needs to. For the past week, however, the rain has subsided and it is sunny and I would dare say HOT, so you never know about weather here.

Coming up on the 2nd and 3rd of February, I’ll be dancing the streets of Oruro in its most famous cultural tradition, their Carnaval parades with dancers all day and night long. I’ve been practicing and doing ¨recorridos¨, which are essentially practice rounds of the parade route. We usually end up dancing 4-5 hours, with only a couple of breaks. It is absolutely exhausting and my body aches and my feet are painful from the rubber sandals. But I would say worth it. We hunch over, kick our legs up, yell in Quechua, run around, go barefoot, and generally have a blast as our body tells us it is running out of fuel. The crows were really big last night, and its even more fun when we have fans that know us and cheer us on even further. The smart thing to do would be to practice every night and build up the stamina and muscles, but I settle for one 5 hour round-trip bus ride per week and suffer the chest pain and muscles aches later.

My work-related activities are little as of this month, but I’m busy planning out what it is I’ll be working on the rest of this year (and the rest of my service) and my list keeps growing, so I’m optimistic about the possibilities I could get myself into. This weekend I’ve been invited to some small community meetings about apple tree production supported by a German NGO called Agroforesta here in Huari, who supposedly has 2 volunteers arriving for the month of February to use GPS to locate and map the hillside where existing and future trees will be to increase diversity of crop types, etc. So, I hope to tag along with them a little. And, of course school starts again in February so I’m busy planning out club activities and workshop schedules and maybe even an Earth Day fair for April, and the new group arrives next week…meaning the same group I came with a year ago, so I will be busy helping with their training sessions since I’m one of the closer volunteers to Cochabamba.

Well, that’s it for my long awaited update. Until then, I’ll be hoping for more and more rain as I curl up and watch the grey clouds and hopefully get to practicing the bright blue guitar more. Much love from me.