Weekend and work

I am going to preface my description of the weekend in Bolivia with a short observation about the populace of Bolivia. Since I have been in Santa Cruz, I have heard two words used to describe people all the time: colla/coya and camba. Colla is a word that describes the people of Western Bolivia (the stereotypical Andean indigenous person that you think of when you hear Bolivia). They are stereotyped as being serious, not friendly and according to a good amount of people I have met here in Santa Cruz, racist. Many cruceños resent what they see as reverse racism by the Collas.

Collas in La Paz

In contrast, cambas, which I have heard as either describing only people from Santa Cruz or as being descriptive of people from the eastern states of Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando, are supposed to be more friendly, prone to jokes, and lazy. The reason that the differences between collas and cambas is discussed so often and with such passion is because of the political differences between the two groups. While many departments are currently voting for more autonomy, in order to have a more federal state (Bolivia is one of the most centralized countries in all of Latin America) and more access to their own resources, people from La Paz, who currently benefit from the centralized system are against it. As such, there is a lot of political conflict in the country and stereotypes are thrown mentioned all the time. Not only have I been spoken to about the differences between collas and cambas from the guys in the office, who I know personally, but literally every single taxicab driver I have spoken to has also gone into great detail about how they feel about collas. So anyhow, it is a tense situation politically that I get to observe and being foreign I feel like everyone wants to clue me into what is going on, so they just talk without any self-censorship, which is really interesting.

But I digress. This past weekend, I went to La Paz to meet some collas and Allison, my friend from CAL who has been backpacking around Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia for the past two months. Brenda and I arrived midday Friday and met Allison in our Hotel, Hostal Naira, which CEPAD reserved for us and which is right in the middle of the action. After eating a quick lunch, Allison, Brenda and I headed over to the offices of the InterAmerican Development Bank to meet with a friend of a friends' parents. Susan has worked with the IDB for the past ten years or so, in Peru and Ecuador (I might have made that up...but two other Latin American countries). She was really nice and spoke to us about her experiences working in international development.

At lunch with Allison:)

After talking to Susan, Brenda, Allison and I went around the touristy parts of La Paz near our Hostel. Allison started feeling feverish after dinner, so we left her at her backpackers hostel and headed home. We were both exhausted due to the altitude (around 12,000 feet)
and I felt winded every time we had to climb up a hill or stairs (which was just about all the time since it is a mountainous city).

With Brenda outside the Church San Francisco, right next door to our hotel.

Witches market right up the hill from our hotel

With Allison in witches market with our matching coats

On Saturday morning Allison came to meet us and basically collapsed from exhaustion, so we had to leave her at the hotel all day while we went around.

Iglesia de San Francisco from another angle. Our hotel was on the street on the far side.

In front of the Presidential Palace in Plaza Murillo

We went to three museums, saw a parade for some saint and followed it up in the hillside until we were lost, and ate at the best Middle Eastern restaurant in all of Bolivia (which was not that good). Allison slept all day and was able to make it out to dinner with us, but beyond that she was pretty much bed-bound. So overall, I would say it was a good weekend, but it was a real pity that Allison didn't feel up to exploring La Paz with us.

Some of the women in the parade we followed up into the hills. They were dancing and in the background you can see some horns from the band that was playing all the way up the mountain.

The market we got lost in after following the parade
On Calle Jaén, a really well maintained block that is full of museums. Brenda and I went to the
museum of musical instruments of Bolivia and saw armadillo guitars and other animal instruments.

Upon my return to Buena Vista, I have had two days of work so far and it is decidedly less exciting than last week. Despite all the fun and joking, the database that I am working on is a monster to deal with because the sheer amount of unorganized data that exists on these computers is intimidating and I need someone to go over it with me in order to organize it, but everyone else is busy doing their own thing. Turns out, work in Bolivia is still work.

There were some nice distractions however. Starting on Sunday night there was a celebration of the 82nd anniversary of the province of Ichilo. At night the military band played in the central plaza and speeches were made. At 5am Monday morning I was startled awake by the sound of shots being fired and the military music again (apparently that is the morning salute to some star). Midday Monday I went outside the office and saw the following:
A bunch of military personnel waiting around to participate in the parade. The parade basically included everyone in the province marching with signs and banners. The taxis drove, motorcycle taxis drove and everyone else walked. The military band and military platoons did some serious high-stepping, which I was unfortunately unable to capture, but it was quite a sight.

Bringing up the rear of the parade

On Monday night I went to Portachuelo to watch Juan Carlos play a game of soccer (which he sadly lost) and then I spent the night at his house and played with his kids. All day Tuesday we were in Portachuelo for meetings that were mind-numbingly long and pretty boring. As Juan Carlos told me today, local development work is not easy, there is a lot of talk and not too much action.

With Don Loreto and Damián after the first half of the 4 hour meeting about tropical fruit production in Portachuelo
The office (L-R: Juan Carlos, Me, Damián, Aude)

In Buena Vista I finally got a key to my room and Damián and Aude helped me put up a mosquito net over my bed, so it is starting to feel like home. The other day I came back and found a lot of little bugs all over my room and went a bit crazy with the bug spray, but I am hoping that by keeping my door closed and cleaning regularly that they will stay away (I figured that they got in when the door lock was being taken care of).

The weather has definitely changed to what I was expecting. It is hot and muggy and sunny, so I am going to need to start wearing my sunscreen and a hat and bug spray (the anti-bug stuff I washed my clothes in is essentially useless). Today (Wednesday), Juan Carlos and I walked to a river 3 km outside of town and I imagine that with this weather I will be heading back on a weekend to cool off. It was a beautiful walk, but I forgot to take my camera, so next time I go I'll try to go prepared so I can share with you all some of the scenery.

Day 1

Some political propaganda from the center of Santa Cruz.

Hola a todos.
I am writing again because I think that I will be blog free until Monday next week, so I need to put my house in order, so to speak, before my extended absence. Last night was my first in Buena Vista, and I spent it with the other two foreign technicians Damian, the Spaniard, and Aude, the French. They showed me where they live, which is pretty much like my situation. Aude has a room bigger than mine but otherwise the same, the bathroom is unattached and it is part of a larger house, and Damian has a house, which consists of a room and a bathroom.
Last night, after returning from San Juan, where I saw some lovely birds (above), Aude and Damian made a salad and I went to Damian´s house to shower and eat. There I had the nicest shower I have had since coming to Bolivia (HOT water when there is low pressure). The salad was nice, and I got to know Damian and Aude a bit. They are muy buena onda (Mexican Spanish for very cool) and both offered me use of their showers for as long as necessary. Damian, who is in the foreground, was wearing an Intifada tshirt when I met him, and prior to coming to Bolivia to work for a year, he was in Oaxaca in 2006 (I probably passed him when I went through the center of Oaxaca during the teachers´ protests), Western Sahara and Palestine. He is super leftist and actually gets into political debates with the local technicians, who support more autonomy while he is more supportive of Morales. Aude is a French student finishing up her university program in the field and she is staying for five months, kind of like my experience in Oaxaca. They made an excellent salad and after dinner and showering I went home for the first night in BV.

Since the owner of the house where I am renting a room has not come back from Sta Cruz, I still do not have a functioning shower nor a lock on my door. Here is the living situation broken down a bit. I am staying in this room that I described, which is on a courtyard in a house with three other rooms around it, plus a bathroom and an open air kitchen. One of the three bedrooms has a private bathroom and is currently occupied by a Bolivian named Fernando, who I met last night in passing, and his shower works. Anyhow, the house is right next to another house with a woman who sells bread products. This is the woman I have been going to for the past two days multiple times a day asking where the house owner is so that the shower can get fixed and the key situation can be dealt with. The woman, who sits on a couch watching tv, always has the same response, that the woman is returning at night. Apparently she is literally the most unpleasant person in all of Buena Vista. The other technicians feel sorry for me because they know her from when they have gone to buy bread and they know that customer service is not her strong suit.

In any case, my room was clean, bed comfortable, I did not sleep well, but I am sure that in the future I will be able to do so. Today was my first full day at work, and it went pretty well. I woke up at 745, got out early and walked around the center of town (picture below) before meeting Aude for chocolate at a cafe at 830.

Church in the center of town

We went to the office at 9am and she worked while I waited until 1030 for the technicians to arrive (things move a lot more slowly here). Normally everyone is at work at 9am, but apparently the car that the municipality gave them overheated and they had to deal with it. When Juan Carlos finally arrived, I started trying to work on my first project: creating a database. The mancommunity of Sara Ichilo has a ton of documents on six different computers but they are not organized, there is a lot of overlap, and when they have to try and find something, it is a nightmare. As such, my first job here in BV is to try and make a database for all the documentation in a way that they will hopefully be able to keep organized in the future. I started working with Juan Carlos in the morning with him showing me the documents that they currently have and how they are unorganized. The idea of organizing it seemed too difficult to him, but I started drawing a tree of how to organize folders pertaining to different municipalities for differnt activities and he seemed to like it. Apparently this is going to be an ongoing project during my stay here, the idea is that I will learn about the municialities while I create the database and will thus later be able to help give some workshops on how to be more effective. After lunch I downloaded all the info from all the different computers onto my computer and started going through them a bit. I think that the biggest challenge in creating the database will be to make it in such a way that it is user friendly and easily managed when I am gone.

The office of the Mancommunity of Sara e Ichilo where I work

Working in the office is hysterical because Socrates, Don Lorgio and Juan Carlos laugh all the time, love making jokes, and are super friendly and relaxed. I am not used to this level of tranquility, but it is really nice to not stress out. Juan Carlos tells me at least five times a day ´tranquilate´which translates pretty easily. Last night I noticed that I had a red line near my hairline that seems to be in a circle, so I concluded that I have tapeworm. Since I do not know how to say tapeworm in Spanish, in the office today I asked Juan Carlos to look at it and tell me what the word for tapeworm is so I could go ask in a pharmacy to take care of it. Juan Carlos called Don Lorgio to take a look because he was not convinced it was tapeworm and Don Lorgio said he did not think it was and ran to his car to get some cream to put on it. When he came back to the office, he inspected again and said it is probably nothing, but I could be growing horns. A further series of jokes were made about calcification of the horns, etc, and when I made a reference to the song Pobre Diabla (poor devil), everyone erupted in laughter anew. And so it goes, all day long, the most entertaining work environment I have ever been in.

Today I learned about some of the nicknames around the office, which are interesting. Damian has the nickname lobito clinechi (which means wolf with wild hair), Aude has the nickname cara de cunyape (face of cunyape, which is a bread made with cheese which looks speckled, like her freckles), Don Lorgio is called Culo de Torito (baby bull´s butt) and they whistle in a way that sounds like they are saying his nickname and laugh non stop about it. Apparently guys who don´t have much of a butt are given this nickname and Don Lorgio actually has the whistle as his telephone ringtone. Juan Carlos´nickname is Pacho (slang for police), because his hair looks like the hair of a cop. I have yet to recieve my nickname, but I anticipate it.

After work, Aude took me to the local stores to buy some stuff for my room, I attempted to wash my clothes by hand, which I did in Mexico. Washing socks was challenging enough and two longsleeved shirts was really hard, so my jeans are remaining dirty for a while yet. Apparently you can pay local women to wash clothes for you. And even though the others don´t do it and I am down for the whole ´roughing it´ experience, I think washing my pants and sheets will need to be outsourced because I have no idea what I am doing, it is hard, and it takes up precious potential blogging time.

Tomorrow I am going to work in the morning, go to Copa Belgica in the afternoon (apparently one of the least developed of the municipalities) and then heading to Santa Cruz for the night before flying out to La Paz for the weekend. I hope everyone has a great weekend and I hope that I have the wherewithall to write copious amounts upon my return. Hasta luego.

athalia

My weekend and Buena Vista

Hola
Apparently internet access is not as easy as I thought here in Bolivia. For three days I had no access and it shames me to say that I started wigging out a bit at the end from the lack of access. Now that I am in the community where I am going to live and work, I have an internet cafe across the street from the house where I am staying and I will have more regular access so I feel better. In any case a lot has happened in the last five days so I have a lot of updating to do.

On Saturday Brenda, the other UCSD student doing an internship with CEPAD and I finally met up and went to our first formal meeting with Rubens Barbery, one of the four directors of CEPAD and the man I got in touch with to go to Bolivia. He was very nice, told us not to worry that our experiences going to grad school and being from the US would help us see things to suggest to the municipalities where we´ll be working. He also told us a bit about Bolivia, how it is organized politically and a bit about our places of work. Brenda is working at La Guardia, a municipality that is now part of the larger urban area of Santa Cruz, so she is staying in Santa Cruz and going by bus every day to work. I, on the other hand, am working in the mancommunity (that is a group of municipalities that joined together for economic, touristic and other reasons) of Sara Ichilo which is about an hour and a half outside the city. I am living here in a rented room from a strange lady and I can already tell that I am going to be spending most of my weekends in Santa Cruz because without work, there is not too much to do here (it is very picturesque, but also very small).

But I am getting ahead of myself. On Saturday, after we met with Rubens, Brenda and I had lunch at our hostel and rested for a while. At 4pm we went to meet with Rubens and another person from the office, Ronaldo, to go to Montero, the second largest city in all of Santa Cruz. Montero was the last place that Ronaldo and a group called Contra Punto was going to play after touring the whole department in a series of concerts meant to unite people. At the tea-early dinner that we were served, we were fed really good balls of yucca, platano and bread with cheese inside, all fried. After eating, Rubens put some white powder in a cup and told me that my initiation or welcome to Santa Cruz was to snort it. Apparently the face I made was priceless, it was some digestive aid that one adds water to, and so I was initiated to the cruceño sense of humor.

The concert was in the evening, since we went early with the artists for the press conference, Brenda and I went around the center of the city taking excellent photos for two hours or so after eating. Below, a choice selection.
One of the public phones shaped like an animal Infront of one of the murals in the center of Montero

As you can see in the photos, I am wearing quite a bit of clothing because it was FREEZING. The concert was very nice, but I was literally losing sensation in my toes because of the cold, and apparently, of all the concerts that Ronaldo and Contra Puntos had, this one was the least attended because of the cold. The first thing Brenda and I did Sunday morning was go with Geovanna to the market to buy me a jacket because I totally brought the wrong set of clothes. Man did I feel dumb with my sunscreen and bugspray. On Sunday, after buying my jacket, Geovanna, Brenda and I went to Biosphere Guembe, an ecological reserve of sorts outside of the city with a bit butterfly dome (I have no idea what the word is in English for what I am talking about). Santa Cruz has huge diversity of plants and animals, including butterflies, and this private reserve, which also has a restaurant, pools, and a lagoon, has guided tours of some of the natural beauty. Our guide spoke way to fast for me to understand half of what he said, but it was basically about the life of butterflies, which I already knew about thanks to my Californian education and the unit on Monarch Butterflies that we had in third or fourth grade. The tour was beautiful, and I also saw some tropical birds indigenous to Santa Cruz (there is a huge dome that is going to be filled with more birds).

Brenda and I on the way to the Mariposeria

Some birds at Guembe

On top of the biodome at Guembe

On Monday morning Brenda and I went back to CEPAD to meet with the local officials who we will be working with. The first meeting was with Brenda and it was pretty intimidating. The officials from La Guardia were very serious and the director who was with us at the meeting also told us how they have very high expectations because we are representing their organization. I was literally shaking at one point, though it might have been from the cold. In any case we were very intimidated. The two technicians who came to talk from Buena Vista, Socrates and Juan Carlos, were also serious, but less intimidating, and after the meeting they took me and Brenda out to lunch and Juan Carlos spent the day with us until 530 when he, Socrates and I headed out. These two guys were super nice and very prone to making jokes. It turns out that the people from Santa Cruz, cruceños, are very bromistas, they make a lot of jokes. These guys were non stop joking and laughing and super friendly so I was relieved to be going with them. Unfortunately, we found out while we were on the road that my room was not ready and so I stayed in the bedroom of Juan Carlos´daughter at his house in Portachuelo, another city in the mancommunity around 20 minutes from Buena Vista. At eight this morning, we went to breakfast, then came to Buena Vista for my first day of work.

Besides Socrates, who is the manager, and Juan Carlos, another cruceño works in the office, Lorio. Then, there are two more cooperantes (my title as well). Damian, a Spaniard, is here for a year with a program sponsored by the government of Cordoba, and Aude, a french girl, is here for five months or so as part of her graduate program. Aude has been in Buena Vista for a month and Damian for four months already. In the office we said hello, had a meeting about all that needed to be done for the week, which is apparently a lot though I did not understand most of what they were referring to. My room in the house was disgusting. Covered in dirt and dust, the shower, which is not attached, doesn´t work, the mattress looks like one of the dirty ones you see on streets, and the person in charge of the house was non responsive at best. Thankfully, Juan Carlos and Damian went with me to buy cleaning supplies, Geovanna lent me sheets and a big blanket, and they helped me clean the room up. The shower still doesn´t work and I do not have a key, but things look a lot better than they did at first (shudder). Juan Carlos and his wife both went to work in England for a few years in order to get money, so Juan Carlos was sympathetic to my plight. He said that he never thought things were dirty until he came back from England and then all of a sudden, he saw things through foreign eyes and they were not so pretty. I guess with time I´ll get used to this along with the cold showers, but right now, the dirt and the cold water are kicking my butt.

This afternoon I went to another municipality, San Juan, which is the smallest in the group of municipalities and also which is the most productive. In the 1950s the Japanese government sent a few hundred people to colonize San Juan, so it has a strong Japanese community, with Japanese school, a museum and a sense of culture. The majority of the people in the town are not Japanese, but there are a lot and Damian and I went around the town during the meeting that Lorio and Socrates attended with technicians from all the different municipalities.

I think that is enough blogging for now. Hopefully I´ll start posting more regularly and not as long. If anyone wants to email me or comment, feel free:)

Hasta luego,

athalia

Arrival

Hola a todos,

I´ve arrived! After a nice long three legged trip, I finally made it to Santa Cruz this morning at 930am. Geovanna, my contact at CEPAD, was waiting for me at the airport and drove me to a really nice hostel where I´ll be staying for the weekend before heading off to Buena Vista which is where I will be doing my internship. I slept for a few hours, attempted to take a freezing shower and couldn´t handle it and had a good lunch. Geovanna came and picked me up to take me to the CEPAD office where I met all the young people who work for them. I think my biggest problem so far has been realizing that my Spanish is really not up to snuff. Half of what people say to me is lost in translation, and every time I try to say something that is not in the present tense I curse myself for not paying more attention to grammar lessons. Oy. Everyone seems very nice and stuff, but I hope that my Spanish improves soon so that I can rock the project and communicate better.

Done with year one!

Hello my few readers! I figure there will be one or two more posts before I leave for Bolivia to give a few life updates.

Since my last update I went to the Spring Fling, also known as IRPS prom. It was very prom-like, held in a large auditorium with balloons. After some shudderingly realistic flashbacks to my actual high school prom, which I thought I put behind me with therapy, I finally got some people to dance with me and proceeded to rock out thoroughly for three hours. I think it surprised a good amount of my classmates that I was actually capable of having a good time since I am usually so stressed out at school, and it was even more shocking when I was able to sing along with some of the lyrics to rap songs (growing up on the hard streets of Albany the lyrics of Tupac really spoke to my life experiences). Going dancing again reminded me how much I love to dance socially, so my new goal for next year is to go dancing with my classmates more often. Below are a few selected photos from the dance.
With my Vera, my prom date for the evening (Doug got Lasik the day of IRPS prom, so he had a watertight excuse for not attending).
With Lane, my most dedicated blog reader, and his lovely wife Emily.

The dancing crew.

After IRPS prom I spent the final two weeks of school studying hard and not dancing very much. I finally finished yesterday, putting to bed my first year of graduate school. It was quite a relief to finish and it feels good to know that the worst is behind me (by all accounts second year is a lot easier to deal with). After Doug threw me a surprise party at Extraordinary Desserts as a send off, I flew home to the Bay Area today for a week of R&R before flying to Bolivia next week.

If you are in the Bay Area and would like to meet up, let me know, I am ready to speak as much English as possible before heading down under. Hope you have a great rest of June!

athalia