I can’t believe it’s October!   And 86 F at 9pm!   I miss pumpkins and leaves… back to reality though.  The smoke is back.  It started up again last night with an awful smell.  So from Sept.- November the sugar cane farmers apparently burn their fields (I assume after harvest).   And Montero is surrounded by corn, soybeans (feels like home) and sugar cane fields.   Which means that when they burn the fields, we live in smoke.  You know that feeling when you’re standing by a camp fire and the smoke blows in your eyes and it stings a little.  That’s how I’ve been feeling all day today and there’s no way to get away from it.  There is no “inside” because, like I mentioned, it’s 86 and there’s no air conditioning so everything is open air.   We actually saw blue sky for the first time on Saturday but most days the haze blocks out the sky and makes for a reddish sun.   There have been people on the news saying “Today is a red air quality day, etc.” and apparently a few days in September they had to shut down the airport because visibility was so low.  However, besides that, life doesn’t change because of the smoke.  Kids are still running around outside breathing it in and everybody just goes about their daily business.  I only assume that people with severe respiratory conditions must do something differently.  Either there aren’t as many kids with asthma here or it’s not diagnosed because I haven’t seen a single kid with an inhaler (and I’ve seen hundreds of kids).   I don’t say any of this to alarm you, we’re both still in fine health but it’s just shocking to me that they have to endure this every year.   The fact that the cars have no emissions standards doesn’t help the air quality even when there’s not smoke either.

For those of you wondering about our visas, we did get all of our paperwork turned in on Monday, hurray!  BUT we have to go back in a week to see if it’s all acceptable.  And then we have to go back in a month to see if they ACTUALLY accepted it.  Our co-volunteer Andrea came with us because hers was supposed to be ready to pick up (she had already been back for the one week check).  She sat in line for 3.5 hours only to told that there was some sheet she hadn’t signed so she had to sign it and come back in 3 days.  : /   You just never know what to expect.  It’s mostly a bummer because it’s such a time drain.  You basically lose a whole day doing it with the 2 hours of travel time and all the wait time.

Thanks for everyone’s comments!  We really enjoy hearing from you and knowing that someone is reading!   Rake some leaves for us.  :0)

Thursday

Laura does not feel right. Nausea, diarrhea, oh boy, but we have to get back to Interpol to do Tom’s stuff. So we get ourselves to early mass again and on are on our way to Santa Cruz by 7:30am. We’re at Interpol by 8:15 and thank god, there’s no line. We’re out in 5 minutes. We push on and get a taxi to the Archbishop’s office (Arzobispo, kind of fun to say). He’s not there to sign our forms but we get the process started and back in Montero by 10am. Laura sleeps most of the rest of the day and watches a movie, not feeling well.

Friday

Now we have our game faces on. We have to pick-up FELCC, Interpol, blood results and Archbishop’s letter each in a certain time interval and at offices spread across the city. This time Laura does NOT eat lunch in Santa Cruz and instead has some Sprite and a piece of bread brought from Montero. Tom attempts a 10 boliviano lunch only to have his glass break when he poured soda into it- the whole bottom snapped off and then his chicken isn’t cooked, still bleeding practically. He leaves the food and we walk out. Anyway, after trufis, taxis, micros (city buses), and a second trufi we get all our paperwork picked up and we’re back in Montero by 6pm. Laura is feeling MUCH better after a day of bread and Sprite.

Saturday

Tom not feeling 100% (we’ve officially learned our lesson about lunches in Santa Cruz) but we get wisked away in the morning for a full day of work. Tom does some video-editing for Madre Clara while Laura attends a training conference for preschool educators and mothers. We talked nutrition, food preparation, and did crafts. Then in the afternoon I got to help out with the religious “animation” or religious education of the young people. This I think I will really enjoy! I’m going to co-lead a small group of 13-15 year old girls. The language is tough but the material is great, just talking about how to live your faith and life. That brings us up to present. Tom is feeling better, his stomach is much stronger than mine in general. And, Monday (cross your fingers) we’re going to try to turn in all of our visa papers! This won’t even be late yet which is amazing, thanks only to the other volunteers’ help and the miracles listed above worked by the sisters. I’m still expecting more roadblocks but maybe fate will cut us a break, you never know .

FELCC: Bolivian for needless bureaucracy.  So we drop off our papers at the Felcc office in Montero Tuesday afternoon, feeling good about having made some progress that day.  He says come back tomorrow, we say okay.  Now this guy ran the other two volunteers all over town to get their paperwork done.  Each time they came back he asked for something new, one document at a time and then when they had everything the price somehow quadrupled.  He’s a real tool.  He’s not nice to the locals either.  So we don’t got to see him without a Sister to do the talking.  Anyway we were on top of our game and had everything he could possibly ask for, plus a Sister so of course guess what?  When we came back the next day he says, oh you can’t file this here, the new rule is that you have to go to Santa Cruz.  (Actually blessing in disguise, but we were frustrated at this point because he didn’t get around to telling this to us until 10am) Luckily we had Madre Clara with us (she’s the superior of the convent right now, born in Montero and can get things done). She walks us down the street to the taxi station to Santa Cruz and makes some phone calls. After about a half-hour wait, her nephew shows up in a nice SUV with leather seats and wisks us off to Santa Cruz. We breeze in the FELCC office an hour later (now 11:30) and Madre Clara throws some elbows and gets us a seat at one of the desks.  Anyway turns out we don’t need half of what Senor Tool in Montero had asked for, the price is half of what he charges and it’s done in under 5 minutes.  Pick up on Friday.

So we zoom back out to the car and Madre Clara decides we can make it to the blood place by 12:30. But then we need gas and we need to pick up Sr. Christina and we roll into Cenetrop for HIV tests at 12:29:30. This time Madre Christina the tall Polish Sister heads things up and talks her way into the office with sad puppy eyes and a story about how we drove all the way from Montero just for this. We get our blood drawn and we’re out of there by 12:45. (Miracle #2)

Now Madre Clara’s nephew has to go to class, he’s 19 and a university student in Santa Cruz and amazingly nice to drive us all over that morning, so Tom and I get dropped off for lunch and we’re on our own for the afternoon. This is where our luck begins to turn, but we eat a nice lunch for $2 at a restaurant and then try to go to Interpol to get Santa Cruz background checks. It’s not open yet so we kill some time checking out Bolivian Burger King and eat some ice cream. At Interpol there’s already 20 some people there when it opens and I walk right through their not-on metal detector but the guard says to Tom, no you can’t come in. I thought it was the backpack so he gives me the paperwork and I go and try to do everything for both of us. Now Interpol has got a really nice thing going, there’s two offices in there and the guy in the actual background check office won’t talk to you until you have an official letter from the guy in the other office which conveniently costs 40 bolivianos. So you stand in line to buy your piece of paper- the guy literally sits there with a word document open on his computer, types your name in and hits print.  Anyway, then you wait in anther 30 minute line to talk to guy in the other office. Once you talk to him, he tells me I have to go back to the other office and buy the forms I need filled out, which conveniently cost 50 bolivianos each. So back to the first line, and then back to the second line. Two hours later I get my stuff done and as much of Tom’s as I can without him coming in. By this time I’m annoyed for many reasons but one of them being that there are tons of people in there with backpacks. Come to realize, that the reason Tom wasn’t allowed in was because he was wearing SHORTS. I then noticed clearly posted on the door was a dress code: no shorts, no flip-flops, no tank-tops. Now sure this might make sense at a nice government building or a court house but it’s about 95 F and humid, no air conditioning, and this place is a dump. The ‘walls’ of the offices are glorified cubicle dividers, there are wires hanging out the ceiling where they should be lights, the walls are filthy, oh but they have standards I guess, I’m sorry.

Anyway we’re still in good-spirits because I got my paperwork done and so we get some wifi at the hotel across the street and wait for our ride home from some of the sisters who are in town doing errands.

Sorry we haven’t been posting as much this week.  There is a LOT to say but it’s been hectic getting used to our new schedule.  We don’t really know what we’re doing each day until someone shows up at our dour and says we’re supposed to be somewhere in 5 minutes.  To catch you up to speed we arrived on Monday and had a tour of the whole compound.  It’s quite extensive and really nice.  There’s a whole parochial center where they have hundreds of young people come Saturdays and Sundays for Sunday-school type stuff and preparation for the sacraments.   Today I was in a life-teen-like praise and worship session with close to 150 teen-age girls (very impressive I think).   There’s also a kindergarten with over 250 kindergarteners, and a preschool with another 50-80 kids under 5.  It’s no surprise they can use extra hands around here.  Then there’s also an orphanage with 80-100 girls (?) ages 0-18.  I haven’t seen all the girls together yet but I saw a lot of beds.   There are just a LOT of kids in this town and they all need to learn some good, Christian values.  That’s where we come in.

Below is the tortoise that lives at the orphanage.

So then Tuesday we tried to go to Santa Cruz for the first time to start our visa process.  We went to morning mass which is at 6:45am in the church on the Plaza.  It’s pretty hilarious seeing all the sisters pack into one truck to go to church (there are 12-15 including postulates here).

When we got to church at 6:40 there were already a bunch of people there and then this group of women marches in with a loud speaker saying the end of their walking rosary (who knows what time they started) which appears to happen daily because the sisters are completely un-phased despite the fact that this woman is singing off key into a loud-speaker, now inside of the church.   Anyway then mass starts with some rousing synthesizer beats and an opening song from the guy upfront with an electric keyboard and a microphone.  Keep in mind it’s still 6:45am and I am not a morning person.  It was an experience.  After mass we went to try to get a trufi (see definition below) to Santa Cruz but on the TV they reported there was a blockade between Montero and Santa Cruz.  Apparently some merchants who wanted better spots to sell their wares decided to sit in the road for a few hours to make their point.  It seems to be a pretty popular form of political protest here.  Anyway, we decided not to go to Santa Cruz to avoid any political entanglements.  So instead we stayed in Montero and worked on getting the necessary paperwork together for FELCC.

Trufi: a car or minivan with extra seats stuffed in.  You pay $1 to ride an hour to Santa Cruz sans air conditioning sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with your closest stranger.  For example your retro-fitted family minivan holds 7 passengers and a driver.  Two of those lucky passengers ride up front and the really lucky one is shoulder-to-shoulder with the driver, legs trying to avoid the stick-shift that is right in front of you.  I had that seat on the way back one day.  Not great.

Two of the more touristy things we’ve done here is visit the Parque Creatico (Dinosaur park) and the Castillo de la Glorieta.   Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the dinosaurs because my camera battery died : (  But the fun fact about Sucre is because there have been lots of dinosaur discoveries around here, including lots of footprints preserved in old river beds, the city has kind of adopted the dinosaur motif.  On pretty much all the roads coming into the city you’ll see a dinosaur sculpture and if you need to make a phone call, just find your friendly neighborhood prehistoric phone.

We also visited this Castle just outside of town.  It’s a really interesting story.  There was this really rich man who owned silver (and gold?) mines in Potosi, a nearby city.  But since Sucre was the capital, all the millonaires from Potosi also had houses in Sucre.  Anyway, he got married in the 1860′s but he and his wife couldn’t have children so they built an orphanage and donated lots of their money to help take care of orphans.  Because of this, Pope Leo XIII named them prince and princess and that’s why their house is known as a castle.  I didn’t know a pope could even do that but if some one wants to catch me up on church history there go right ahead.  Anyway they traveled to Europe a lot and had all kinds of baroque-style stuff in their house and huge marble fireplaces imported from Italy.  It was really beautiful.  The picture below is all I took however because you have to pay to take pictures at places here and I’m a cheapskate.

Unfortunately their nephew sold the castle to the military after the death of the Princess and so all the furniture inside is gone and lots of the windows and floors were damaged.  Military men later told stories of being in the house at night and seeing ghosts, especially of the Princess .  They’re really into ghost stories here.

Another neat fact is you’ll notice the castle has three towers.  One is the campanile/steeple of the chapel and the others are the Prince and Princess’s private towers.  I told Tom when we build our castle, I’m going to need my own tower also.  That’s just not something you can share.

So I learned something a little disturbing this week. I’m a blond. I was sitting in class with my professor and came across the word ‘rubia’ in what we were reading. To explain it me she said, “It means light-complexion, like you. I’m moreno (dark complexion) and you’re rubio.” And though I know she meant the whole skin color and eye color combo, but basically she called me a blond. To be fair I do still have my blond highlights from summer in the front but I would definitely have categorized myself closer to moreno, just for the record.

It’s actually a little fun to be more exotic-looking here though. I don’t stand out as much as the 6-foot bleach-blond haired traveler from Holland we met but I’m just different enough for people to give me an extra look on the street. It’s nothing like the wide-mouth stares we received in Africa however. Besides the beggars who get really excited when we walk by, no one really seems to treat us that differently here.

There was one funny occurrence yesterday when we were at this fair/expo with the daughter and son of the family we’re staying with.   The fair was like a county fair and had booths from lots of companies.   When we walked past the Bolivian Airlines booth the women walked right past the two Bolivians we were with and shoved fliers into our hands.   She was thinking “Those look like people that ride airplanes.”  I thought it was funny .

We’re still in Sucre and working hard on our Spanish (which means we don’t have as much time for blog posts). We’ve done lots of interesting things over the past week! We climbed one of the big hills around Sucre (they have a spanish word for something between a hill and a mountain, but I don’t remember it this second) and went to the hilltop Cafe Mirador for a snack on Wednesday. The view was great.

We have been trying to acclimate to the Bolivian meal system which is bread for breakfast with possibly salami and cheese and then a HUGE lunch at 12:30 of a big bowl of soup made of pasta, potatoes, vegetables and sometimes meat and then a big plate of potatoes and meat and sometimes also rice. Then they don’t really eat for the rest of the day, maybe just a snack in the evening. At first it was really hard to eat enough at lunch time to make it through but our stomachs are quickly getting trained. I should note that we’re still at the spanish school and living with a pretty well-off family right now so this food is not very representative of what we’ll be living off of for the next 2 years. With the Sisters it will probably be lots of rice and little meat. Today however, we had our first food culture shock. The meat for today’s lunch was little fried fish, like the size of sardines and deep fried whole, bones, head and all. It was unnerving, especially when some broke apart and I had to just pick up a head with my fork. We both got through it gracefully though and swore we could feel them swimming around in our stomachs later.

Speaking of culture shock, we have been doing pretty well in Sucre and it helps that there are so many other foreigners around and people used to visitors. This weekend however we went to a market in the country in a small town called Tarabuco. It’s well known for it’s beautiful textiles and lots of tourists go there. So we felt plenty comfortable but it was our first encounter with a truly different culture here. For example in the Plaza in the middle of town you will find this statue:

It is a man wearing the traditional dress of Tarabuco who has just cut out the heart of a Spanish soldier and is eating it. You can even walk around the other side and see the hole where he cut the heart out. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore…. Next to it is a plaque explaining a battle they fought against the Spanish colonists and that the statue is of a well-known warrior who is celebrating his victory. As you walk around the village and see the people wearing their traditional clothes and walking their donkeys around it’s clear that this is a place that has been protected from Westernization. Some of the traditional clothes were really quite interesting such as men wearing knee-length woven ponchos and everyone wearing sandals despite the fact that it had been around 40 F that morning. Here’s me modeling one of the traditional hats that some of the women were wearing.

Also all of the women wear their hair in two long braids down the back with little black beaded-balls hanging from the bottom of the braid. It’s weird to think of wearing the exact same hairstyle every day of your life, but I guess it makes getting ready easier in the morning and you don’t have to worry about hair cuts. The people in the country seem very proud of their culture and many of them still only speak Quechua, they don’t even learn Spanish. Quechua is the Incan language and this part of Bolivia was part of the Incan empire, but further to the East, where Montero is, there remains people from a different empire that pre-dated the Incans. These people speak Aymara primarily and their empire was based around Lake Titicaca until it was taken over by the Incans. But even beyond that there are smaller pockets of civilization such as the Chipaya (I think that’s correct). We went to a museum exhibit about them this week. They live near one specific lake in Bolivia and they estimate there are probably less than 2000 of them still alive. They have their own language and customs, for example the women wear their hair in lots of small braids almost like dreds but even smaller. Their homes are mud huts with a dome-roof. I may not be getting all of these facts exactly correct here but suffice it to say there’s lots of interesting Anthropology to learn here.

To end with, let’s return to food. On Friday night we had a “cooking class” at our school and we learned how to make Sonso which is a dish made out of cheese and yucca. This meant there was lots of Yucca to be boiled and mashed and they had the COOLEST method of mashing.

Sorry Grandma, but that totally beats your potato masher. Apparently they come in bigger sizes also. And finally, while sitting here writing this, I ordered some pancakes to snack on. They came with butter and what can only be described as watered-down molasses, NOT maple syrup. That was a bit of a let down but my fresh strawberry juice washed it down okay. Eat some high-fructose corn syrup for us, they don’t seem to have any here, not even in the syrup!

So on Saturday we went to this special celebration at the Casa de Tourismo and they had a whole show of folkloric dancers and then afterwards they drove us all to the Dinosaur Park in town for a special evening showing of the dinosaurs (a bunch of life size replicas of dinosaurs and some fossilized foot prints).    Below are some short movies I took of the dancing.  It was really neat with lots of varied dress and styles of dance.

So I could vent some more about some things here, but I’ll just say something short about the driving.   People here really drive like maniacs (and that’s not me being judgmental of the culture, I promise, they will admit it themselves.).   Instead of yielding at an intersection to other cars or pedestrians, cars just lay on the horn as if to say “I have no intention of stopping so get out of my way.”  You might be saying to yourself, this sounds like a dangerous system and you would be right.  There is no pedestrian right of way and as we experienced this morning when two cars come to an intersection and both honk they just drive right into each other!   Needless to say we are being very careful and getting out of the way when we hear honks.

One week of Spanish classes down and we are both feeling a lot more confident.  We have gotten around town fine with our Spanish and even survived a trip to Interpol (International Police) to get background checks for our visas yesterday.  They have to send the paperwork to the U.S. so it takes awhile.

In addition this week we played walleyball (volleyball in a racquetball court) and had salsa lessons.   With these two activities in addition to the 4-6 miles we walk a day I’d say we’re acclimating pretty well to the altitude.

The family we’re staying with had a party Tuesday evening so we got a real listening comprehension challenge early.  They were barbecuing steaks and eating rice with milk and boiled potatoes (note we arrived at 8pm and they were just beginning the party that earlier we had heard would start at 6pm).   There were about 12 family members sitting around the table and it was VERY difficult to follow the conversation but I managed to get a few words in here and there.   We also got to try our first Bolivian alcohol that night.  I enjoyed the beer from La Paz, Paceña which reminds me a lot of Budweiser.  When I told the father of the family that he said, “Yes they are similar, but Paceña is better because it’s Bolivian.”  And so I said of course I agreed but in St. Louis I’d have to say the other way around.   We also got to try some red wine, vino tino, from a Bolivian winery called Kohlberg.  I liked it a LOT.  It kind of reminded me of a Norton only sweeter.  I didn’t recognize the name of the type of grapes it was made from though.

Speaking of alcohol, those of you who were with us in Malawi will remember that there we had the pleasure of drinking Carlsberg, “Probably the best beer in the world.”  Here in Sucre they have “Maybe the Best Bolivian Pilsner Beer.”  Maybe? As if no one’s ever bothered to sit down and drink them all next to each other?  But it could be the best, I mean maybe, it’s in the running at least, I mean who really knows?   You’ll also notice in the picture below that they sell beer by the chop which amuses me also.

To boot, I’m sitting in a bar (with free wi-fi) whose slogan is “Probably the best bar in town.”  We’re probably in the best country in the world, but then who’s really to say one way or another ?