Tarija

I can´t seem to get away from Susan and Sarah R: Sarah and I were roommates in Miami, then the three of us were neighbors in Illataco, and now we are the three new volunteers assigned to Tarija. Here are Susan and Sarah about to eat a delicious lunch at a cafe in the city near one of the three beautiful plazas. Have I mentioned that Tarija is beautiful? It´s basically a little, yuppy city. It is always clean: They actually have readily-accessible garbage cans on the streets and take pride in their goal of being the cleanest city in Bolivia. Another advantage to living in Tarija is that the dogs are less plentiful, far nicer, and usually wearing sweaters. El Día de San Roque, the ¨Day of the Dog¨ was last week, and the people of Tarija dressed all the dogs up in fancy collars. This may be solely a Tarijan holiday. I can imagine such an event in Cochabamba could only result in pain, blood, and lots of rabies shots.

I have now been in the city of Tarija for almost a month! Wow.

Due to some technical difficulties, I spent most of the first week in a hostel in the city but finally moved my luggage into my new room in the veterinarian´s house that Wednesday. The biggest room in which I have ever lived, it is in the interior of the building, causing me to be shielded from a great deal of disturbances such as 6am trufi horns and late-night drunkards. However, due to the room´s placement I am also denied a window to the great outdoors. My fantastic, mountainous view from the roof will have to suffice:

Frustrations arose during the first couple weeks as I began to feel less and less productive. Beginning as a nice vacation from the packed schedule I had during training, my free time in the city of Tarija before settling into my site soon became a nuisance. Bolivian Independence Day was the Sunday after I moved my things into the new house, and the Bolivians took a four day weekend for it. Rumor has it that they carefully planned the parading to take place entirely on that Friday so that they could have the rest of the weekend to drink and party without having to bother with any more formalities. I´ll give them credit for being clever with their partying. Coming back to my point, however, this meant that there was no work for me to do in the closed PAN office on Friday and Monday. In hindsight, I should not have gone horse-hunting with Sarah on Thursday and should have checked in to the PAN office. Instead I spent most of the day contemplating which horse Sarah might buy from this spectacular German woman who lives outside Tarija. (One´s bicycle allowance of $200 can also be put toward the purchase of a horse for use in transporting oneself around one´s site and to the outlying communities in which one might work. In some cases, horses are the only effective means of transportation, due to road or lack-of-road conditions.) In short, I had a great time, and Sarah got to test drive two horses as our cab driver impatiently drove away.

However, on Friday I learned about the four day weekend and my inability to meet with my work partners in the PAN office. This clearly added to my frustrations, but I did see many a parade on the streets of Tarija. That´s always fun. I swear there are at least three parades a week here. Most of the time I have no idea why.

So... Tuesday I was going to go to work, but I had to be in the Peace Corps office in Tarija in the morning to arrange a trip to Santa Cruz to take care of some things. Those arrangements took all day, thanks to the siesta that does in fact exist in Bolivia. The office reopened after the siesta at 2:30 or 3pm, just in time for me to miss my first-ever reading club in Valle de Concepción. I had attended one with Monica, the Volunteer that I am replacing, during my site visit in training (club pictured to the right, singing ¨Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes¨); and when I arrived at the veterinarian´s house the cute kids next door made me promise to hold a meeting on Tuesday. How could I resist not only their adorableness but the opportunity to DO SOMETHING? So, though I had planned to both go to the PAN office to start my primary project AND have a reading club meeting, which will be one of my secondary projects, I ended up missing PAN in the morning and having to call Rebeca, the veterinarian, during siesta to ask her to please apologetically turn away the children that were about to show up on her doorstep.

After spending the rest of that week in Santa Cruz and enduring more guilt and feelings of uselessness due to STILL not having accomplished anything, I ran into some Volunteers in Tarija city who asked me to join them in a recycling project they are beginning. Steve and Winston are from B41, the group that arrived here four months before mine, and their sites are the two closest to mine, with Valle de Concepción in between. Because my site also houses the mayor´s office, where we would soon be spending countless hours planning said project and trying to get said mayor to foot his half of the bill, how could I refuse their invitation? And since we had a meeting with the mayor on Monday, of course I couldn´t go to PAN. I know it sounds like I was procrastinating, and if that´s what you´re thinking you might be right, but you also might not have any concept of the incredible Bolivian need to recycle. I will demonstrate, and you will be convinced.

To your left, you will see Valle de Concepción´s version of a landfill. Notice the lack of order, the garbage haphazardly strewn about over the landscape, the pigs rummaging through the filth. Also notice how the majority of the garbage is plastic and therefore, hopefully, recyclable.

Notice something else, if you will: Doesn´t there seem to be surprisingly little garbage located in this landfill, considering that no recycling program exists as of yet and this landfill serves a population of at least 1000 people? I theorize that the missing trash has met one of four possible fates. In order of greatest to least likelihood, said trash has either been (1)burned and is now polluting the air and Bolivian lungs; (2)thrown on the ground and is now polluting the earth and endangering the lives of free-roaming, free-grazing livestock; (3)thrown in a river and is now polluting the water; or (4)reused as a flower pot or toothbrush holder in a Peace Corps-influenced school.

I am excessively excited about the potential for this recycling program to take off and make a real difference here. Of course the deeper we delve into all aspects of starting such a program, the more obstacles we encounter; but so far we have not run into anything so discouraging as to make us lose hope. The site of plastics littering the streets and schoolyards and the smell of toxic chemicals in the air keep our hopes alive.