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.