Today we fasted by just eating bread and water all day. The beginning of the day was quiet with Tom working and me cleaning the house. The Good Friday service started at 6pm. The Confirmation class acted out the Passion for us (complete with fake blood which I believe was motor oil) and we adored the cross (with the crucified Jesus and everyone kissed Jesus). I liked it this way, I mean the whole importance of the cross is because JESUS was on it. The cross alone didn’t do anything. One interesting detail of the Triduum so far is that there are collection baskets everywhere. Last night at adoration there was a Sister holding a basket so everyone coming for adoration to donate on their way in. Today by every crucifix there was a altar boy holding a collection basket so everyone came up to adore the cross and then dropped their money in. Then once we returned to the church after the Stations of the Cross there were also altar boys with the baskets. The reason for this is that, like we have “Christmas and Easter Catholics” in the U.S., here they have “Good Friday Catholics.” People only come to mass for Good Friday and so that’s a prime time for collecting money. We saw so many families tonight that I’ve never seen at mass before (some of their kids I work with at the Guarderia so I would have noticed). Anyway you have to love them for even coming at all though. Before communion the Sister made an announcement that everyone was welcome to receive who had had their First Communion and who had CONFESSED. I’m sure that was aimed at those people that don’t come to mass. Confession actually is a really big thing here during Holy Week. At the other church in town the Priests have been hearing confession all week 8am-noon and Holy Thursday we had a priest in our chapel hearing confessions all day long with only breaks for meals. Apparently the line at the parish churches on Good Friday is endless as well. This is good to see since we’ve heard through the “The Break with Fr. Roderick” podcast that we listen to that in many places in Europe, Reconciliation almost doesn’t exist anymore.

Back to the service though, after communion we start the procession for the Stations of the Cross. First there’s our fourteen altar servers (all male). This is a special youth group that serve at every mass throughout the year but they only admit males. I think the Priests use it for recruitment. Then goes the flat bed truck where more youth act out every station. Then go a coffin with a dead Jesus in it and a crying Mary statue dressed in black, each carried by four people. Obviously four men had to carry Jesus and four women carried Mary because that’s how the culture is. This is followed by a band of trumpets, trombones and drums. Then the Sisters in their truck with the loud speaker, then all the people followed by a second car with a loud speaker. We walked through the streets praying the rosary, singing songs and stopping at different peoples’ houses where they had set up tables with flowers, statues, candles, etc. one for each station. We have done this same thing every Friday during Lent but usually mass starts at 7:00 and we’re done with our walking Stations by 8:30. Tonight however we start the walk at 7:30 and don’t return to the church until 9:30pm which got us back to our house right before 10pm. It was a marathon. One of the neat things about walking around slowly at night is it gives me a good chance to look into peoples’ lit-up houses and get a better idea about how people live here. Obviously I’m also reflecting on the mysteries, but it helps the time go by. Tonight when we returned to the church they carried the dead Jesus in and put him in a little cave they had built in one corner of the church. Then people went up and said prayers and kissed the cave and kissed Mary. Sorry I keep forgetting my camera so there are no pictures but I will try to remember it on Easter morning. For now, good night.

Holidays are hard. There’s a constant reminder that we’re not with family and things aren’t the way we’re used to them. But holidays are also a great chance for us to learn about the culture here and celebrate with our new community! So onward and upward we trudge.

I’m going to do my best to give you a play by play, so here we go. Tonight was Holy Thursday mass. Everyone is off of school and most are off of work. I spent the afternoon decorating the church with the Sisters and some youth. We put up a LOT of decorations. I mean, almost gratuitous. We had five different flower arrangements something like 10 20-foot-long cloths that we draped around things (all of which I personally ironed) and a very extravagant altar decorated for adoration. I clarified with the Sisters that yes, we have to take all this down tomorrow? And then put it up again on Saturday? And they laughed and said yes. Sigh, oh well. Because it’s the institution of the Eucharist and the Priesthood Holy Thursday is a big party here. We presented the priests with flowers and presents after mass. At lunch we had a special chocolate dessert and walnuts! It was the first time I’d seen walnuts here.

The music is also festive. This has kind of been a frustration for us all during Lent but I have since relaxed about it with my mantra “clap it out Laura, clap it out.” Basically, we clap along to EVERY song. It doesn’t matter how slow or serious the song is someone (or multiple people) choose a beat (not always the same) and start clapping. And then a Sister goes around and encourages everyone to keep clapping. In addition to this, we don’t really have contemplative songs at mass, most are upbeat accompanied by the electronic keyboard and we seem to be singing the same songs in Lent that we sing normally. We miss the quiet contemplation and we miss the liturgically-relevant songs. We also had the washing of the feet tonight. It was also a little more different that we’d have liked. Twelve young men from the confirmation class were chosen and dressed up as disciples in white and red robes, and seated on the altar. Then the priest washed their feet. It struck us more as a re-enactment than a liturgical experience. And I felt very offended that the Sisters and Priest couldn’t even be forward-thinking enough to include a female in with the disciples. I mean what message is that sending? We felt like it totally missed the whole idea that we are each called to wash the feet of our neighbors, to be servants of others. This is a primary part of Tom and I’s faith and a large reason we’re in Bolivia. But, I’m focusing on love not judgement this week . We are currently relaxing in our house, seeking reprieve from the music at the church. I’m going to return in a bit and finish out the adoration until midnight.

Adoration update: So it’s a custom here to travel around to 7 different churches for adoration. People who didn’t even go to the mass will do this adoration traveling. So they drive over, come in, kneel for about 3 minutes, get up and leave for another church. This gave adoration a bit more of a “train station” feel with so many comings and goings but around 11:30pm it calmed down. The other interesting thing is that although people rarely come to church as a family-unit, at adoration everyone was traveling as families. So that even at 11pm at night there were people walking in with their 2-year-olds for adoration. So the kids would file into the front row and play while the parents did their 3 minute prayer and then everyone left. At first I was shocked, but then I thought well at least the kids are getting exposed to the idea of doing adoration. Also, I understood better why we made such a fancy altar for adoration since so many visitors would be coming to see it. It’s almost like a form of hospitality.

We are now well past the mark for the longest either of us have been away from family or from the U.S.  From here on out is uncharted territory.  Mentally and emotionally I think we’re back up to a higher point than the 3-month mark.  The language comes easier everyday and not every sentence has to be thought-out thoroughly before said.  We feel like we have some community here with the Sisters, the other volunteers, and the girls at the Hogar.  We are slowly making acquaintances with co-workers and some young people we’ve met through the Sisters.  Making real ‘friends’ is very difficult though.  Besides work and grocery shopping, we don’t really leave the compound.

We are feeling like we’re ‘missing’ more back home as time goes on as well.  Babies are born, friends get engaged, and we’re missing a big wedding season this summer.  But also during that time we have been gaining a better understanding of people’s lives in Montero by being here with them day in and day out.  It’s a very different feeling than a 2-week or even 2-month service trip.  We are trying to approach it differently also.  Though we do often think about our eventual return to the states, we are attempting to make this our life while we’re here.  Not that we paused our life to come down here for an experience, but that this IS us and we have nothing waiting for us at home except visits to family and friends.

What has changed over these past 6 months?  Well, we achieved our one-year residency visa (finally finished the process on Feb. 9 when we got our government identity cards).  We can successfully maneuver the transportation systems to get ourselves just about anywhere and have forgotten what’s it’s like to have a car.  We have a daily and weekly schedule so that we know approximately what is going on most of the time.  We have switched to brushing our teeth with the tap water although we still drink bottled water.  We feel very comfortable and at-home in our house here.  We are accustomed to rice at every meal and eating with tablespoons out of wide and low bowls.  (The teaspoon-sized spoon we use in the US isn’t commonly used here. Also bowl in spanish is literally “deep plate” and that’s what they look like.) We are also accustomed to our breakfast of bread and our two-part lunch of soup and a second.  We have a wide range of foods that we’ve learned how to cook here, and are getting by just fine in our small and scantily-stocked kitchen.   We’ve become accustomed to always having a bottle of sprite, coca-cola and peach juice in our fridge, and to always having a dozen bananas on our counter.  It is no longer a novelty to look up and see a lizard crawling on the wall and we really don’t miss our TV that much.  And interestingly, it has not been that hard to get used to owning nothing but the things we brought down here with us and living our lives in service to the people around us, receiving nothing in return but our food.  It’s just an accepted fact of daily life now.

I will say we’re used to constantly having dogs around, but we’re still not particularly pleased about it.  We understand it’s necessary for safety though.  And we’re even accustomed to seeing stray dogs wander through church during mass, although it does still make me chuckle, particularly the one that got in line on Ash Wednesday for ashes.  I have now, 100%, become a facebook stalker as that is how I try to stay updated with all the happenings back home. And, it’s always an amazing reminder of small the world really is when I can call my mom on her cellphone from my computer here in Montero.

Things we still miss from the US include food, good live music, comfortable chairs/couches, fast Internet, and indoor climate control.    But as we are learning here, those are things you can live without.

Today the teacher’s union here declared another strike. So far we’ve had a 24 hour strike (I got off), a 48-hour strike (Kinder still had classes) and now starting Monday we’ll have a 72-hour strike of all grade schools and high schools. And if the teachers still don’t get their demands the next step apparently is an indefinite strike. It sounds as if it’s not that uncommon for these things to happen either. My first thought is of the children who only get 20 hours of school a week as it is and don’t need to be missing so many school days. And then I think of the poor parents who most likely leave their kids at home alone because they can’t afford the childcare, and if they do put them in childcare, this is now 6 extra days that they have to pay for.

Then I think of the professors, are they justified in being so angry? It appears that perhaps they are. Like most teachers, their jobs are incredibly important to the formation of the next generation and yet they are under-paid and work in very challenging conditions (class sizes of 45+ and not even enough chairs for all the students). As Tom mentioned in an earlier post, food prices have increased significantly here in the last 5 years from what we gather and the teachers claim they haven’t been given an adequate cost-of-living increase. An increase of 15% was announced about a month ago but that did not satisfy most since apparently everything, including government fees, have increased at least 15% leaving them with the same or less equivalent take-home. In addition, Evo Morales, personally, and his government officials have apparently made countless promises that they have failed to complete. This is particularly ironic because one of Evo’s slogans is “Evo cumple” which means basically that Evo follows through with his word, he’s there for you. Now as you can imagine “Evo no cumple” is heard more frequently. One promise in particular (which surprised me when I heard it) is that for the last two years he has said the government will buy laptops for every single government-paid teacher. I assume this is an initiative to modernize education, improve the teaching, etc. Well two years have passed, and no laptops have arrived. This issue is apparently on ‘the list’ that the teachers are presenting to the government with this most recent strike. I’m not particularly surprised that the teachers haven’t received laptops; they’re even more expensive here because everything is imported. Tom priced out a laptop he wanted and it cost $200 more to buy from Bolivia than to buy from the U.S., not including shipping. Just in general, technology is pricey here, since there is no local option. What surprises me is WHY he would make such a promise, and why they believed him. That’s extremely expensive for the government, the same government that closed our preschool for the month of February because sugar prices were high.

Besides the previous 15% increase, the government’s only response has been to announce that the teachers’ salaries will be discounted for every day that they strike. So both sides are trying to play hardball. I don’t think the teachers will get their laptops, at best they’ll get a pay raise (they probably make about $125/month currently). I think an indefinite strike would be a real shame for the students however.

This is one of the funnier idiosyncrasies of Bolivian politics. They just will not let it go that they are land-locked due to a 19th century war with Chile. So every March 23rd, school children across the country make boats out of construction paper and are told it is their national duty to get Bolivia’s sea access back. It does make some sense from an economy and global-shipping standpoint, but you can tell they really take it personally also. Here’s a good story about it. I stayed home sick from the Kinder today but I know our kids were coloring boats and learning about it also.

Imminent disk failure….dead batteries….spiders living on motherboards. These are the daily struggles I encounter in trying to keep my 29 computers up and running. Most days only about 25 are functioning for whatever reason. I just hope as many are up as possible on Wednesdays when I have my two classes of 36 students come in.

The theme song of my lab is Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” as I have a growing cemetery of dead monitors, motherboards, keyboards, CD drives, everything. Luckily since I’m working for free and we received so many donations for the Institute’s computer lab, Madre Clara was able to scrape some money together from my salary and the donations to buy six new computers. Those computers are a god-send but even still sometimes I have problems with them.

Since I’ve discovered that one of my most valuable skills here is my computer knowledge, I attempt to provide my own tech support in the lab, although I lean heavily on Tom. Interestingly, this is my first time ever using Windows 98 (as I switched from Macs to Windows with Windows XP) and I’m stretching my brain trying to remember what to do with floppy disks and their ridiculous formatting issues.

As far as the teaching, I have rapidly improved in that area. Kindergartners like to repeat things and like receiving incentives to participate. My main lesson plans have been: name the four parts of the computer, which finger do we click with, and no food in the computer lab. If they remember these things from one week to the next, they receive stickers for giving the right answers in class. I’m also trying to teach a little English as well. All I’ve tried so far is “Hello Miss Laura” and “My name is.” They don’t remember it from week to week though. Once a week is just not enough for a new language. Interestingly, since they do only see me once a week, I could practically do the same lesson plan for four weeks in a row and they might not really notice. For my own sake, I mix it up though.

With the pre-kinder students I’m still working on basic mouse skills but some of my Kinder students already can double-click and move the mouse well. For them, I’m moving on to the dragging with the mouse this week but every week is a review of how to hold the mouse and how to click. In retrospect I should have spent more time on holding the mouse and moving it but I forgot that that was something learned! It feels so second nature to me I forgot there was a time when I didn’t know how to do it.

Get it in 720p.
Also on Youtube

I start class projecting things on the front board (also a god-send to have a teacher’s computer and a projector) and reviewing vocabulary and then I show them how to play a game and give them the chance to do it on their own. The first part of the class I’m constantly fighting with them to pay attention to me and not be pounding on buttons on their computers. The second part of the class I can’t keep them in their seats and there’s constantly a group following me around asking for help “Profesora Laura no puedo, Profesora Laura no puedo.” Usually it takes me 20-30 minutes just to get around to each child and remind them how to click and then the period’s over. Any time that students aren’t in the lab, I’m installing new games or trying to trouble-shoot whichever computer wouldn’t turn on that day. And that’s a little window into my life from 2-6 pm every Monday-Thursday until November!

On Ash Wednesday when Tom reminded me that it was a day of fasting, indignation and disappointment rushed into my mind as I thought, “wait I still have to do that here?”   Possibly because I’ve felt like I’ve been fasting and sacrificing for the past 6 months, I subconsciously thought that lenten fasting wouldn’t apply to me.  Isn’t everyday Lent here compared to home?

But this thought process just forced me to take a step back and count all my blessings here.  I need to get out of the mindset of listing what I miss from the U.S. and instead appreciate all the amazing things I get to experience here that are only temporary.   So for Lent Tom and I have both resolved to use more of our time for the greater glory of God and less time dwelling in personal comfort.  To this end I have given up watching American TV shows which I like to watch to “forget” I’m in Bolivia, and instead I am doing more reflection, prayer and blog-writing.

This evening I had company while I was reading my Lenten reflection.  As I read aloud, Isaias lay on the floor next to my computer smiling contentedly and showing off his 1 year old teeth.  He’s living with the Sisters right now to get some extra attention that he can’t receive at the Hogar.  Isaias came to the Sisters as an infant when his mother died of brain cancer.  She was already sick when she became pregnant and the father immediately renounced the sick woman and the baby.  Isaias had a rough start from conception and was never properly nourished.   During a surgical attempt to remove her tumor, the mother died when Isaias was only a few months old.   Alone and anemic, Isaias arrived at the Hogar and despite attempts to fatten him up he’s still a little skinny and developmentally behind for his age.  Particularly, he’s having a lot of trouble crawling and walking, so the Sisters brought him to the convent to feed him well and provide him more one-on-one locomotion practice.   This is how Isaias ended up on my floor tonight.  He had been crying in the office of the Guarderia with Madre Inez so I took him back to our house to play until she was done working.  The lenten reflection I was reading was motivational and suggested ways we could take up our cross and follow Jesus: spend 5-10 minutes in prayer, reach out to someone each day, find something each day to be grateful for.   Looking down at Isaias I realized I had taken up my cross that day without even knowing it.  I had never felt such a strong conviction before that I was serving Christ with my whole heart.  It was one of those fleeting moments in life when you can say with absolute certainty, “yes, this is where I’m meant to be.”

Isaias with milk mustache : )

We’re a little behind here, but Carnaval in Bolivia was amazing and such a fun experience.

We started on Friday with a corso (march through the streets with a band) and a big water fight at the Kinder.

The kids were dressed up in various Halloween-type costumes with the key components being bright colors, masks, water guns and whistles!

Then Friday night we went to Montero’s corso which despite starting at 10pm and ending at 2am was a family-friendly event.  It involved floats and dancing groups.  Each float had it’s own “queen.”

Below is the official Montero queen, so her float was the nicest.

Saturday morning we went to Santa Cruz for a get-together of hogars in the area and each group put on a dance.  Then Saturday afternoon I organized another water fight with my youth group, Infancia Missionera.  (drenching #2)  With the older youth group (Seguidores de Cristo) I help give a talk on chastity and why you should wait until marriage to have sex.  Apparently some who out-grow water balloons celebrate Carnaval with promiscuity and condoms are given out on the streets of Santa Cruz.  We didn’t experience anything like that though.

On Sunday Carnaval REALLY started, Friday and Saturday were just a warm up.  We mostly spent Sunday resting and staying dry until Sunday night when we went to the Carnaval party at the Hogar.   At the Hogar each “house” of girls (they are sorted by age into bedrooms, each with 15-20 girls) crowned a queen and prepared costumes and a dance.  At the last minute I was asked to step up to the judge’s table and help judge who had the best queen, best choreagraphy, and best costumes.  The queen’s outfits were REALLY impressive since they were all home-made with craft supplies.  First, each house paraded with their queen and danced.  This part involved quite a bit of sprayed foam (apparently a crucial part of a Carnaval parade) and some very loud music.

Get it in 720p.
Also on Youtube

After the parade was all-out dancing time until the food was ready.  We all sat back down, queens were awarded their respective prizes and dinner was served.  We had rice with green beans and tomatoes, bbq-d meat and sausage (under-cooked), boiled bananas and yucca.  It was very tasty, almost worth the diarrhea we both had the next day!  After the food was more dancing and the last of the foam was sprayed as the queens’ outfits slowly unraveled and the parts were carried away as prizes by the younger girls.   The dancing and loud music continued for quite a while but we excused ourselves a little before 11 pm to head back with some of the Sisters.

Monday was WATER day at the Hogar!  After lunch and all the chores and clothes-washing were finished for the day (all the girls 6 and over wash all their clothes themselves by hand) it was a water free for all!  (Normally in Bolivian culture it is considered unhealthy to get yourself wet and children are always chastized for it, so this is a really exciting thing for them.)  We showed up armed with 200 water balloons and a mini-water gun while the Sisters handed out another 600 water balloons to the girls and various buckets were acquired.   We started just bombarding each other inside the Hogar until one of the workers opened the front gates and let the girls go stand by the street.  It’s a pretty busy street so there were lots of opportunities to throw water balloons at motorcycles and dump buckets of mud on cars.   This is where I started becoming a little more shocked by Carnaval.  There were bands of people walking around the streets with water guns full of paint and other ammunition like mud and foam.  Also Montero is largely a city of motorcycles and everyone who passed on a motorcycle was either carrying a water gun themselves or had someone on the back as the “gunner.”  And this is where things started getting “feo” or ugly.  The girls got sprayed with paint quite a few times, engaged in a war with a passing group of boys (which I’m proud to say they won), and at least one truck that passed had a man on back dumping used car oil on people.  So when the Madre got wind of this she barged out and yelled at everyone to get back inside.  In addition girls were sent out to scrub the paint off the walls.   Though now painted and smelling of oil the girls couldn’t have been happier.  Our god-daughter Carmen got oiled so after she changed her clothes I helped her try to shampoo it out.  The smell didn’t really come out though.  Despite that we were shocked and concerned about some of these practices, we didn’t feel we had the authority or the place to tell the girls to stop.  We avoided the paint however and escaped only drenched in water. (drenching #3)

Tuesday (also a holiday from work and school because I guess it’s just useless trying to get people to stop partying) we stayed home and got caught up on laundry and sleep and got some work done for the upcoming week.  Tuesday evening we had the Hogar volunteers over for our weekly community dinner, and they got bombarded by water balloons on the 1-block walk over.  Other than that our Carnaval ended peacefully.

So we probably should have done this before, but we finally got around to looking up some facts about Bolivia.

Population: 9,862,860 (2009)

Growth rate: 1.7% (2009)

GDP per capita – current prices :   US$ 1,840 (2010 estimate)
GNI per capita:  $1630 (2009- different source)

Urban population as % of total population:  66%  (2009)- still growing rapidly

% of urban population with access to improved sanitation: 34%

Population median age:  21 years (2006)

Life expectancy:  65 years (2007)

Adult literacy:  90% (2007)

% of population living on less than $2 a day:  30% (2008)

% of population below national poverty line:  37.7% (down from 65.2% in 2002)

From personal experience, I have met many people living on less than $1500 a year, basically all of my coworkers at the Guarderia and Kinder, although some have spouses that have a good income.  Yes the food is cheaper here and some clothing items are cheaper but any luxury items such as microwaves, televisions, computers are MORE expensive than in the US or Europe.  This makes the move from middle class to upper class extremely difficult.   One mother I work with has two children but her unmarried significant-other walked out when the second child was 6 months old.  Since then she’s been on her own and has little family to help out.  She makes $1100 a year, which works out to just about $1 a day per person.  The only way she makes it work is because they eat all their meals at the Guarderia Monday through Friday.   This February however, the government said they couldn’t pay for food at the Guarderia (related to the rise in sugar prices I believe) and so also aren’t paying staff until March.  In order to keep running the Sisters offered to pay three staff members for the month of February, however they are only getting paid half their normal salary, so $50 for the month.  Due to this cut back, this mother couldn’t afford to pay for school supplies for her daughter (10 years old).  I covered for her at work one day as she went to talk to their father, who is still somewhat in the kids lives although doesn’t pay child support regularly, and demanded that he buy the daughter school supplies.  It was now the third week of school and she was told she couldn’t come back to school without the supplies.

Bolivia is in a large agricultural boom right now, particularly around Santa Cruz.  Supposedly, some of the recent problems with sugar, as seen in the news, stem from export agreements.  The companies say that production is slowed down currently but they still must keep their export quotas and so that leaves less sugar available for Bolivians.  This has caused the price to increase significantly and the government put rations in place.  While we were in Sucre in January, at 8pm at night there were a whole line of people sitting on the sidewalk in folding chairs (as if waiting for concert tickets or something).  I now believe they may have been lined up to buy sugar; because of the limited quantities it’s first-come, first-served.

As far as adult literacy, 90% seems high.  I guess it depends on the definition of literacy.  In January, while I was helping get students signed up for the Kinder, a grandmother came through with her granddaughter.  When I asked her to sign, she looked embarrassed and said she couldn’t.  I thought she was just being sheepish so I urged her on but then realized quickly that she literally meant she didn’t know how to sign her name.  (oops!)  I leaned over to the other teacher and asked what to do and she told me to go get the ink pad.  Instead of signing they’re allowed to put a thumb print and it counts legally.  She was the only one we had this year but as I paged through previous years there were 3-5 a year that put thumb prints down.  Those are the truly illiterate, but I question the quality of reading and writing skills some kids leave school with here.  In cities such as Montero, though the schools are over-crowded, all kids get to go to school.  In the countryside however, particularly those towns that still don’t have electricity and indoor plumbing, I can see how it would be possible for kids to not be able to go to school due to money or access issues.  Some of the girls at the Hogar actually have mothers, fathers and whole families but live at the Hogar because their parents can’t afford to send them to school.  They get to go home and visit their families over Christmas.

In Santa Cruz there’s a house started by a Salesian missionary, named Kathleen, who first came to Bolivia 10 years ago.  She provides free room and board and school supplies to girls who come from poor families but have good grades and otherwise would not be able to attend college.  We went there for lunch one day and one of the girls I met had come from Okinawa (where other missionaries work).  She’s from a family of 6 and the parents couldn’t afford to send them all to school.  She got through high school with the help of the Salesian Sisters in Okinawa and got through college in Kathleen’s house in Santa Cruz.  She’ll be graduating this November with a degree in microbiology and should be able to get a well-paid job as a lab technician.   Finally, the light of hope.

After living in Bolivia for 6 months, we’ve begun to appreciate a few things more than we used to.

Things here we appreciate:

- cool, RAINY days!

- Having a mother and father

- Having all our teeth

Things back home we miss and now appreciate more:

- looking at a restaurant menu without having to weigh in your mind which option is  least-likely to give you food poisoning

- watching Youtube videos without waiting 10 minutes to download

- boneless, skinless chicken breasts!

- bug-free oatmeal, rice, flour, sugar

- frozen pizza

- microwaves

- air conditioning in the summer

- heat in the winter

- hot showers

- the street you live on not smelling like feces

- free toilet paper in public bathrooms

- GOOD HEALTH

- clothing dryer

to be continued…