You know how sometimes, after long absences from a good friend -- say, since October -- when you run into them again you find yourself at a loss for words? Despite what million events took place in their absence, despite the anecdote per day that you could relate had you been communicating daily, you resort to catching them up on the boring basics. After all, you can´t talk about real stuff until you´ve covered the background information.

What has happened between October and now? Thanksgiving happened. As you may know, there were no Pilgrims in Bolivia. To celebrate, I joined the group of 60 or so Santa Cruz volunteers at a nice (though salamander- and HUGE centipede-ridden) hotel overlooking a vast expanse of nature preserve and spent all day in the pool getting sunburned through my SPF 50.

Things happened before Thanksgiving, now that I think about it. B42 had in-service training (IST) back in the homeland, Cochabamba, where we reunited for the first time since being shipped off to our sites to begin service. Each of us presented an oral report of the status of things in our sites. Mine may have enigmatically hinted that my site doesn´t appear to need me very much while also giving the impression that I am working and have plans for future work. My boss thought it was good.

After IST, I took my first long bus ride to my friend Naya´s site halfway between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. Maybe the worst eight hours of my life, I spent the trip clenching desperately to keep the increasingly-threatening explosive diarrhea in my body not my pants. When we stopped at the halfway point, I found the bathroom to be a hole in the ground of about 2-inch diameter and surprised myself by expertly directing the majority of the explosion into the hole. Beginner´s luck.

After learning about libraries in Naya´s site we bussed it again to Samaipata, a small, cute, tourist town halfway to Santa Cruz. We played at waterfalls, saw ancient Incan ruins, and hiked a small mountain. Then we continued on to Buena Vista with its swimming pool, blazing sun, and US government-provided turkey.

Sometimes the mindless small talk consumes the entire temporal window you had available, and you excuse yourself from the conversation and walk away with a distressing taste in your mouth. That, my friends, is the taste of nonfulfillment. It tastes like friendship slipping away into abbreviated, Christmas-letter-update oblivion -- and I think that tastes like chuño.

After Thanksgiving, I returned to Valle de Concepción with the goal of devoting more of my time to the PAN office and less of it to finding excuses not to go to the PAN office. After all, my diagnostic report had (kind of) mentioned that Valle on the whole doesn´t really need me, whereas PAN actually requested me. It seemed only fair, and I think we´re on the road to making some really progress in that dusty little office.

Upon my return to Tarija, I noticed another change: Christmas decorations! Little, fake Christmas trees with lights that blinked in time with the annoying squeak of a popular carol; rope lights wrapped around the palm trees in the plaza, randomly and tackily blinking; buildings hung with garlands dusted with fake snow in a climate that never sees any. Weird. While confused by the lack of cold and powdery, white stuff, I thought back to the brief time I spent in a Chicagoland mall when I was home for my brother´s wedding (at the end of SEPTEMBER) and was horrified by the Christmas tree display set up outside one department store that shall remain nameless. Thank you, Bolivia, for not being as Christmas-crazy as the United States.

Naya´s family came to visit her for the holidays, and they decided to spend Christmas week in none other than the beautiful, tranquil, perfect-for-quality-family-time Tarija. Together we discovered the amazing waterfalls just outside of town, ate at nearly every sidewalk cafe, and enjoyed the good company of the tightly-knit Tarija volunteer family. As homesickness had begun to hit me kind of hard a couple days before Christmas, it was nice to have the familiarity of an American family around.

A couple days after Christmas, Susan and I packed our bags for a Santa Cruz New Year. After 5 taxis, 1 truck, 1 seedy hostel, 4 buses 4 passport stamps, and 32 hours, we made it to that huge, sweaty city via Argentina. ¨Why the Argentina route?¨ you ask? Get out a map. Follow the directions below.

1. Find Tarija city.

2. Find Yacuiba.

3. Examine distance between Tarija and Yacuiba.

4. Find Orán, Argentina.

5. Examine distance from Tarija to Orán to Yacuiba.

6. Compare distances in step 3 and step 5.

7. Imagine both routes taking 12 hours. That´s because the more direct-looking route crosses some mountains... on a one-lane, unpaved road.

8. Imagine two buses encountering each other on said road on the edge of a cliff and having to maneuver around each other. Can you imagine that sometimes one of them falls?

9. Make the smart choice, the Argentinian choice, over paved roads, over flat land.

(Dad, before you put the atlas away, I´ll give you our exact route: Tarija south to almost Bermejo where we crossed the border into Aguas Blancas, Argentina. Then to Orán, then to Pocitos where we crossed back into Bolivia at Yacuiba. Yacuiba to Santa Cruz. Back in reverse order. The route where we may have fallen off a cliff would have been Tarija to Yacuiba to Santa Cruz.)

Needless to say it was a long, strange trip. Argentinian police are pretty strict and paranoid and insisted on poking through my dirty clothes and smelling my shampoo bottles four times on the way back. They must hate their jobs.

While it is possible to save the endangered relationship, the process takes conscious effort, though the strategy is impressively simple: Talk more. Communicate often enough that updates are practically unnecessary and can´t dominate conversation: That base will already be there, and you will now be free to delve into other topics. Issues, maybe. Funny, had-to-be-there types of stories that will maintain their humor because of the reestablished inimacy of the relationship between story teller and tellee.

In national news, Tarija and the rest of our like-minded side of the country is still experiencing some upheaval about the whole autonomía thing. Additionally, apparently Evo had threatened to change the 2/3 congressional voting requirement for passing a law to only 50%, making it very easy for him to get passed virtually any law he wanted. He can´t get anything past us of ¨the Orient¨ though, and the immediate response was much hunger striking and horn-honking automobile parades followed by a huge rally that I was not allowed to attend. My favorite part of the whole charade was the sign I took a picture of. You can translate yourself.

Aside from travelling, getting sunburned, celebrating holidays, attending (but not participating in) autonomía rallies, and spending quality time in the office and with my reading club, I´ve been able to catch up on my pleasure reading for the first time since elementary school. I shit you not. I highly recommend The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Highly. Great character development. Great plot. Interesting philosophical ideas. I´ve also been researching where I might want to go to medical school. So far, there´s the obvious Johns Hopkins, along with a smattering of Chicago schools. I try to look outside of Chicago, but every school I research loses some appeal when I realize it´s not in Chicago. Apparently I´m biased.

My New Year´s resolution to you (keeping in mind that I haven´t kept a single New Year´s resolution in my entire life and didn´t even bother to make any during college) is to wash the chuño from our mouths with Dove ice cream bars (mmm...). I promise biweekly blogs. Woah. I know. But want you to be a part of my life. This is for our own good. See you in two weeks.