Santa Cruz Tomorrow!

Leaving for Santa Cruz tomorrow!  I'll be back on Thursday late at night.

Today, I did areo-merangue (aka the excercise class).  We've got a decent-sized group who goes now.  It's fun but hard!  I also went for a sort-of run with my dog, and my host sister and I taught him to sit and lie down.  I also found a fellow-runner in the store on the corner.  He told my sister and me that's it's better running in the morning, so I asked if he ran too.  He said he runs every morning with his dog.  Running unites everyone!

La Defensoria

Today I had class at 9, per usual, with the afternoon free.  Class was at the house of the program director, not per the usual.  Ismael's house is very Asian-themed....the gate has a Chinese symbol on it, there's a  studio Ismael uses to teach his daily Tai Chi classes, there are Chinese and Bolivian things all over the walls...and there are also tons of windchimes and stone frogs, because Ismael likes them.  So we all sat on pillows in the Tai Chi studio and learned about the Bolivian lowlands, aka the east.  And after class we ate vegetarian salteñas and birthday cake for my buddy Ali's birthday.  (We all have buddies so no one gets lost when we go places.)  For those poor souls who have never had a salteña, they are delicious fried cresent-roll-ish dough with veggies/potatoes/mystery liquid inside.  They are AWESOME.  They do tend to end up all over, because of the juice (which always manages to leak out somehow...but WORTH IT.

After class, I went with Allyson and Sophie (two girls in my education reform project group) to the Defensoria de la Niñez (a group that defends children, from things like child abuse).  When Colegio Bolivar went coed, the Defensoria helped protect the girls.  We went in and asked if we could talk to someone about what happened.

We talked to a nice woman there, who told us that the Defensoria got involved to protect the girls' right to education and to not be discriminated against.  The girls entered the school with psychologists and social workers, who apparently also faced some attacks.  One interesting thing she told us was that the girls' parents didn't want them to go because of all the attacks, but the girls wanted to (I think not only because it's a good school but on principle).  Now all the public schools in the city are mixed.  We asked if any other schools had had this type of problem when they mixed (years ago for some of them).  She said that there were some problems, but more subtle, like expelling the girls for not wearing the "correct" (boys') uniform.  At Colegio Bolivar they wanted to make the girls buzz their hair, like the boys have to, but the Defensoria wouldn't allow it, since it violated the girls' right as "little women."

Snow Day!

Well, technically not a SNOW day, but I still didn't have school.  Why, you ask?  Because the people of Cochabamba were blockading the roads.  Still not entirely sure why they're blockading....something to do with wanting more money for the town.  The doctors also protested today and yesterday, according to a doctor friend.  I asked my host brother if the doctors were the ones blockading the streets, and he laughed and said "Doctors don't blockade, they just march."  Those two are definitely favorite ways to show discontent.

So today, I slept, watched Los Hechiceros de Waverly Place/Fineas y Ferb, napped, ate yummy noodle casserole, registered for classes, got rained/hailed/thunder-stormed on, bought a LOT of chocolate, and ate cake for dinner!  A successful day!

Talking with Important People

Our group has a month-long project on basically anything we want, with the only requirement being that it involves field work and talking to people.  That month is speeding to a close (the presentation is due the Monday after next, and we're spending 5 days of those 11 days in Santa Cruz.)  My group is investigating the Colegio Bolivar,  a public boys' high school that went co-ed this year, to the tune of angry parents and much resistance.  In Bolivia, summer vacation ends in January, so we've been here watching the whole thing unfold from the beginning (it's all over the news).  Today Kate and I went to the school to see if there was anyone there we could talk to.

The school was very nice and light blue with a gated archway.  Some grown-ups  adults were talking in the gateway and one of the woman (presumably a secretary or administrator) asked what we wanted.  We asked if we could speak to the director (aka principal) and she had us take a seat outside his office.  The building was basically a big square, with the main entrance leading to a courtyard in the middle.  It had a big impressive staircase in the middle that led to the second floor balconies (think Sound of Music staircase, only whitewashed and Spanish style).  We waited for perhaps half an hour and then went in to talk to the director.  His name is Miguel and he's been the principal for 2 years.  He seemed a little standoff-ish at first but then we had a great conversation for at least an hour.  Then he had another meeting, but he told us to come back any time.

So a summary of what we talked about:
-500-ish boys, 10 girls at the high school
-a law from the government mandated mixed schools
-parents were angry because the girls didn't respect the waitlist to get into the school (because the law required mixing, I presume)
-the girls are all 13 and 14, in their first year of high school
-there were a lot of problems at first but things are calming dow
-previously the World Bank and other countries had a big role in the Bolivian education system, but now it's more nationalized
-they are focusing more on educating a whole person, not just the academic side (this is also part of the education reform, curious how it works literally in practice)
-they have begun teaching indigenous history and languages (the kids at Bolivar learn both English and Quechua, a local indigenous language)
-Miguel talked about having a balance between honoring Bolivian tradition and culture (and helping to save the indigenous cultures that are dying out) and teaching technology and helping the students prepare for the global world

At the end, he asked us a little about the US and the education system there.  We were both glad he did; it made it seem less like an interrogation and more like a reciprocal exchange.  (Reciprocity=ayni in Aymara and/or Quechua)  We're hoping to return Friday to talk with a few professors or some of the students.  Another interesting thing I noticed was that Miguel kept using "varones" to refer to the boys and "chicas" to refer to the girls.  I don't have an awesome grasp on the connotations, but varones sounds a lot like "barons" which made me think it referred more to men.  Chicas, on the other hand, refers to girls, preteen/teenage girls.  I was a little put-off by this, but by the end of our interview I realized that even though "chicos" and "chicas" might translate to "boys" and "girls" for an English-speaker, "chicos" can also mean a mixed group of boys and girls.  So Miguel had to use a different word to distinguish between the genders.  ¡Bien interesante!

Tidbits

So I have trouble remembering what I write on my blog, but I feel like I should give a rundown of some things that I forget aren't normal to USA-ers.

-stuff is cheap.  I bought a pair of headphones for 30Bs, or a little more than $4.  I got TOTALLY ripped off by a taxi driver who charged me 75Bs when I probably should have been charged 40 or 50.  But that's still $10-ish

-stores here mostly don't have windows, they just have metal garage doors they open every morning

-people drive fast, and you have to cross the street assertively

-our house has one bathroom...really not as big of a problem as I'd have expected

-all the houses have water tanks on the roof, and sometimes the tank runs out at the end of the day and you don't have water till morning

-you don't buy eggs in dozens, you go to the store and say how many, and then you carry them home in a plastic baggie

-every morning my family gets fresh bread, which is SOOOO delicious and soft

-I have not seen Ziploc baggies (aka yummy bread does not stay that way past a day)

-bricks are bigger, and have six square holes in them....it seems like having holes in bricks would be unsafe, but practically all buildings are built with them, and I guess cement blocks do it

-houses/buildings all have fences, of cement or metal

-the fences usually have metal prongs on top, or barbed wire, or electric wire, or pieces of broken glass stuck in the cement

-vendors have little carts on the street where you can buy gum, cookies, crackers (which in Spanish are also called cookies), or yummy peanut butter bars, for cheap

-you can't put toilet paper in the toilet--there's a little trash can next to the toilet

-most of the showers I've encountered (including at my house) are not separate stalls...there’s just a shower head in the bathroom and once you’re done you use a rubber scrape-y thing to push the water into the drain…I actually prefer it to a stall shower since I like cleaning up the water (¿OCD much?)

-the micros (MEE-crows, aka minibus) and trufis (TROO-fees, aka XL hippie van) don’t have stops, you just wave when you want them to pick you up, and yell “ESQUINA POR FAVOR” (corner, please) when you want to get off

-Cochabamba is NOT a tourist city; it’s rare to see other non-Bolivians except the ones in my program

-I forget words/spellings in English and there are always those phrases that just DON’T translate into English (of course these also happen in reverse but I expected that)

-graffiti is EVERYWHERE, and it’s political

-I have my own room

-the windows in our house don’t have screens

-all the fruit here is organic and from Bolivia

-SO much variety of fruits. also potatoes

-“salsa” does not mean the stuff you put on tacos.  If you say “salsa,” people will ask “what kind of salsa” because salsa means sauce

That’s all I got for now.  I’ll add on later if I think of anything else!

The Mines of Potosí

Today we went to the mines in Cerro Rico (Rich Hill, roughly translated).  Cerro Rico has come to represent the exploitation of Bolivia, because during the colonial era, the Spanish emptied the mines of all the silver at the expense of the indigenous people.  It’s still an active mine today, but there is no more pure silver.

We started out by each buying a bag of coca and a bottle of soda.  Coca is really important to the miners, because they used it in the colonial era to stave off hunger and fatigue while working 14-24 hour days.  The Spanish learned to let the indigenous people use it because they could work longer.  Coca is still chewed in the mines (and all over Bolivia, really).  Our tour guide told us that now the miners make their own hours, but they need the money, so they aren’t really free to work only when they want.

Before entering the mine, we all had to put on baggy pants, jackets, rubber boots, and helmets with lights.  Then we put the coca and soda in jackets and walked into the mine, after waiting for a guy pushing a cart to pass by.  We walked in a long line (10 of us and the tour guide) along the cart’s path.  The ground was covered in a few inches of water, and occasionally we all would have to move to the edge to let a cart pass.  When carts came by on their way out, filled with rocks or bags of minerals, one of us would put our coca and soda on the cart for the miners.  Some parts of the mine were pretty wide and I could walk normally, but in a lot of places I had to hunch, and in two spots I had to crawl.  It was incredibly dark, as you’d expect since we were underground.  Three or four in our group had broken headlamps, so we alternated to help those people see.  It still was pretty tricky, since they were walking in their own shadows.  I can’t imagine being in that darkness for fourteen hours.

We went to see the Tio, an indigenous god.  Technically, he is the devil, but he isn’t evil like the Christian devil.  He is the god of the underworld, and can bring good fortune or bad.  The miners offer coca and alcohol to him in a ceremony.  I did the ceremony, which involved taking a sip of 96% alcohol—that was pretty gross.  The miners also sacrifice llamas to him, but our group didn’t do that.  When they sacrifice the llama, everyone has to be outside the mine or the Tio will take their lives instead of the llama’s.  The Spaniards didn’t know about the Tio, since they gave orders from outside the mine.  There are a ton of Tios in the mines, but we only saw this one.

One of the wider sections

El Tio, with cigarettes in his mouth

After leaving the mine, we went to Wayna Pacha, a children’s center for the miners’ kids.  School-aged kids go there to play games and do educational activities, as a way to keep them from working in the mines.  Technically kids under 18 can’t work in the mines, but many do as a way to help their families.  We saw one boy who was 13 when we were in the mines.  He told us he started working there at 12.

So after hearing the history of Wayna Pacha, we played with the kids!  I played with the older kids, preteen aged.  I played chess with one boy, and then we all went downstairs.  The kids get meals at the center, so they had bread, gruel, and tea and we goofed around together.

Afterwards, some of our group went to a miner’s house.  We walked four or five blocks in the rain until we got there.  Only the miner’s wife was there.  She knits sweaters to sell, but she told us after buying yarn she barely gets any money.  The family had 8 or 9 kids, and lived in a one-room house.  Most of the room was beds, with blankets on them to combine them into one big bed.  There was an electric stove in one corner and a TV in the other.  The two oldest siblings had moved out to work (I think they were 19 and 16 years old).  The family rented their house, like most miners, and said that the owner was not very nice.  The parents speak Quechua, but the mom told us her kids don’t like to speak it.  The mom told us that she can’t read, so she can’t tell if her kids are doing their schoolwork.  She said whatever jobs her kids want, she will support them, but when someone in our group asked if she wanted them to be miners, she said no.

Taxis don’t go by the miner’s house, so we walked a few blocks to a corner where we could catch them.  Luckily it had stopped raining, but the streets were like rivers.  The street the miner lived on was mud, with a 2-foot wide river of water running down each side.  It was great to get home and be dry!  Then I ate the most delicious pizza of my life and it had mushrooms! 

To Potosí, the Highest City in the World

Yup, it really is the highest.  What defines a “city” exactly, I’m not sure.  But Potosí was really important in the colonial time.  Silver from Potosí supplied Europe for hundreds of years, and basically enabled it to develop the way it has.  Now Potosí is definitely NOT a booming city; there’s a lot of poverty and a lot of people still have to work in the mines just to survive.

On our way to Potosí (in a bus) we stopped at Tarapaya hot springs.  We all swam in a big 90-ish degree pool.  We had to stay around the edges because in the center is a volcano, which sometimes makes whirlpools that suck people in.  We put mud on our faces and all over our bodies—all natural spa treatment!  The only problem was that when I washed it off I also washed off all my sunscreen…so my shoulders are a little burned.  Luckily I have some aloe vera!  

Emily, Me, Melissa--sorry, I don't have the mud pictures!

So we were supposed to get to Potosí and eat lunch at 1pm, but we were a few hours late so we didn’t finish lunch until 4pm-ish.  I went with some friends to a Convent/Museum.  It was established in 1685 and wealthy families would raise their second daughter to join the convent when she turned 15.  Once she joined, she stayed there without outside contact until she died.  Only 21 nuns lived there, so one had to die before a new girl would join.  The convent had a lot of bloody crosses—different than what I usually see.  There are still nuns living there now, though only 12.  They make candies that you can buy in the gift shop.

Then we walked around the central plaza, which was really close to the hotel.  (Fun Fact: There also weren’t very good sidewalks—about 2-3 feet wide, but sometimes going around a corner the sidewalks disappeared.  Shows how old the city is!  WAY before cars.)

For dinner, we went back to the hotel.  A group of traditional musicians played music while we ate.  It was a 3 course meal, which is not at all typical for Bolivian dinners.  It was good, though so I ate a lot, and then SUFFERED when we started dancing.  My belly was not pleased.  But I had fun!  And on a happy note, not one bit of altitude sickness! (For perspective, the front seat of our bus had 2 oxygen tanks, so that was a bit unnerving.)

Museum-ing in Sucre

We went to a museum about the Chuquisaca.  There were weavings, instruments, and jingly shoes like I saw at Carnival.  Also other fun stuff, like authentic clothes and a stove.  Our guide wore traditional clothes, and was from that indigenous group.  There also was a woman weaving, so I watched her for a while.  She didn’t have a pattern, and her weaving was beautiful.

Then we went to ASUR.  ASUR is a museum/cultural preservation project.  This museum is helping regenerate the art of weaving among a few indigenous groups who had lost that skill (because of modernization.)  The women make beautiful, super super intricate weavings.  The men used to weave in the pre-Colombus era, but they lost that hundreds of years ago.  They are just started to learn again.  The men and women have different styles of weaving but both are gorgeous.

Made by women

Made by men

Lunch was at a café with an awesome view.  I had some pesto pasta, which was delicious.  Then I befriended a cat!

Then we went to Centro Cultural Masis, where we had a little talk with the leader, Roberto.  Then he and his band played us traditional music.  They teach music to kids—check out how cute they are!  Then we ate dinner, which involved yummy egg salad and some beets, among other things.  Then he played more music with a smaller group of just men.  We drank some weird little drinks that were part of a ceremony to the Pachamama (Mother Earth) and then we DANCED!

Sucre!

Today we flew to Sucre.  I walked around with some friends, and we saw a demonstration in the plaza about coca.  Coca is a leaf that’s really important to the culture here.  It’s chewed as a mild stimulant and used in ceremonies.  It gets a bad rep since it’s used to make cocaine.  The current president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has a new initiative that would abolish cocaine but protect the coca leaf.  

Health benefits of the coca leaf

Then we went to a vegetarian restaurant, which was delicious but we sat with random (Bolivian) strangers, at one table.  It was a little awkward.  I tried to engage them in conversation, but they didn’t seem very chatty.  Lunch was only 13 Bs, or less than $2!  (Soup, main course, dessert)

We went to a museum, MUSEF (an indigenous/folklore museum).  MUSEF had an exhibit on the totally interesting Chipaya, who live in circular houses and have doors made of cactus.  They also build “artificial rivers” to cultivate their crops.

Then the whole group went to a restaurant to celebrate Sophie’s birthday.  We had tacos, a fruit cake, and a chocolate cake.  The cakes had sparklers!  We all sang for Sophie and she got a T-shirt that said (in Spanish) “Probably the best birthday of my life.”  Then everyone danced for a long while on the dancefloor.  It was fun!

Better today!

I'm feeling better!  I even ate some birthday cake!
I'll post more later--just an update!

Summary of the Week

I’m going to try to sum up Monday through Friday in one post, since I’m obviously struggling to keep up the 1-post-per-day thing.  So Monday, I had no school in the morning, so I worked on the large amount of homework I had due Tuesday.  I also didn’t have school Wednesday morning, as a last minute change.  That ended up working out perfectly, since I had to schedule a last-minute Skype interview Wednesday morning for a summer job.

This week in Spanish class, I saw a video about cargadores, or carriers.  Cargadores are men who you hire in the market to carry goods.  The video was particularly about potato carriers.  They carry 45 pound sacks of potatoes.  Cargadores always work in groups, and have regular customers they carry for.  Most of them are from the country, and moved to the city to help their families.  But the cargador culture is that they go out to a bar and drink alcohol with their coworkers.  When the men were interviewed about this culture, they (individually) said that they were torn between their family and their new friends.  They could not survive without their “brothers” or the men that they worked with, so they felt they couldn’t refuse to drink with them/ buy them drinks.  The cargadores sleep on the street, or if a bar-owner takes pity on them, in the bar.   Part of cargador culture is not going to the doctor for sickness or injury.  The video was really sad and showed how important culture and community is—aren’t we all products of our culture and friends?

The Spanish classes also went to the cemetery, and talked to the kids who work there.  This cemetery was made up of little drawers in the wall, where the bodies go, and the kids are paid to clean the glass front.  Some of the people have tombs, but it costs more money to be put in the ground.  The people in the little drawers are removed after 5 years (after they’ve decomposed) and their bones are then burned.  In the cemetery, we met 4 kids who showed us around—Kevin (11), Walter (13), Julio César (13), and Joseina (14).  They told us about the important people buried there, and showed us the tombs of a girl who was kidnapped and killed and a boy who was killed in the water war.  People always leave them flowers and pray to them because they have good souls.  Kevin and Joseina are brother and sister, and both started working in the cemetery when they were 5 years old to help their family.  Kevin goes to school in the morning and works from noon to 6pm on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.  Joseina works every day in the cemetery and goes to school at night.  Walter started working when he was 10, to help his 6 siblings and his 2 nieces.  He also goes to school at night, and wants to be a mechanic.  Julio César has an older brother who works in the cemetery too, as a guard.  His brother is 15.  The kids told us that they make 30-60 Bolivianos a day (US$4-9).  They sing or pray for people as well as washing the glass.  They said some people are nice and give them a lot of money, and some people are bad and don’t want to pay them.  When people ask what they charge, they say, “depends on what you want to pay.”

We saw another movie about “cleferos,” or glue-sniffers.  These are kids who come from bad homes or are abandoned, and live in the street.  A former student on this program did a documentary on them.  All of them said they didn’t want to sniff glue.  A lot of the young women had babies, and wanted a better life for their kids.  They all had cuts and scars from the violence in the street.  Many of the women were hit by their husbands, and the police was very violent towards them.  There are some homes for the street kids, but a lot of them lock the kids in and don’t let them leave, so the kids know not to go there.  Even while they were being interviewed, the cleferos were sniffing glue.  It was so sad to see—and once they get addicted and become part of that community, it’s so hard for them to stop.  It’s hard to imagine living in that much violence and hardship.

So finally caught up on my blogging!  I actually stayed home sick from school today, since my stomach keeps cramping up like someone’s twisting it around.  Not fun.  But I got to sleep 4 extra hours, and my host mom made me tea and maizana, which is like thick, clear soup.  My friend Ali just told me what it is—corn starch.  (She called me to see how I was doing—isn’t that nice?)  I ate it with crackers and sugar so it was pretty good.  I’m hoping to be better by Monday, when I leave for Sucre and Potosí.  This will be my third day feeling crummy, so if I’m still not better by tomorrow I’ll go to the doctor.  Hoping it won’t come to that!

Yes, I Do Go To School Here

Lest you all think Bolivia is just fun and games, here’s a rundown of my typical day, without being on an excursion.

7:15 Wake up, eat breakfast with my mom, shower

8:20 Catch the micro to the university—sometimes I catch up on readings on the micro until I get nauseous

8:45 Get off the micro (MEE-crow) and walk to school

8:53 Wonder if I have time to get coffee, get coffee regardless at Café Vivaldi

9:00ish Get to class, wait 5-15 minutes for class to start since Bolivian time always runs a little late

10:30 Descanso!  Thirty-minute break for chatting with friends or getting a snack

11:00 Back to class

12:30 Class lets out, unless it runs late, which it often does

1:15 Arrive home by micro and eat lunch with my family

2:20 Take the micro back to school

3:00ish Start Spanish class with Chichi and Beba (our Spanish profs)—sometimes we watch a movie or go on a field trip

4:30 Break!

6:30 Go home on the micro, which is usually full because of commuter hour

7:30ish Arrive home and eat a little dinner with my family

8:15ish Hang out with my family-- chat/play cards/sing Selena Gomez with my host sister

9:30 Start homework/email people/blog

11:00 Bed

So to review:

6 hours in class

2.5 hours on the micro

2.5 hours eating with my family

1 hour of breaks during class

½ hour showering/brushing teeth, etc.

8 hours sleeping

1.5 hours doing homework

1 hour hanging with my family

1 hour that always disappears—the time that just slips away …when I stay in class late to talk to a friend, or the micro comes late, or I talk with my host mom about organic farming/climate change instead of starting homework

I know most people probably don’t get 8 hours of sleep every night.  I work really hard to get sleep, because it’s physically exhausting to be surrounded by a foreign language all the time.  Every time I listen to someone speak Spanish, I have to concentrate and actively think about what they are saying.  We don’t always realize it, but when someone speaks English, we can’t always here every word (if there’s background noise, they talk funny, etc).  But in our native language we can fill in the gaps.  In Spanish I can’t fill in gaps, I need to literally hear every word to understand the sentence.  A lot of effort!  But with a combo of 8 hours of sleep and coffee, I’m succeeding!

Birthday Shout-out to Matt!!

Feliz cumpleaños Matt!  Or Mateo, spanishicized.  Good job making it to a full 19 years of life.  Were you in Bolivia with me, I would buy you a cake and then shove your face into it.  That's the custom here for birthdays.  The birthday person takes a big bite out of the whole cake (mandatory) and a friend/family member shoves their face into it (optional, but why pass up that opportunity).  You'll have to take a rain-check.

This hostel in La Paz is almost named Bacon.

Back to Cochabamba

At 8am on Sunday, we left Tocoli.  Eliana and I were not excited to hike either up or down the mountain with our luggage (to either get on the bus at the bottom of the mountain or take the path to meet it by the road).  So we hiked perpendicularly (off the beaten path), and figured we’d run into the road eventually.  And we did!  Some people from Tocoli were hitching a ride on the (coach) bus with us, so we tripled up and it was just a bit cozy.  We stopped in the little town of Ancoraimes for la Fiesta de la Cruz (Festival of the Cross).  It started as a Christian festival, but has sort of morphed into just a party with food and marching around.  We stood in the church and listened to the priest talk in Aymara, and then everyone left the church and marched in a circle around the town square.  There was music and some singing, but it was in Aymara so I couldn’t sing along.  Next we met up with the villagers of Tocoli, who prepared an Apthapi with potatoes, corn, bread, and bananas.  Yum!

We drove to the airport in El Alto, and I ate a quesadilla and a cinnamon roll—DELICIOUS.  We also saw the Bolivian soccer team!  I felt mildly disgusting, after not having showered/brushed my teeth/changed my clothes/put on deodorant for the past 4 days.  I actually couldn’t take off my hat because my hair was so greasy.  Just getting the full rural experience!  It’s wicked cold there, so why would they shower and change clothes every day?  I think I’ll have a hard time adjusting to the fashion pressures in the US—I only have maybe 10 outfits here in Bolivia (but only 2 pairs of pants and 2 skirts) so everyone here has seen me wear the same clothes loads of times.  But I feel like in the US, people expect me to have an unlimited closet of clothes…let’s reject all that consumerism, yeah?  

View of Ancoraimes before the festival had begun

Leaving the church

The Apthapi

Community Project

Today we had bread for breakfast, with some sugary tea.  Eliana and I walked down the mountain with Rene for our group project.  We hung around his house for a while and then walked to the school to work on a mysterious project.  No one else was there, so our group hung out by the lake.  Once we were all there, we learned that our project was to move rocks to build a community center for ethnotourists.  Right now the town center is just a little pavilion by the lake.  So we (my study abroad group) made an assembly line moving rocks from the river into a pile.  I guess people with building skills will do the actual building with the rocks.  We sang lots of songs.  Yay!

For lunch we had soup and another Apthapi on the rocky little beach.  I seriously struggled to eat the soup, since we didn’t get spoons.  After lunch, we played with the kids and gave them piggyback rides.  The older kids cared for their younger siblings, so even kids as young as 4 or 5 carried around the younger kids and played with them.  One little girl handed me this cute baby. (See below)

Next we had a coa, or ceremony to the Pachamama (Mother Earth).  Every part of the ceremony meant something.  The frog-shaped cookie was because frogs are the most sacred animal in Andean culture.  We each put coca leaves on the pile to represent people/things we want to pray about.  Then we burned the pile, as a way of feeding the Earth and restoring the balance between nature and humans.  According to Andean culture, humans, animals, plants, spirits, etc are all meant to live together, with no one being more important than the others.

After the coa, some people in our group went swimming in the (freezing cold) lake—I opted to watch and hang out with the village kids.  Then the men of the village did a dance with old men masks and canes.  My host mom in Cochabamba told me it was a satire of the Spanish men.  After their dance, our study abroad group sang “Here Comes the Sun” and “Lean on Me” for them.  Our program leader, Heidi, gave the village books (with Spanish and Aymara text) and 5000 Bolivianos in a ceremony as a thank-you.  Then Eliana and I hiked up to our house for our last dinner in Tocoli.

I tried to get the kids to make silly faces with me, but they mostly just laughed at my silly faces

Old man dance

Me, Rosia, Eliana, and Sixto

After giving books to everyone in the community

Climb Every Mountain…

I guess I should give a run-down on our house.  It had 2 stories, with the stairs outside the house.  There were maybe 3 rooms downstairs, and a little kitchen in a separate building.  Upstairs were 2 rooms, Eliana and my room and our host parents's room.  There was a little tiny courtyard with a clothesline, some benches, etc.  The house did have electricity, but for cooking our mom started a fire in the little stove.  That's why the walls were black in the kitchen, from the soot.  There was a little hole for the smoke to go out, but clearly it didn't always cooperate.  There was running water from a tap in the courtyard.  One thing that struck me as funny was that all the storage room doors had locks.  It seemed like only the people of Tocoli would be this far out on the mountain.  I wondered who the locks were there for.

When I woke up at 6:30, no one was home!  Eliana and I were worried our parents had left for the day to go farm or something.  Around 7, our host mom Rosia came back, and told us our host dad Sixto had gone to La Paz.  Rosia gave us pito for breakfast, which came in the form of a bowl of brown flour, a cup of hot tea, and some sugar for us to add.  When we combined them all, it made a sort of brown gruel, which actually was pretty tasty and VERY filling.  Rosia taught us words in Aymara, but they were really long and when we asked her to repeat them so we could write them down, she would say something else.  (I did learn “yuspajara” for thank you, “kala” for rock, and “wawa” for baby.)  When we tried to talk to her in Spanish, she would mostly just say “yes,” even if it wasn’t a yes/no question.  Her Spanish was hard to understand, probably from the Aymara accent, and I’m sure our Spanish was hard for her to understand from the English accent.

We kept trying to help with cooking or cleaning, but our host mom kept telling us she didn’t need help, so when her nephew Rene came by we opted to go hiking with him and his host students Annie and Kate.  Rene took us all around the mountain and showed us cement water things (tanks?) and told us how the water came down the mountain and was distributed to the houses in pipes.  We saw a neighboring village in the distance (whose name was long and hard to pronounce.)  Rene told us stories about one of the previous students, Mateo, who was crazy and swam in the chilly lake and drank whiskey with Rene. Rene kept mentioning some sort of job we’d be doing after lunch that involved moving/removing rocks, but I wasn’t very clear what he meant.  We visited Rene’s other uncle, who was hosting Sophie and Katie.  The uncle wasn’t home, but the aunt was.  She was knitting a toddler sweater to sell in La Paz.  She was the fastest knitter EVER.  Sophie and Katie told us she started the sweater 2 hours before, and she was almost to the neck. 

Eliana and I went back to our house, for a lunch of potatoes, rice, carrots with onions, and cheese that squeaked when I ate it.  We talked to Rosia about the plants that grow, and potatoes seem to be the only thing.  The carrots and onions came from La Paz, and they don’t have fruit.  We brought two bags of carrots, flour, and oil for the families who hosted students, so they’d be able to feed us.  After lunch, Rosia told us she didn’t need help with anything and insisted we rest (that was a common theme of our stay).  Eliana and I napped for 2 ½ hours, and I dreamed that I kept trying to get up to help Rosia, and then I would “wake up” in my bed again and start all over.

We never did help Rene move rocks.  When we saw him the next day, he said he just napped too.  At 4pm, our family ate pito again and drank tea.  Eliana and I sat outside the house with Rosia and sang Disney/Julie Andrews songs.  We asked if she knew any Aymara songs, and she told us they didn’t have words.  We saw a cute dog, but Rosia threw a rock at it.  That’s the way people treat the dogs here.  It’s really sad.

Then Eliana and I “helped” (ie. watched) Rosia cook dinner.  She told us that only women cook, not men, and not little girls because they could burn themselves.  I’m not entirely sure how Rosia didn’t burn herself, since I watched her take a metal pot off the stove with her bare hands (and it didn’t have handles).  Eliana took pictures of the kitchen and showed Rosia.  Then she showed her some pictures from La Paz, and Rosia really like this picture of TONS of birds in the plaza (I think people were feeding them).  I said I would be scared to have all those birds around me, and Rosia said, “They could attack you!  And bite you with their little mouths!” and laughed.  Hooray for cross-cultural jokes!

Rosia asked us what stoves are like where we live, and what we eat.  I told her that my family loves rice and potatoes, and that we eat them with vegetables. Eliana and I are both vegetarians, but it wasn’t really a problem since they don’t eat much meat out here.  Next, bed!  I slept in jeans, a tank top, a long-sleeved shirt, a sweater, and a sweatshirt—inside my sleeping bag with two blankets on top.  It gets COLD at night.  I always had at least 2 layers on during the day, usually 3 or 4. 

The room I shared with Eliana

Our house

The bathroom

Eliana and me on the mountain

That's Lake Titicaca

Pito

Where Rosia cooks food

To Tocoli!

I woke up at 4:30 to leave the hotel in La Paz.  We had to leave extra early because two journalists were killed in El Alto, which would somehow lead to more traffic (?).  (Update: They found one of the people who killed the journalists.  I read about it in the newspaper on Thursday March 8.)

After being on the bus for an undetermined amount of time (I was snoozing), we stopped on top of a mountain.  We met Calixto, who organized our stay with the villagers of Tocoli.  Calixto talked to us for a bit about the ethnotourism they hope to have.  The village is dying out because people have to move to the city to survive.  They are hoping to have cultural exchanges, where tourists can come learn about their culture, without having a huge hotel or anything really commercialized.  Calixto told us that when they first started doing the exchanges (I think about 3 years ago) all the people were worried they would have to buy French fries and Coke to please the tourists.  They felt like their food wasn’t good enough.  Even on a mountain in Bolivia, there are still ideas of modern/traditional and white/mestizo/indigenous, and ideas about which have more value.  Then Calixto went to help the villagers get ready for a ceremony.  Our group hiked around on the mountain, which was beautiful, and saw some llamas and a dog!

We crossed the road for the ceremony.  Our group stood in a line, and all the people of Tocoli shook our hands (first the men and then the women).  Then they stood in a line and we greeted them each individually.  Then they tied awayus with flowers on our backs, and we all joined hands and DANCED!  Most of the men played flutes or drums, but some of the men and all the women danced with us.  After the dancing we took some pictures with the villagers.  Then we danced some more, all the way down the road.  It was actually really hard to breathe with the altitude.  The whole ceremony was called Rito de Acogida.

Then we hiked down the mountain toward Lake Titicaca.  I took a shortcut with some of the villagers, which still took a longggg time.  (Everyone else walked along the road, which zig-zagged down the mountain.)  We had an Apthapi (op-TOP-ee) near the elementary school.  An Apthapi is when food (mostly potatoes, but also little bitty fish from the lake) is spread out on blankets in a long line, and the whole community shares it.  We also ate some yummy soup! 

After lunch I got to go out on the lake in a rowboat.  Then my friend Sophie and I talked to two boys from the village, Valdo and Gabriel.  They were 14 and 12 years old, and went to the middle school an hour’s walk from the village.  There are almost 20 kids in their class (or school, not sure), and the school in Tocoli has 8 kids.  They told us about the community, and said that a lot of people leave to find work in La Paz.  They told us they knew how to play the traditional instruments, and that most of the boys learn (not girls though).  Then we had a flower fight and threw purple petals at each other.

Finally, we met our families.  My friend Eliana and I were together, with an older man and woman.  They didn’t speak a lot of Spanish, mostly Aymara.  I was feeling pretty woozy at this point, but our house was up the mountain….so maybe 20 minutes later we arrived.  Eliana and I had our own room, and our host mom told us to rest there.  Later she brought us some potato and rice soup, and we were in bed by 8:30.

Calixto talking to us

Greeting the villagers of Tocoli

With my blanket of flowers

DANCING!

The walk to the village--that's Lake Titicaca

In a rowboat on Lake Titicaca

I'm so sad my pictures are squished!  Well, come visit me in real life and I'll show you them normal-proportioned.