Tech Week

The first stop during Tech Week was in a town in the region of Cochabamba called Totora, where a Volunteer named Ashley is currently stationed. We put on a health fair for the elementary school she works with, which consisted of different groups of us travelling around to the six different classrooms in the school presenting different health-related games. My group of three presented a dental hygiene-themed puppet show, complete with an evil villain trying to rot all the teeth in the town of Totora, a puppet whose teeth slowly and disgustingly rot away because he takes the advice of the villain, and a hero who eventually destroys the villain by beating him with a toothbrush. We had a few technical difficulties, including about 20 minutes of dead time after our first presentation during which we couldn´t think of anything else to do to entertain the first graders, but by the end of the day we had everything running smoothly.

In Totora, we stayed at what was supposedly the nicest hotel in town. It had two rooms: one with 5 beds and the other with 6, and some of us slept on straw mattresses on the floor, of course in our nifty travel mosquito nets. The room was quite a sight: With all our mosquito nets set up on the floor and on the beds, it looked like a pod people breeding ground.

The food at Totora was very good, but there seemed to be very little of it. During one meal, Sydney was quoted as saying, ¨Are you finished with that bone?¨ We think we´ll be making a B42 tee shirt with that quote. Speaking of food, the bread in Totora tastes like sawdust. I don´t recommend it. Our second day was spent hanging out with Ashley´s English club making marmalade. Since we were lacking pectin and had to use lemon peels instead, the marmalade took like 2 hours to cook, and during the boiling time we played games like Memory and Twister with the kids to teach them some English words. Eventually the kids had to go home for dinner, so finished the jarring for them and kept a large jar for ourselves to eat at breakfast. The sawdust bread was greatly improved by the addition of the copious amount of sugar in the marmalade, and our jar was empty in about 10 minutes.

The second night in Totora was the festival of El Día de San Juan, which supposedly falls on the coldest day of the year. San Juan coincides with the anniversary of Totora, and for this reason Totora´s celebration is pretty well known, and people actually travel to the small, colonial town to partake in the festivities. We left the hotel and stepped out onto the street that night to be greeted by a very hellish scene of children burning a thousand small fires in the streets. There was also a parade led by children carrying flame-filled tin cans on sticks, followed by many groups of people carrying different colored lights and representing each different region in Bolivia. These were followed by a couple marching bands, and the parade concluded with a group of men in military uniforms. Then, after introductions of embassadors from China and Italy, the bonfires and dancing began. Everywhere we looked there were Bolivians inviting us to dance, and we all had a wonderful time dancing with a group of university students from the city of Cochabamba.

Second stop: Aiquile. Also in the Cochabamba region. We visited the orphanage with which a Volunteer named Matt has been working. During the first day we led self esteem activities with the kids in the morning and had a field day during the afternoon. My group was working with a group of kids in third grade or so, and my greatest accomplishment of the day was getting them to hold hands in a circle and pass a hula hoop around the group without breaking the circle... standing boy-girl-boy-girl. That´s the key right there. Oh yeah. They had to HOLD HANDS! We got them to do the activity three times, and by the last time they were really into it, trying to beat their previous time.

We spent the second and third days at the orphanage putting on a teacher workshop, emphasizing the themes of different learning styles, creativity, and classroom management. The second day was pretty much dedicated to the topic of ¨Learning Corners¨ which the Peace Corps is really trying to introduce to Bolivian classrooms to make learning a little more dynamic. Basically, each corner of the classroom is dedicated to an activity pertaining to a different subject, such as math, science, language, and creativity, but all the corners relate to one central theme. The theme we chose to present as an example was the World Cup. I was in the math corner, so I invented a math game having to do with advancing each player´s World Cup team through the tournament. Got it? The great thing about Learning Corners is that, if the teacher makes his or her activities self-explanatory enough, it divides the class (which is usually more than one teacher can handle) into four smaller groups that can basically teach themselves and stay entertained for hours.

I only was able to teach my Corner to one group of teachers, however, due to the colony of bacteria growing in my stomach. Three of us had massive diarrhea and vomiting attacks the night before, and we were yanked out of the Learning Corner activity to take a field trip to the hospital. After waiting there for an hour and half, the doctor informed us that we were not in an emergency situation and would have to return later. So Susan, Sydney, and I spent the rest of the afternoon drinking sprite and eating crackers, which we all later puked up while trying to do yoga. We returned to the hospital later that night on foot. (I´m still not sure why we didn´t have vehicles at that particular time.) As we approached a complete unlit building, we thought to ourselves, ¨Of course! We´re in the Bolivia countryside. Of course there are no hospitals open 24 hours. What were we thinking?¨ Upon further examination through the gate of the building, we realized that it was not, in fact a hospital, but rather a cemetery! After deciding not to take that as an omen, we got directions from a kid on the street and found the real hospital, where I received some pills that killed the bacteria in my small intestine, and I have been feeling fine ever since. Susan also took some medicing and is also fine. Sydney, however, decided to let her immune system fight off the intruders in an effort to make it stronger. Upon our return to Cochabamba after Tech Week, she spent two nights in the hospital and is now on medication for salmonella and amoebas. I´ve gotta admit, though, that I have never had more fun being sick. That girl is one of the funniest people I have ever met, and she makes a great sick buddy.

Anyway, the source of my bacteria was probably either the chicken the orphans left sitting out all day before cooking for us or the refrescos they made us with water that hadn´t been boiled. Or it could be the fact that I maybe saw one bar of soap the whole time I spent in that place. The moral of the story is to not leave your health in the hands of Bolivian orphans: They don´t have the cleanest hands. However, there were hot showers at the orphanage -- amazing!

Our third stop was a tiny mountain town in the Santa Cruz region called La Laja. School was out of session, so we had the luxury of two nights sleeping on more straw mattresses in the classrooms of the vacant building at no cost. The first night in La Laja, we hiked to a cave that contained ancient Incan cave paintings and saw a gorgeous sunset on the return hike over the mountains. The next two days were spent constructing a greenhouse in an even tinier town that was about a two and a half hour walk from La Laja. I know this because our 15 passenger van broke down the second day, and I elected to be in the group that began walking while the Land Cruiser took the first half of us to our destination.

During those days in La Laja, we also had our site interviews in order to express in which of the 15 possible sites we had the most interest. I had discovered that I have an intense interest in adult education and of course health, so I narrowed it down to five sites with adult education and health education opportunities. On July 3rd, the Integrated Education Director, Wendy held a party at her gorgeous home on a mountainside just outside the city of Cochabamba. She always had joked about using the technique of throwing darts at a map in order to match Trainees with their future sites. Well, she affixed balloons to some trees outside her home, each containing a slip of paper with the exciting news of one Trainee´s site. We took turns throwing darts at the balloons and reading each other´s site announcements. Apparently I´m no good at darts without a beer in my other hand, and I had to just walk up to a balloon and pop it after many failed throwing attempts. Shameful, I know.

I´m going to the region of Tarija in the southernmost part of Bolivia. My site is called Valle de Concepción and is about 25 kilometers outside the city of Tarija, which is absolutely beautiful. I´ll be visiting it for the first time in about an hour, and I´ll post again when I get back into Cochabamba after my visit.

Hope all is well with all of you! I´m extremely excited. Here we go!