Several times a year here, a group that is angry at the government for something it did or didn’t do will block all the major roads in a region until the government promises change.  Though there have been many blockades since we arrived, this week we were actually stuck in a road blockade for the first time.  In this case, the motorcycle taxi drivers (our primary way of getting around in Montero) were protesting a new government regulation that would have required: license plates for all motorcycles (about $50/vehicle), paying annual property tax on the motorcycle, and paying the back property tax on the motorcycle.

On Monday (Feb. 13), we drove down to Santa Cruz in one of the Sisters’ trucks, with the nephew of Sister Clara as our driver.  We had to work on some visa stuff (an ongoing process since September, they still have our passports!) in Santa Cruz and were just going down for a few hours.  When we drove down at about 8:30 in the morning, we didn’t notice anything special along the road, it seemed like an ordinary day.  After conducting our business and grabbing some lunch, we started to head back up the road to Montero.

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After going about ten minutes up the road from Santa Cruz to Montero (just past the airport on the map) we hit a line of stopped cars.  We got out to see what was up, and heard about the blockade.  Like I mentioned above, these are fairly frequent in Bolivia, and usually only last for a few hours, so we decided to go back to Santa Cruz for the afternoon.  We went shopping for some building materials and went out to get ice cream. Around 6pm we were hoping that the blockade had lifted, so we went back up the road to Montero to see if it was any better.  Unfortunately it wasn’t, but we were hopeful that it would be lifted any minute, so we decided to wait in the line there.  After about an hour, the line started to move and we saw traffic coming from the other direction, so we were excited that it had been lifted.  However, that turned out not to be the case.  We only made it about a mile up the road before we stopped again.  We later learned that this was because the people who had setup the blockade had moved it to a different spot along the road.

After waiting an hour or so at this new spot, we gave up and decided to return to Santa Cruz.  Thankfully, one of the Sisters we work with has a family member in Santa Cruz that agreed to put us up for the night. However, getting back to Santa Cruz wasn’t as easy as it should have been.  We had a 4×4 vehicle, so it wasn’t too hard for us to cross the median into the lanes going the other direction (which should have been empty because all that traffic was stopped on the other side of the blockade).  However, now these lanes were full of taxis and buses that had brought people up to the blockade, so that they could walk across.  There were so many people trying to get across at this time of night (I’d estimate >5,000) that the taxis that dropped people off couldn’t leave again before more taxis arrived, so they got trapped in a huge traffic jam, and the people who came in later taxis ended up having to walk much further (almost a mile to the blockade).

Here’s a short video I took of us in the traffic jam going *away* from the blockade.

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Also on Youtube

We finally made it out of the traffic, got some dinner, and went to bed around 11pm.  The next day (my birthday) we got up and hung around Santa Cruz for a while, had a nice breakfast, and did some errands. There still didn’t seem to be any hope of the blockade lifting (the paper reported negotiations the night before had gone south), so we decided that we would try to walk through it.  We took a taxi up to the blockade and thankfully the terrible traffic from the previous night had cleared out.  We only had to walk about a quarter mile to actually get to the blockade, which wasn’t too bad.

Get it in 720p.
Also on Youtube

When we got there, it was just a lot of guys standing around across the road. We looked down and tried not to make eye contact with them. We followed three Bolivian women through, trying to look like we were with them…hoping that would help them ignore the two (very out of place) white people walking through. That nearly backfired on us when one of those three started saying stuff to one of the guys as we were leaving the blockade, but nothing came of it, and we made it through safely.  Since it was just a lot of guys standing around, you might wonder why didn’t the police just come out and clear them out? Word was they paid off the police to stay out of it.

After we were a ways away, I hid behind a car and caught a picture of it (click on it to see the full-size version):

The actual blockade is where all the people are standing, just in front of where all the trucks are stopped.

We were able to grab another taxi from right there, but we weren’t out of the woods quite yet. There was *another* blockade on the same road, within site of Montero. So we had to do the same drill there, walk a ways, go through the blockade without making eye contact, then grab another taxi to continue into Montero. Now that we were seasoned pros at walking through blockades, this one wasn’t a problem. We made it through and into Montero in time for lunch  

Political note: The reason blockades are successful is because of Bolivia’s lack of infrastructure.  There is literally only one paved road going north out of Santa Cruz.  This is Santa Cruz’s connection to the rest of the region and is hugely vital economically.  Due to the heavy rains this week no other unpaved route was viable.  It’s sad that this is the only way that people feel they can have their voices heard by the government.   The 3-day road block affected hundreds of thousands of people and caused businesses to lose thousands of dollars.  The whole country gets hurt when roads are blockaded.

So I’ve been meaning to put together a post about “Only in Bolivia: The things Tom and Laura say that are ridiculous outside of this context.”  Unfortunately I always forget them by the time I get to my computer.  But I caught one tonight to share with you:

::The conversation is about a bag full of 20 centavo coins the Sisters gave us because we bring them to mass to teach the Hogar girls to put money in the collection.  But we didn’t need more because we already had a big bag.  Also, 20 centavos is basically as worthless as a penny.::

Tom: What are we going to go do with all these 20 centavo coins?

Laura:  Give them to the Hogar volunteers to use.

Tom: Why don’t we just give them back to the Sisters?

Laura: What are they going to do with them?

Tom (exasperated): Why don’t they just take them to bank or something?  Or buy a chicken?

lol and then I was just imagining someone carrying a bag of pennies off to buy a chicken, since that’s obviously what you do with bags of pennies.   Tom insists it was a joke, a sarcastic remark about how much they eat chicken here.  Either way, only in Bolivia.

On Tuesday, Kindergarten sign-ups began and it has been CRA-zy!   Last year I was really proud to be able to help as my language skills were weak, but I could only do simple things.  However this year, despite hoping to take a backseat role, I ended up in the forefront when Madre Clara asked me to help her hand out numbers to people Tuesday morning.  That turned into me being the only one who knew what was going on Tuesday afternoon and so I became all of sudden in charge of who got accepted and who got rejected.  People got desperate and pushy very quickly as we filled all 250 places in ONE DAY.  Meaning I talked to 250 different people, and looked at that much paperwork in one day also.  Unfortunately that was just step one as now we have to have each parent come back and do all the government paperwork with us.  I thought, well I’ve done my hard day, I’ll take a backseat on Wednesday but instead I ended up doing the hardest part which is filling out this from called a RUDE.  It’s basically a census of the child, asking about where they live, do they work, how many times they went to the doctor last year, does their house have water, electricity, what level of school their parents completed, etc, etc.  I went from last year, only having to say “Sign here please” to now having to use all the vocabulary I know, and some I don’t know.   Some of the questions ask what kind of water the family has and options include:  household tap, village tap, personal well, village well, lake, river.   It then asks what type of sewage system they have, options being: sewer system, septic tank, cesspit, in the street, in a ditch, in a river.

There’s a whole form also about illiteracy, where you have to point blank ask people: are you illiterate, were your parents illiterate?  Also there’s a big focus this year on what language they grew up speaking because Bolivia made it mandatory for everyone to be fluent in an ‘indigenous’ language besides Spanish and there’s fighting over what languages should be required for which regions.   Imagine I have to ask with a straight face, “How do you get rid of your sewage?  Do you have pipes or do you dump it in a ditch?”  “Are you illiterate?”   “Did you complete grade school?”

But as scary as the questions are, the answers are scarier.  Though I haven’t encountered someone this year yet, last year I had a grandmother come in to sign up her granddaughter and she was illiterate to the point she could not even sign her name.  (In talking to the other Professors at the Institute, the sewing professor said she’s had students arrive, ages 30-40, not being able to recognize numbers.)   This afternoon I had a mother come in with her baby-in-arm who was born in 1990.  She was signing up her 6 year old for Kindergarten.  Do the math.  She dropped out after 7th grade, her husband finished school up through 9th grade.  Another mother who seemed especially overwhelmed by the whole process, had finished up through fourth grade.

I often get frustrated at the Kinder because the children come in knowing so little, as if there had been no instruction at home.  I mean, how hard is it to teach numbers and letters to a child?  And I tell you, when I get a book out to read to these children, they are so excited you’d think I was giving away barbies and hot wheels.  They are so hungry for learning.  But when I get a chance like a today to learn a little about their home lives, their parents, it does give me pause.  So many of the parents are young, under-educated, working long hours.  How could they understand the importance of early-childhood education?  To understand the importance of reading to child?  To have the money for books?   To take the time to do it?  These people don’t just need parenting classes, they need education period.  Think of what you learned after fifth grade, critical thinking skills comes to mind as a biggie, not to mention biology, chemistry, algebra, now imagine living without ever having learned any of those things.  So many things I count as basic knowledge in US culture: germs cause disease, education is valuable, the ability to read is essential in life, things in nature are made up of atoms and molecules, the five food groups, how a vaccine works, I could go on.  I interact with people, almost daily, that do not know these things, because they were just never taught them.  And the resulting reality a culture that I define as “illogical” and “ridiculously ineffective” or sometimes just plain “wrong.”  But what I have to wrap my head around is that you can’t ask of someone what they can’t give.  People are a product of their own lives and situations and you have to work with them from where they are, not from where they should be.  I have no right to judge these people’s life choices or dismiss them when they can’t function at the same level that I can.  I was afforded the privilege of education, they were not.  What is my responsibility then to the uneducated masses, as a member of the 5% of the world’s population with an advanced degree?  I’m finally starting to understand what Reading Rainbow was on about, “Knowledge is Power.”  Scientia potentia est.

After Potosi, we took a 6-hour bus drive to the city of Uyuni which is on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni, the biggest salt flat in the world, over 10,000 km². We lined up a tour as soon as we got into town, spent the night as a hostel with great hot water (Piedra Blanca) and then started our tour the next morning.  The first day of the tour we visited the train cemetery where all the trains from Bolivia’s past have been left to die.  They were fun to climb on.

Then we headed to the salt flats (salar).  However in Colchani, the city just before the salt flats (whose major economy is extracting and selling salt), the left back wheel fell off our Toyota Land Cruiser and we came to a screeching halt.  A few other drivers stopped to help, or possibly jeer, it was hard to tell.  Anyway, finally we got the wheel back on, moved some lug nuts around and were on our way.  Here we are on the edge of the salar with the truck that we all grew to hate.

Since it’s the rainy season, the salt flats are slightly flooded and so it gives the whole place a ‘mirror’ effect.  Also it’s easy to take pictures which trick your depth perception.  So we had some fun.

These were our travelling companions:  me, Tom, Gal (Israel), Chris (UK), Aneta (Norway/UK), Katie.  And below, you can see the mirror effect well.

Anyway, the salt flats were really neat but we had to leave eventually (and most people were pretty sunburnt by then) so we headed back to Uyuni.  We were supposed to go on to a another small village 2 hours down to the road to sleep but the truck had to get fixed that night so we slept in Uyuni.  The next morning we got on the road and though we didn’t see any more salt flats, we saw volcanoes, lakes, rock formations and beautiful high-altitude deserts, very reminiscent of Mars.

And in all the fresh-water lakes, there were flamingos!!!  Hundreds of them.  Three different species:  Chilean Flamingo, Andean Flamingo and James/Puna Flamingo all of which only exist is this area of the world!  As you can imagine I was on biologist-overdrive with all this excitement.

Above: a James/Puna Flamingo, and below, me studiously annotating the species we’d seen.

We even saw an Andean fox that seemed to be hanging around the road looking for generous tour-goers with food to share. 

We ended the second day at Laguna Colorada which is a beautiful red lake (due to its algal inhabitants) filled with all three species of flamingos.  It was breath-taking.  We spent the night at a rustic ‘campamento’ that had dorm-type beds in a basic building and despite warnings of extreme cold, it didn’t get much below freezing so we were fine.   The next morning we woke up at 4am in order to get to the geysers and hot water springs by sunrise, which is supposedly the best time for them.  Well we were all up and ready to go, our driver was up, but guess what wasn’t up, the truck.  For 2.5 hours the truck would not start.  Finally they soldered some wires together which made the fuel-pump work and it started.  Tired and frustrated but happy to be on the road, we piled in and made it to the geysers.

We took a quick dip in the hot springs and then ended up at Laguna Verde near the Chilean border.   Although I was assured only 5 hours, from here it was a 7.5 hour death march back to Uyuni.  Our driver kept the coca leaves coming and we all bounced along in the back seat.  The only ray of light on the drive was that we finally reached 5000m.  We had had a celebration the day before at 15,000 ft and were holding out for the elusive 5000m (~16,400ft).  Well we made it, and even jogged a few more meters up for good measure.

For the rest of the trip my theme song was “We gotta get out of this place” by The Animals.  We were supposed to get out of the truck and right onto a 9 hour bus to Sucre but (thankfully?) the bus was cancelled and so we had to beg our way onto a bus the next morning, agreeing to sit on the floor for 6 hours in order to get all the way to Sucre that day.  We spent the night in Sucre at the nicest place we’d been the whole trip, which we really needed since we hadn’t bathed in some days, only to find out that our flight was delayed multiple times, giving us another day in Sucre.  I took advantage of the nice bed and cable, Tom used the internet and Katie did some souvenir shopping.  Then finally(!) Monday night we got home.  We showed Katie around the compound and Hogar, arriving to lots of big hugs from the girls that missed us.  And then Tuesday at noon we saw her off at the airport as she ended her world travels.  Really we couldn’t have asked for a better travel companion than Katie because she was so easy-going and unperturbed about all the crazy things that happened.  Thanks for visiting Katie!  The trip was amazing, but it’s good to be home.

For New Year’s this year, we spent the first part of our evening having a nice bolivian dinner with the other volunteers, including three from other towns near us. We made a dish called salchipapa which sounds fancy  but is really just fried hot dogs on top of french fries…mighty tasty.

After that, we all went to mass at our nearby church, where we met up with all the girls from the Hogar (the girls home) and sat with them.  After mass all the volunteers went back to the Hogar for their big New Years party.

We got lots of time to hang out with the girls.

(above) Tom, Ophelia, Goelle.   (below) There was also quite a bit of dancing. Laura and Deisy.

For the occasion, the girls even got a fancy dinner. They all really enjoyed their big pieces of steak (decent meat is not very common for them).  Eat up Ophelia!

Just before midnight most of the volunteers left the Hogar for our own party, which we had on the roof of the institute where I teach. From up there we got a great view of the fireworks that were shot off all around town. There weren’t any particularly large displays, but every block in the city had their own, still quite substantial, display. However, from our vantage point on the roof, we could see all of these at once and it was amazing. I have never seen so many fireworks at once before. I shot a short video of it so you can see for yourself. The video starts facing downtown, then after everyone says “Happy New Years” it pans 360 degrees around.

Get it in 720p.
Also on Youtube

Because not all the volunteers could leave the Hogar for midnight, they joined us later, and we were able to celebrate new years for central time too

But it wasn’t over yet. The next day we had a party at the parish center put on by the young adult groups. Again, there was lots of dancing.

Currently, we’re looking forward to our second (almost) full year in Bolivia. We’re very busy getting set to begin the school year, which starts in just a couple weeks.

We hope that the new year, 2012, brings love and joy into your life. Please keep us and the people of Bolivia in your thoughts!

Merry Christmas!  We hope that you all are having a blessed and joy-filled Christmas!  We enjoyed our second Bolivian Christmas here in Montero.

Since Friday December 16th, I’ve been doing a Christmas Novena every afternoon with the kids from the neighborhood.  30-40 kids came daily to pray, sing, color, make nativity scenes and practice the nativity play.  Then on Christmas Eve they sang the Gloria dressed as angels to welcome Niño Jesus and on Christmas day they performed the nativity play at mass.   I really enjoy getting to know the kids and this leads Tom to call me a celebrity in the neighborhood because I can’t walk around without kids yelling out “Laurita!”  I made my first Nativity scene or “pesebre” also! (with the help of a coloring sheet)

On Christmas Eve, I got an emergency plea from Sister Inez to help her finish the angels’ wings for that night.  We had been working little by little on them all week but still had eight not-started nor a single finished.  So we worked all morning and afternoon (and I have the hot glue gun burns to prove it) and finally at 4:30pm finished, just in time for dinner at 5pm.  The Sisters shared their food with us so we had a nice Christmas dinner in our house with volunteer Marcos who came from Yapacani for Christmas.  Then it was off to mass at 7:30 to line up my angels.  Tom, the other volunteers, and I dressed up for mass although most people don’t.  It helps us feel more like Christmas though.

In front of the Nativity scene with Carmen (notice the angels in the background and Jesus in the hammock).

The angel performance went off well and so triumphantly we headed to the Hogar after mass for a little celebration.  The Sisters didn’t organize anything but we put some music on and danced with the younger girls until 11:00pm and then put them to bed.  It was really sweet, when I walked in to help put the 6-10 year olds to bed, all of them wanted big goodnight kisses and one even asked me to make the sign of the cross on her head.  It gave me heart pangs to think of all these little girls yearning for goodnight kisses that they rarely receive. It reminded me that despite how good the care may be at the Hogar, nothing can replace a loving mother in a child’s life.  I would have adopted all those little girls on the spot if I could have.

Afterwards we shared a little fermented apple cider (poor man’s champagne), which is the traditional drink here at Christmas, with the other volunteers and watched the fireworks until midnight.  We jokingly sang a rendition of the Star-Spangled banner at midnight, because fireworks just don’t mean Christmas for us.

Christmas morning the volunteers made scrambled eggs and french toast for the girls which Tom and Marcos headed over at 6:00am to help out with, while I was helping at the parish center to prepare the Christmas party for the neighborhood kids.  Then it was off to mass again at 8:00 where I helped the Nativity play actors get ready and dressed up some angels for the Gloria.  We had folded up the white angel robes from the night before and put them in a bag on the floor.  When I pulled the first robe out in the morning it had a big tarantula on it!!  I let out a yelp and jumped backwards throwing down the robe, only able to articulate, “spider, spider.”  All the kids tried to quelm my fears saying, oh spiders won’t hurt you, they’re not that bad.  But when I pulled all the other robes out and flushed out the tarantula from the bottom of the bag all the kids got excited too, “ahh, tarantula!”  Luckily as the tarantula started escaping its way towards the altar, a server boy came out with a broom and escorted it outside.  With that behind us, the angels and nativity actors all performed well and we headed to the parish center after mass for songs and games.  Kids won toys for participating and I gave out prizes to all the kids that had participated in the Novena.  There was also a competition of nativity scenes, and kids’ ones were way better than mine, so they all won toys also.   The party ended at about 12:30 when all the kids received hot chocolate, fried bread and treat bags and went home for lunch.

We headed over to the Hogar for lunch only to find they had eaten without us!  But we scavenged some leftover french toast and all was well.  We gave Carmen, our god-daughter a little present for Christmas and also gave one to Ophelia, an eight-year-old little girl that has latched on to Tom and just loves him.  She’s really sweet, and smart but she got bad parasites this past July-August and lost a lot of weight.  Now when you hug her you can feel all her bones.  They feed the girls enough at the Hogar in order to not be undernourished, but not enough to really gain any weight, so I had been worried about Ophelia for awhile.  And it’s not that we can’t buy her food here, but it is more difficult because how do you buy for one, when there are 100+ other hungry faces looking at you?  So while home in the US, we bought her some high-calorie Cliff bars hoping that at least an extra 100 calories a day and some protein might help.

Tom and Ophelia last Carnaval (before she lost weight)

I also opened my store at the Hogar for a little bit and made lots of sales including some of the biggest items that require 20 tickets to buy (the girls earn tickets by helping out the workers).   I enjoy pretending to be a Bolivian market worker and I hope the girls enjoy the chance to pick out their own things.  The store was so popular, the Sisters have even opened up a competing store that sells shoes and clothes.  At 3:00pm Marcos dressed up as Santa Claus and gave out presents to all the girls (backpack and a new pair of clothes) but we couldn’t stay because our OFS (Secular Order of Franciscans) group was going to Villa Virginia for another Christmas party.

Villa Virginia is full of bars called “chicherias” and is poorer than our neighborhood so the OFS bought a small lot there and started going three years ago for Christmas to give out toys and do some evangelization.   We showed up with treat bags and toys and started playing loud music, saying all the kids are invited to come celebrate Christmas with us.   It’s funny to me how common ‘impromptu’ events like this are, which only work because people are accustomed to coming out and investigating when it sounds like something new is going on in the neighborhood, that and word of mouth.  Anyway about 80 kids came, and we basically repeated the morning activities: songs, games, telling the Christmas story, and dances culminating in toys and treat bags being handed out at about 5:45pm.  Coincidentally, once the kids started leaving with toys a whole bunch more kids materialized, but we went ahead and gave to them also since we had planned for 200.

On the way home, the guys in the back of the pickup were yelling “ho ho ho” and throwing out toys and treat bags to any kids that we passed.  It might have worked better if most of the bags hadn’t landed in the street, but oh well.  They were having fun.

After that, we headed back over to the Hogar to check in with Marcos and see how everything went.  Finally at 7:00pm we headed back to our house, cooked some spaghetti and meatballs, called family, and crashed in our beds.

While back in the U.S., some people sounded surprised when we said we wanted to go back to Bolivia for Christmas.  I hope this long description has shed some light on why I felt so strongly about that decision.  Though it’s more a ‘work day’ than a holiday, it’s an opportunity to touch the lives of so many children and for me, embodies our goal of being here, which is to love others.  As God gave us the gift of his Son, I gave my Christmas as a gift to others.  And it was like I experienced a new kind of Christmas, instead of the kind where joy comes from the love of family, good food, and the thoughtful presents you receive; this Christmas we gave love and presents to others, and we kept giving until we were tired and hungry, and left with nothing but Christmas joy.

I can’t believe it’s already Christmas Eve!  Before we get into Christmas festivities I want to update you about all of the exciting travels we’ve had since November 22nd.

Tuesday November 22nd we left Santa Cruz and 18 hours later arrived in Minneapolis, Minnesota!  It was the first time home to the U.S. for Tom in 14 months!!  (I snuck in a short trip home in September as you may recall so I wasn’t as homesick.)   Some of the reverse culture shock experiences we had were:

• I noticed in the airport no one was staring at me….It felt weird
• Tom said “Oh man, now other people can understand us when we talk to each other.”  In Bolivia we take advantage of being able to have personal conversations in public as no one knows English.
• being shocked seeing someone talking to themselves before remembering what a bluetooth was!
• flushing toilet paper, just feels so wrong!
• I kept trying to convert the prices of everything into another currency but I couldn’t figure out what currency to put them in, it’s kind of ridiculous to put them back into bolivianos!

We got some Pizza Hut in the Miami airport while we were waiting for our connection and marveled at the diversity of people you see moving through that airport.   Tom was so excited about Pizza Hut that we had it AGAIN for lunch the next day, but after that my stomach got fed up (haha, pun) with the hemisphere change and I spent the next few days eating white bread and 7up.  We were very happy to back in the U.S. though and jumped right back into American society going to Target, Microcenter and Costco all on our first day back!  We spent Thanksgiving day and the week after with the Kents, seeing lots of extended family and having a nice time relaxing.

Then we got a Greyhound down to Dubuque, Iowa to visit our college friend Fr. Gary Mayer.  He invited us to do some impromptu sharing about our volunteer work to a first grade class and a high school class of juniors that he teaches.  This was unexpected but turned out to be a lot of fun and made us realize how important doing outreach will be when we come back and have all these experiences to share.  We’ve always said that although we are experiencing a lot of personal growth here, it’s integral to us to share what has helped us to grow so that this experience has an impact much wider than just us and our own faith lives.

Next, we made a stop in Cedar Rapids to see our good friends Wade and Nicole and their adorable daughter Addie!  It was amazing to see how much had happened in their lives in the 14 months we’d been gone and kind of drove home the fact that life goes on whether you’re there to witness it or not.  Despite the temptation to return home and think, oh things are just the same and I feel just the same, I have to remind myself that no, I’m not the same as I was, and neither are the people here.  This will become clearer next year when we come home for good but I began to reflect on how to maintain relationships despite distance, accepting that you won’t be there to see/understand what the other person is going through.

Finally we arrived in St. Louis!  MN and IA might as well have been other countries to me because I didn’t feel ‘home’ until we got to St. Louis.  We had a million people to try to see and errands to run, not to mention me taking the GRE, while in St. Louis but for all that I think we did well getting to see as many people as possible while still maintaining sanity (there are only so many times you can answer the question “So how’s Bolivia?” in a day).  Plus, it was my birthday (big 2-8) so everyone was very generous about taking us out for dinner/lunch which we really appreciated!  Sadly we still had to miss a lot of friends and family (most notably Campion Christmas) but it turns out that three weeks is just not that much time.

On December 13th, after doing lots of clearance shopping and trying to pack our suitcases to the weight limit, we returned to Santa Cruz.  Sitting at our gate in St. Louis, I felt very down-hearted to be leaving so many wonderful people and delicious food behind, knowing it was entirely my choice to do so.  I thought to myself, we’ve had a good year, who says we need to do a second, why not just pack it in now?  I still felt hesitant the first few days back but after a week of seeing the Hogar girls, hanging out with the other volunteers, doing youth group for the neighborhood kids, and joking around with the Sisters, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.  I feel such a deep sense of purpose being here.  I love being able to wake up everyday, no agenda, and say “God, what shall we do today?”

Let me start this post with an apology.   I know we’ve gotten behind and left you, our loyal blog reader in the dark for over a month, but it’s our New Year’s resolution to get back on track, so I’m starting early, here we go.

It’s been a very busy end to the school year, especially since it overlapped with Thanksgiving and our trip home to the US.  Friday, November 11^th was Kinder graduation. It was a fun night and lots of the hogar girls graduated.

All the Kinder professors with Madre Clara.

Yusel, Lulu and I before graduation.

Friday November 18^th was Institute graduation. At mass beforehand, Tom and I took our ‘compromiso’ or promise to join the local OFS (Order of Secular Franciscans) chapter for the next year. We hope it gives us an opportunity to do faith-sharing and activities with more people our age.  Later, Tom graduated his second class of graphic design/multimedia students. My English students are going to continue for a second semester and graduate next June, as we determined 5 months was not sufficient for basic English. It was a fun graduation mostly because I had been able to get to know many of the students over the past year as many of their children were at the Guarderia and we saw them at the Expositions. I also volunteered twice as a model for the beauty class. One of the beauty students invited us over to her house afterwards for a graduation party. In consisted of a big dinner of pork, yucca and rice (really good, we both cleaned our plates), lots of beer drinking and some dancing. It was nice to see a little more of what family-life is like in Montero but we couldn’t stay too late since we had Thanksgiving the next morning.

Tom congratulating one of his top students at Institute graduation.

Saturday, November 19^th all the Salesian volunteers gathered in Montero for our yearly Thanksgiving celebration. We made turkey and pumpkin pies and they brought all the rest. It was a really good meal and we had a record turnout of 19 people! The rest of the day was spent eating desserts little by little and playing fun group games.

The Lineup.  Front row (L to R):  Amadita, Angela, Giorgia, Ramona, Katie, Fionn, Aubrey, Judy, Me(Laura), Marcelle, Susan.  Back row (L to R): Eric, Eric, Fr. Matthew, Marcos, Tom, Amber, Monica.  Sr. Anna is missing.

On Sunday, we continued to spend time with the visiting volunteers, we had an intro session for the OFS and my new hogar project finally got off the ground! In September, I got the idea of starting a store or ‘venta’ at the Hogar so that girls could earn points to buy things. They receive presents twice a year: Christmas and Birthday but get little choice over what they get. So after a few months of planning and buying things the store opened! The first week sparked lots of interest but sales were slow, we sold 6 packets of shampoo, and a bouncy ball. I went out of my way to buy lots of fancy jewelry and hair things, but it was amazing to watch how very practical the girls are when they’re spending their own currency. Having your own shampoo is a luxury valued more highly than hair clips or toys. I’m excited to see after a few months what the sales trends are. I think you really can learn about someone by watching their shopping habits. It’s all decision-making, priorities, weighing your options. They want to get the most value for their tickets.

On Monday we had the end-of-year or ‘despedida’ party for the professors of the Institute and Kinder, Tom and I turned in our final grades and closed out the 2011 school year! (It does make paperwork easier here that school years only span one calendar year) Tuesday we got up early and 18 hours later landed in Minneapolis, MN! We spent Thanksgiving with Tom’s family and will spend another two weeks visiting friends and my family before we fly back to Bolivia Dec. 13^th.