this potato is a little too overwhelming for me.

February. The altiplano is blooming, as much as it can, and my bird feeder is hectic. As life is busy all around and within me, I am still baffled by where in the world I am yet not by my comfort in this place. I close my curtains to a dusk covered town, the mountains undressing themselves from the colors of sunset, and I still feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere, yet it is a nowhere whose problems have become my own and and whose tranquility I have happily accepted. It is so fresh and quiet and still here, even if the rain is pounding on my tin roof, the drowning sound brings a calmness to my afternoon that I look forward to. No trucks screaming down highways, planes whipping across the sky, or tires turning into driveways. If you listen, the birds chirp and a fly buzzes while the wind might whistle through the town and I hope for the clouds to rumble so I can savor the rain on my roof and see the plants grin in happiness.

Carnaval. Lent season came early this year, and we had almost 40 volunteers make the trip up to the altiplano to see the biggest celebration in Bolivia. We Oruro volunteers hosted them in our beloved city, leading them into the morning with traditional Tinku dancing and making our final approach to the Virgen del Socavon on our knees at the church just before sunrise. The costumes of all the dancers were outrageously adorned and the water balloon/foam wars were out-of-control. The bands bellowed their sounds hours on end and the dancers stomped their feet and swung their hips while the crowd cheered on. It was in fact a once in a lifetime opportunity, or twice as I plan on repeating the madness next year.

1 year down. My Bolivia Peace Corps “B-44” group passed our 1 year in-country mark back in January and are starting to experience things for the second time around, like Carnaval. A friend commented yesterday that I have successfully and naturally adopted Bolivian campo expressions in my speech, such anomalies as inhaled sentences and a grunt-like approval. I spent a week helping with training sessions for the new group of volunteers that arrived in January, and it was fun to see them experiencing cultural aspects for that first time around. Simple things, such as how usually a spoon is the only utensil available at a meal (even if there is a hunk of meat on the bone), the horn-honking in cities that I’ve grown to ignore, and always always sharing your food with others. So I laugh when my host-mom inhales as she babbles in quechua to the ladies who are eating at her table in the plaza and I smile, knowing fully well they are talking about me (I understand some words, especially when they include gringa), and continue eating knowing they are joking in a loving way and that the price of living here is that people will always stare and talk about you and think you are just the weirdest thing that ever lived.=) But that’s ok, being weird is also fun.

School. It started the third week of February, and I’ve been busy trying to get things organized for the new year. I’ve got the paperwork and stamps and signatures necessary to start doing guest-speaker type workshops in schools across the district on environmental topics, and a weekly eco-club (patrulla ecológica) that I hope to engage in recycling and outdoor activities. For the time-being, I still have my environmental classes with 7th and 8th graders, and plans for an earth-day fair, teacher workshops, etc. But when the rain halts my bike-ride to schools out in the campo, or the photocopy place isn’t open, or I can’t find someone willing to let me print documents, I remind myself that in Bolivia “there is always time to do it tomorrow” and that is why we are here for two years, and instead I start cooking or walking around town or plazearing (a beloved past-time of sitting in the plaza and “people-watching” as I buy a relleno or packaged ice-cream to snack on) or playing on my new-computer (like I am doing now) as it continues to help me organize my life and work. The apple tree mapping project went well although I didn’t help much. However, it has propelled me into further ideas and am currently looking into some hardware and software borrowing-loaning, etc. to continue working. In fact I feel like my work-possibilities are endless and I could never get them all done in a year, its simply the daunting fact of Bolivian time and how things work here and help and support, etc. So in the meantime, I keep putting things off until tomorrow just like people do here when they don’t show up for a meeting or say they’ll be there when they know they can’t make it. I am busy, but it is such a different busy than what I used to feel that I can barely call it busy. It is more like occupied with activities that I am trying to accomplish but may not and that is ok.

So I am happy; I am searching and seeking, finding while learning and still living things out where I equally feel foreigner and at home.

I will conclude with two quotes that describe our almost daily struggle with food-related issues that came from my volunteer friends who visited me in my site recently:

you could get a relief map of my stomach right now.
this potato is a little too overwhelming for me.