It´s been too long hasn´t it? It has.

The Integrated Education Tech Specialist (a third year volunteer who assists my boss) came to visit the new Tarija volunteers a couple weeks ago and took some really nice pictures, so I will share those with you and pray that you think twice about disowning me.

My site was her first stop, and she arrived in the middle of the reading club I have every Tuesday and Thursday at two o´clock and immediately began taking pictures.... without my knowledge. Yes, that means none of these pictures are staged, except some of the ones of the kids: They are absolutely fascinated by digital cameras. As a related side note, I let a girl Elva from my reading club borrow my camera yesterday to take pictures of a fair for the 25 PAN centers in my area, and she disappeared into the crowd with it. Though I haven´t seen her since, I am far less worried than I probably should be. Should I be? I can´t seem to make myself worry about it. Perhaps a palm branch broom is currently brushing up the smashed remains of the one valuable, expensive thing I brought to this country. Perhaps Elva will arrive at reading club on Tuesday with an offering of battery-dead, memory-erased, now-useless-to-her metal box. Perhaps, in our town of 1000 people, Elva will manage to avoid me for the next two years and I will never see the little box again. I think this nonchalant attitude will get me far in Bolivia. Anyway, here´s my reading club.














We meet at the park and take over these two, huge, cement tables. We sing songs in Spanish and English, like ¨Head, Shoulder, Knees and Toes.¨ We read for about an hour. We check books in and out. Each kid has their own card that I keep on file in a little box, listing every book they´ve ever borrowed from the previous volunteer Monica´s extensive collection, whether or not they returned it on time and in what condition it was retured, and whether or not they completed the assignment that comes with each borrowed book. When a child checks out a book in English, of which I have an abundance, he or she is instructed to return a week later having found three words in the English text that look like Spanish words. For Spanish books, he or she must tell me what the book was about. I have recently added chapter books in Spanish like The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter to the collection. It´s cheaper to buy these without illustrations, so my assignment for those books is to choose a chapter and draw a picture of what happened in that chapter. I feel like Mrs. Freed. Soon I might have them find words they didn´t know and write the definitions. Ooh that´s a good idea. That way I can learn too.


Paola, the girl with me on the left, is my favorite. I´m probably not supposed to have favorites, but I´m not too naive to believe that all teachers (and most parents) do. Paola is one of my next door neighbors. Her seven-year-old, ever-present smile would follow me everywhere if she didn´t have school and parents and a bedtime. My favorite thing about my favorite girl is the way she walks -- or rather, gets from place to place: She never walks. She´s a jumper. She leaps and bounds and spins and skips and falls a lot and gets back up to jump again. Recently, she has discovered that she can minimize her time on the ground by holding my hand wherever we go. I imagine we´re quite a sight: Me with my long, even strides attached at the hand to this tiny, bounding bundle of energy.

Here´s my favorite picture. Every day at about 3 pm, the wind picks up in Valle de Concepción and can sometimes change the temperature by a good 10 or 15 degrees, morphing the day from ¨shorts weather¨ to ¨hoodie weather¨ and causing the kids who came jacketless to reading club to huddle together for warmth rather than run home to grab more clothes. Paola was resourceful and used my folder full of stickers (prizes for attendance, good treatment of books, and helping me with class) as a windbreaker.

That reminds me: Some of you have asked if there is anything I need that you could send. Stickers. These kids go crazy over stickers. And I don´t know where you can find children´s books in Spanish in the US, but those would also be very much appreciated. Stuffing the empty spaces in the boxes with American chocolate is also a nice gesture. =)


I went to visit Susan at her site last week. It is flippin´ beautiful in a different way than Valle de Concepción. Practically on the Argentinian border, it´s a little bit hotter and more forested down in La Mamora. Susan and I are sitting on a bench outside the elementary school in which she teaches computer classes to teachers every morning and plays basketball with students every afternoon. The mountains in the background are Argentina.

Susan had been talking up her Gringa friend who could also play basketball since she arrived at her site and started playing against the big-talking student teachers. During recess that day we were challenged to a game and won hands-down, 31 to 20ish. The rematch was to 11 and involved a lot more fouling and a lot more arguments about the definition of a foul. They play by slightly different rules here as far as fouling goes, and by the time we had lost that 11 point game, Susan and I had sworn to ourselves to get NBA or NCAA basketball game tapes sent down to enlighten those boys about how much contact is too much and how it is possible to foul the person not in possession of the ball.

I´m throwing this last picture in to show you my boss, Wendy. She is just as nice and awesome as she looks here, entertaining Bolivian children with her fancy camera. I also wanted to mention how cool my job is. I read books with little kids (so far. I swear I´ll do more soon.) and basketball playing can be listed on my trimesterly report as a work-related activity because it encourages physical fitness, health, and self-esteem. Visiting with neighbors is sharing of United States culture, one of the three main goals of Peace Corps, and if you visit me at my site we will be introducing more cultural exchange to their lives and I won´t have to take vacation time. Think about it. You´d be doing Bolivia a favor.