Lauren's Bolivian Adventures: 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.