Día de Tradición en Colpa Bélgica

Today was the big party in Colpa Bélgica and I was there for most of the festivities. I woke up at 7 am to catch a trufi (shared cab) to Portachuelo, and then waited around for an hour until everyone was ready to go (for some reason when I am told to be somewhere on time I still show up at the appointed hour). With Juan Carlos, his family and some ladies from FAMAPOR (one of the groups of women producers from Portachuelo) I went to Colpa and we arrived at 1030 am while they were still setting up. After helping set up, I went with Juan Carlos's daughter and brother-in-law to see what games there were to play.

There were stilts to play with and thanks to B/RJCC summer camp as a child, where one of the optional activities was Circus class, I was able to show the kids how to walk on stilts correctly. People came up to me during the day impressed with my stilt-walking abilities, apparently white girls on stilts are not too common around here.

Brenda and Aude came around midday to Colpa and we had a good time eating, participating in some of the games (I got creamed in the potato sack race). By the time we left at 4:30 they were just starting the dancing, so I did not get to show my killer moves off of stilts.

With Brenda early in the day. As you might gather from the sweaty faces, it was HOT, and there was not too much shade.
With Brenda and John, Juan Carlos' brother-in-law. He was my stilt-walking protegé.
With Aude after watching a traditional dance.
White girl on stilts
With Juan Carlos' daughter Oriana, my play date for the day. She is eating the treat I got for participating in the potato sack race.

One month down

Some boxes made by artisans here in Buena Vista. I took photos to put in a catalogue for the Mancommunity. This group of women has the most amazing products, I plan to go crazy buying gifts from them. Not only do they make boxes, they make hats, beautiful purses out of banana tree bark, crochet and paintings on cloth.

Since the last time I posted on the blog, not much has really gone on here in Buena Vista. Last week I went to Santa Cruz for the weekend and hung out with Brenda. On Saturday night we went to a bar called HPNOTIK with the daughter of the owner of the hostel where Brenda is living in Santa Cruz. The bar is exactly the type of place I would never go in the USA: people have to wait in lines to get in, the inside is decorated with advertisements for different brands of alcohol and cigarettes, there was loud techno music and strobe lights. To top it off, nobody was really dancing except me and Brenda, and there was very little room to do so. I will chalk that one night out as an experience, but next time I stay up late dancing must be included, because going deaf and inhaling smoke is just not enough fun to make it worth it.

On Sunday we went to a Peruvian celebration in the central plaza to see the dancing. We did not stay for the whole thing because after every dance was a half hour of the emcee talking before the next group went onstage, which was pretty irritating The Peruvian festival was held at the side of the church on Sunday and while the emcee was blabbing I took this photo of the church and beautiful sky.I have been noticing of late that I am rather lonely here in Bolivia, the excitement of being in a new place and meeting new people has begun to wear off a bit, and I am starting to miss having friends to hang out with after work. As a result, I am staying in the office most of the day just to be around the company of others. Tragic tale, I know, it could definitely be worse, but it is still difficult to be lonely and I was informed by my male coworkers that their wives are jealous, so I am not going to be invited to any weekend BBQs with the wife and kids...
With Aude at the River Surutú 3km from town during lunch.

The one thing that was pretty exciting this week is that I started teaching English classes in Candelaria and despite my reservations, they have been pretty fun. On Tuesday night there were 11 students and on Thursday we had 13, and all we are really doing is going over how to have a basic conversation with a tourist. I prepared a ton of material which I thought we would cover in the first day, but due to repetition everything took a lot longer than I thought, so it looks like my class is set for the next two weeks. All the students are really excited to be learning and they find my amusing enough, especially when I make mistakes speaking Spanish, so it is a fun environment.

Second night of English class, Thursday 07-24-08 in Candelaria. This photo shows about half the class. The students range in age from around 10 to 30 or so and five of them are siblings (in the community of Candelaria there is one family with 11 siblings that has really spear-headed the development of the area as an eco-tourist destination. I have met 6 of the 11 siblings and five are currently taking my class, they are its youngest and oldest members). Students practicing a dialog in English class in Candelaria Thursday night. The classroom is the store in front of the shop where the artisans of Candelaria make bamboo furniture and art. They wanted an English class in order to better communicate with tourists who come by, so I am teaching basic conversation that they´ll need to sell goods and make hotel reservations, and whatever else they might be interested in communicating to tourists. Check out their blog: www.ecoalberguecandelaria.blogspot.com, which I updated with English-Spanish entries.
I also decided this week to start working on a project to gather information about producers of basic agricultural goods that could be certified Fair Trade. I am going to go around and do interviews with some local associations of producers of honey, rice, tropical fruit and coffee to get basic information and hopefully start them on the certification track. I also plan to ask questions about the challenges the associations are facing and will then write a report for the Mancommunity, CEPAD and whoever else is interested about how to better serve the needs of the agricultural producers in the area. I am excited to hopefully have more fulfilling work for the next 1.5 months, not that making a database was not titillating, since I enjoy talking to people and having this project will keep me busy.

This weekend I will be going to the Día de Tradición in Colpa Bélgica, which should be a good time. Along with ridiculous amounts of meat and consumption of alcohol, there is going to be live music and dancing, so I plan to take good photos for the next entry.

Santa Ana, San Rafael, San Miguel y San Ignacio de nuevo

Santa Ana, the first stop on our tour of the towns around San Ignacio. This painted church is a lot less decorated than San Ignacio, but it was still pretty. The road there, and to the other towns as well, was a nightmare, all dirt and the car we were in kept almost spinning out.

With Aude on the side of the reservoir of Santa Ana. I think that every town in this area has a reservoir for water.

Confessional in San Rafael.

The front of the church in San Rafael.
First pose in my attempt to become the next San Miguel Jesuit Church pinup girl. This church was beautiful on the outside, it was unfortunately locked, so we could not see how the paintings inside looked, but I would venture to guess that there are angels, crosses and saints.
Pose number two in front of San Miguel, going for casual, maybe the month of May?

The reason I did not mind staying in San Ignacio a few extra days, I fell in love with a baby at the hotel:) Her name is Shalimar and she is 5 months old. Despite appearances, she enjoyed her time with me as well, I think the affection was mutual.

Photos from San Ignacio

To start out, here is a pretty lame map. I chose it because it is the only one that shows San Ignacio (look at the right side on the border with Brazil). In actuality, San Ignacio is a couple hundred kilometers from the border, but you get the idea, it is far away from the city and it is pretty much a frontier area. I heard a ton of Portuguese while I was in town, apparently Brazilians come to hang out in San Ignacio, and San Matías, which is the actual town on the border is a hotspot for narco-trafficking. As one nice hotel guest told me, it is like the Tijuana of Bolivia.

At a pre-dinner drink with the ladies from Portachuelo, who literally brought the party to San Ignacio. After dinner, these ladies wanted to go dancing and I could not keep up.

The Jesuit Church of San Ignacio. As you can see, the painting is pretty awesome.

Side of the church

Apparently there are post offices in Bolivia...They are just really hard to come across.

Chilling in the shade with the ladies from Santa Rosa (Nancy, Rosalydia, Bernarda) and Colpa Bélgica (María Elena, Elba). Talking to them Rosalydia and María Elena told me that they both wanted to leave the country to work, however they were unable to due to having young children. Despite this challenge, Rosalydia is going to Argentina with her 4 year old son in August, leaving older children behind, and María Elena is waiting for her cousin in Spain to find her a job so she can get a visa to work for a few years (her youngest is 5 years old now, she gave up on other chances to go abroad because he was too young, but she is ready to go now). Clearly the micro-enterprises that these women belong to are not raking in enough money to support their families.
With some of the ladies and their children at the side of the reservoir that the town has. It seems like just about every town we visited in Velasco had a reservoir that was man-made but filled with rain-water. This reservior was full of people swimming and had a purification plant on the side to clean the water for consumption. One theory about what got me sick is that the water in one of the beverages I drank came from the reservoir, so I could have gotten an infection since it is not as clean as water I am used to.
When I got out of the hospital Tuesday morning, I saw that the church was open and there was no mass going on, which meant pictures! As you can see, there is tons of painting on all the walls. The church is famous for its angels, which are above all the windows.
First post-hospitalization picture next to the confessional, San Ignacio de Velasco.

San Ignacio de Velasco

As I squatted by the side of the road at 1am in the morning attempting to pee before another truck passed by, I wondered why I was not more upset about my situation. Earlier in the evening, my French coworker and I had piled onto an old hot bus filled with more people than seats to go to San Ignacio de Velasco, 12 hours northeast of Santa Cruz, to participate in the Feria de la Mujer. Our tickets were paid for by the Mancommunity, so we were in a cheap bus, and the 14 women from four of the seven municipalities were in a comfortable first class bus, so we were going to meet in San Ignacio. The bus we were in was dark and stuffy and since nobody paid for their children to have a seat, there were more people than spaces on the bus, making for a cozy ride. Five hours into the trip, with no bathroom stops and no bathroom on the bus, the front tire exploded and the bus stopped on the side of the road to get fixed. Aude and I went outside to get some air and that is when she told me that it was now or never for peeing since the bus didn´t seem to value the bladder issues of its passengers. That is how I ended up squatting in some grass at 1am on the side of the road, hoping that nothing was going to bite me in the butt.

The ride ended up taking 13 hours, we did not arrive in San Ignacio de Velasco until 830am, and we were late since the Fair was already getting underway. Straight from the bus, Aude and I ran to the main plaza to meet the women from the other bus and get started setting up. San Ignacio de Velasco is a pretty large city relatively close to the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil. The climate is HOT and dry, with very little vegetation, and this weekend the temperature was around 90 degrees farenheight. Aude and I helped the women from the Mancommunity set up their stands, where they were going to sell their wares, which included: baked goods, knitted goods, palm-related goods, honey and honey derivatives, and sausage. Sitting in the sun all day was tough, but the company of the ladies made it bearable. Of the four municipalities, the women from Portachuelo were by far the most entertaining, making jokes with all the customers and having a great time. All the women at the fair with us pertain to micro-enterprises, small womens´organizations that bake or knit, etcetc. The women from Portachuelo came from three different organizations and all of them are veterans of sorts, they are the ones who always go the fairs since they can handle it. As such, they were relaxed and jovial and helped me and Aude figure out how to do our job (which was to help them in any way they needed).

Unfortunately, along with really awesome people, there was a bitch in the group, the ex-mayor from Buena Vista, who was incredibly full of herself and who did not communicate with us at all about where the women from Buena Vista were or where they were going, etc. Despite her, the first day was great, and after working until 7pm, we all went to visit the painted Jesuit Church and then out to dinner.

San Ignacio is in the wider region known at Chiquitanilla, part of Bolivia that has a series of Jesuit churches that are painted and are truly beautiful to see. Anyhow, after dinner, the women from Portachuelo went to a disco-karaoke joint and Aude and I stuck around for a bit before going to bed early.

Sunday we had to start setting up at 7am to be ready for the first crowd after mass. It was another long day in the sun, but we also went in two groups to visit some of the sights around town, so that was a great break. In the evening, Aude and I went with all the women to the bus station to see them off. One of the complications that the ex-mayor of Buena Vista instigated was inviting more women than she informed the mancommunity about. As such, there were not enough seats on the bus, so Aude and I gave up our seats for them to all go home. At the bus station, there was some confusion about seats and the ex-mayor flipped her lid and was yelling and crying about how we did not treat her right yadda yadda yadda, but at 7pm we put her on the bus and were officially done with our fair duties. That night we had dinner with a sweet girl from the hotel we are staying at and made plans to visit some towns nearby with more painted churches before heading out Monday night.

At 4am Monday morning I woke up with some serious vomiting and illness and for the next 12 hours resisted going to the hospital until it became clear that there was no other option. Myriam, a Spaniard working for CEPAD here in San Ignacio took me to a private Catholic hospital, and the doctor pronounced that I had a stomach-intestinal infection from something I had eaten. I ended up spending 16 hours in the hospital with an IV overnight. I was pretty freaked out about the whole thing, but the hospital was really nice, the nurses were incredibly sweet, and I had a private room with a tv and bathroom and Aude spent the night with me. On top of everything else, I got a million calls from just about everyone I know in Bolivia checking up on me to see if I was okay, and I got visitors (people I had met just two days before in the hotel came by to see how I was doing and offering to help me out if I did not have enough money to pay). Overall, it was a very positive experience, especially since my stomach does not hurt anymore, and it is a perfect example of why Bolivia is so awesome and why I want to come back for more time.

Aude had to cancel our tickets, so we are now spending two more days in Velasco, during which I hope to recover completely and maybe vist a church or two. Sorry for the long post sans photos, but I do not have my camera adapter thing here, so expect a nice photo filled post sometime this weekend.

Fin de Semana en Buena Vista

Spent a pretty chill weekend in Buena Vista. On Saturday I slept til midday and then went with Damián to Río Surutú, which is 3km outside of town. It was a beautiful walk and this time I had my camera to capture some of the awesomeness. As you can see below, the cows and the plain with some palm trees really does look like the African Savannah.

Right next to the river there was a small group of huts that served as a village of sorts. I think that the people who live next to the river are the people who make a living digging up rocks and sand into huge flatbed trucks for use in construction sites. When I went on Wednesday with Juan Carlos to the river he told me that this line of work is going to start doing damage to the environment as sediment will get into the river and float downstream (if it hasn't already done damage...which I doubt since there is a lot of digging going on). Anyhow, in this village there were cows hanging out and pigs snorting around with their piglets in hot pursuit. I made Damián wait for ten to fifteen minutes I think taking pictures of the piglets attempting to suckle while their mom snorted around looking for food. Clearly showing my city stripes, I thought it was cute.

When we got to the river, we walked downstream a ways in order to get away from all the excavations and the other people there. We ended up crossing over to the other side of the river since the water was very shallow. The side of the river we crossed over to is apparently the edge of the national park Amboró and it definitely looked a lot nicer than the side that we started out on.

The other side of the river

Me in the river

Sunday was more hanging out. My landlady came by to tell me she was heading out of town for two weeks, so that is great news. I washed some clothes and read the Develoment Club Book Club selection for the summer The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. There was a chapter devoted to Bolivia and its hyperinflation in the 1980s. One of the protagonists during that time period was Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who helped implement policy changes that led to the end of poor economic planning and which also opened up the Bolivian economy to privatization. He was later president from 1993-1997 and was re-elected in 2002 but was quickly outed from office in 2003 and is now found only in graffiti on the streets equating him to other no longer in-favor politicians.

Walk to Calendaria

Below are some photos from a walk I took this afternoon towards the community of Candelaria.

Papaya tree

These fruit smelled really good but it was not clear what they were.
In the distance the mountains are of the Parque Amboró

Colpa Belgica and Electricity

Hola compañeros

I am writing to you all from an internet cafe next to Damian´s house because the office currently has no electricity. While I originally thought that the lack of electricity was just one of the many outages that happens here in Bolivia (last night for example, there was no water for a few hours), it turns out that the electricity outage is due to bills not being paid. Damian told me that in the four months he´s been here, this has happened three or four times already. While I saw the lack of electricity as a sign from above that we should be celebrating Independence Day, Damian and Juan Carlos wanted to work...so I guess Independence Day remains a national and not international holiday:(

The past few days have been interesting. Two days ago Juan Carlos and I took a walk to the river that is 3 km outside of town and it was amazing. Looking on both sides of the road on the way to the river I felt like I was in the Savannah of Africa, there were weird cow-like animals, grassy areas and palm trees. It was amazing. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, so this weekend I plan to go again with a bathingsuit and my camera to share with all of you. Anyhow, lunch and the trip to the river took 3 hours, so I was convinced that when Juan Carlos and I would get back to the office that everyone would be there and that we would get the third degree for being late. Obviously I am still not used to living in Bolivia. Not only were we the first ones back, nobody else came for a while after we returned. Man oh man, life is sweet.

Yesterday Damian, Aude, Juan Carlos and I went to Colpa Belgica to work with the local technician to help organize the big Tradition Day that they will have at the end of July. Apparently the annual fiesta was a complete disaster, a little kid was killed during one of the sporting events (they take a log and cover it in grease and oil and then people climb up it to get prizes that are on top. When they were trying to set up the log it fell on this kid). Anyhow, they have big hopes of making the festival a success this year, so the technician went over what events they plan to hold, who they want to invite and other issues in the morning. I was a little bit irritated that I could not contribute much to the conversation. Aude and I were pretty much just listening, which I recognize is important when one is just starting out, but I really want to help and contribute, so it is frustrating not to be able to. I did make one comment I am pretty proud of. The event is going to start at 9am with a race entering the town (14km). The strategic reason for having the race is to get sports media reporting about the event and get more publicity. After the race, the party starts at 10am and goes until 6 or 7 at night. There will be food provided by local womens´organizations, a band, traditional games and dancing and a fair where organizations from different municipalities with unique products will be invited to participate (honey producers, women who work with palm leaves, etc). The fair will be an attraction for tourism but also will show people in Colpa Belgica potential projects or fields of work that they could initiate in the town. At this point in the conversation I interjected that they should also invite representatives from the organic farming project that the Japanese government has helped sponsor in San Juan (the community with the Japanese colony). So it looks like they are going to get an invite too.

After the morning meeting, we all went to a local eco-tourism lodge outside of town for Aude to do an interview with the owner (her 5 month internship is through the Tourism office and she is trying to gather info on all tourist attractions in Sara-Ichilo for future use in publications). The place was way off the beaten trail and I think the only people who know about it are from the Department of Santa Cruz, but it was beautiful. It felt like a less developed Hawaii, with a lodge, a playground for kids, a small pool, cabins, and a lake for fishing. Pictures from the lodge below.

Some birds at the Eco-tourism lodge.
View of the lake from the Eco-tourism lodge in Colpa Belgica.

We spent the afternoon once again with the technician and with more representatives from the local government to solidify plans for the festivities and then came home around 6pm. The scenery and sky in this part of Santa Cruz are impressive, as the photos show, really really beautiful, despite all the bugs.

A cowboy rounding up horses in Colpa Belgica

A truck carrying sugarcane to the factory in Colpa Belgica. These trucks are all over the dirt roads in Colpa and some of them get stuck in mud holes. The whole town smells bad because the sugar factory does not clean or treat its waste.

After feeling pretty useless all day, Juan Carlos proposed that I teach English classes to people involved in tourism since that would really help them appeal to a wider audience. I am still not sure how I will teach the classes, so any and all advice would be much appreciated, but I think about an hour twice a week and a lot of practice talking are the order of the day. Looks like no matter how far I go to study Spanish everyone still wants me to speak English, must be because I do it so well;P Anyhow, this weekend I think I will be sticking around town, going back to the river and trying to not get burned or bitten. Hope everyone enjoys their three day weekend!