Toro Toro 7 - Extreme Ali

(Posted retroactively)

On the third day, we did another hike, to this waterfall (see picture on right). We ended up going to about halfway up the photo on the right, where it looks like there might be a cave thing.

Meanwhile, that day we were arranging a camera exchange program - you trade cameras with a friend and (presumably they take pictures of you) at the end of the day you see what you got.

Well the picture below is what I got - an awesome photo that looks like I just scaled up the entire cliff (barefoot) and am now climbing over the edge!











Here is also tree ali

















and bridge ali.

Toro Toro 6 - The Crazy Dinosaur Man

(Posted retroactively)

On Sunday, we went to see a very crazy old man who had spent the past twenty five years of his life collecting evidence of dinosaurs in Toro Toro. Over the years, he had collected so much stuff that he decided to turn his house into a museum. Sounds all well and good, at first, but most of the things he collected were rocks that he thought looked like a dinosaur head, or something like that.

For example, the photo on the right is a rock he found that he thought looked like a brontosaurus, so he stuck a brontosaurus head on it.

Although I question his sanity, it was really quite impressive just how much stuff he had in his house. All of the walls of his house were mosaics, and completely covered in rocks.

Toro Toro 5 - The Cave Drawings

(Posted retroactively)

On one of our hikes, we stopped to look at some cave drawings. In the picture to the left, there are two different cave drawings, one on the left in the shadows and one on the right in the sunshine.

Unfortunately, the sun was creating a lot of glare so it was sort of hard to see. Here are closer up pictures of the cave drawings.

This first one is a map of the area. At the bottom, there are big mountains (the mountains that were close to where we were) and little mountains (ones that are far away). Apparently there is a river too, but I can't find it.

This second one is a moral code, according to our guide. It says things like "do not lie" and "do not be lazy." There are three different commandments there apparently, but I don't know what the third one is either.

Toro Toro 4 - The Canyon

(Posted retroactively)

On our second day, we headed out to a canyon known as El Vergel.

After walking down about a million and a half stairs, we came across a little swimming hole, where there were waterfalls in which we swam. We stopped and hung out for like an hour, swimming, tanning, napping, and eating.

Then was the hard part: on the way back we had to climb back up the million and a half stairs, which is hard enough in Cochabamba at the Jesuchristo statue - but Toro Toro is at an elevation of 3,600 m: a whole kilometer higher than Cochabamba, which means it was seriously difficult to breathe.

Toro Toro 3 - The Cave

(Posted retroactively)

We went spelunking, and honestly it was the coolest thing ever. This cave was apparently 7 kms long, but we only saw 1 km of it. And parts of it we had to crawl or squeeze through little cracks, or use them little ropey things to scale down ten-foot drops and stuff. Too bad I couldn't take more pictures, but I was more concerned about getting a decent grip and not breaking my camera than anything else. We got so dirty, but it was amazing fun!

Toro Toro 2 - The Dinosaurs

(Posted retroactively)

After we got to Toro Toro, the first thing we did was look at dinosaur footprints. They were pretty cool, but a little bit smaller than I thought they'd be (at first, anyways).

Not sure what kind of dinosaur this was, but it's next to my foot. They said it was probably two and a half metres tall, so I'm thinking it had pretty small feet.


This is a set of Diplodocus tracks - I think... it's a little hard to translate the Spanish names into English. Lucas or some other dinosaur expert can tell me what they are, I think. Those are some of the other volunteers sitting in the tracks.








This one is a velociraptor. They can partly tell because the middle toe is really a claw and it's all curved, hence the hand demonstrating.





This one is a pterodactyl. They figured that one out because the footprints are right next to each other and judging by the imprints, they can tell it was either taking off or landing (I forget, but I'm sure they know).

Toro Toro 1 - The Road

(Posted retroactively)

We drove to a national park on Friday, and let me tell you, the road was an adventure. We left at 4:30 am, so I couldn't see what was going on for a few hours, but when I could, wow, I was amazed.

The road was in places just a dirt road, in places cobblestone, and in some places just a track in between rocks. On the right is a picture of us following a tractor that was building the road for us.

At one point, we were driving along and the road stopped. There was a tiny sign that said "road closed" and there were some construction workers eating breakfast, and there was literally no road beyond them. They told us to go "follow the river" through a dried up river bed, and eventually we'd make our way back to the road.

Easier said than done. The dried up river bed was not so dried up, and we drove through a few little rivers. I thought the bus wouldn't make it. On the left is the river we drove through.

Going Home

Yes, it's true, I'm going home.

Generally, I've been really unhappy with my placement here - that is, my work and what it is that I do every day. There were problems since the beginning - that's why I switched from CEDIB to Warmi, and then at Warmi they basically had me playing with kids all day. At both places I felt like I could be doing the exact same thing in Canada, and yes, I talked to my supervisors and the FSD support staff here many times.

Although it hasn't been what I expected, and I am going home early, I'm glad I came to Bolivia. It's been a very educational experience for me, both personally and academically, and I got to see and do all kinds of things that most people don't get the chance.

This weekend I'm going to Toro Toro, a national park close to Cochabamba, as a little excursion before I leave, and I'll be getting back to Canada Tuesday evening.

See you all soon!

More wildlife!

In Cochabamba, there's a river that runs through the middle of town. Well, it would be a river in the rainy season, now it's more like a trickle.

Anyways, today there were sheep in the river! This is the third time I've seen them or so, there's this farmer who herds his sheep up and down the river or something like that. The baby ones are so cute!

Things I really appreciate about Canada

Note, this is different from things I miss about Canada. For example, I miss shower curtains. But I really appreciate the fact that Canada has public education. Let's begin, shall we?

• Ambulances - the ambulances here are literally twenty year old vans that have been painted and refitted to serve as ambulances. I would not like to be rescued in one of them.

• Dental hygiene - there is a ridiculous number of people here that are either missing teeth or have false teeth (i.e. implants). How can you tell? All the false teeth have a little gold border around them, which sometimes starts to separate from the rest of the fake tooth and it makes it look like you have straw stuck in your teeth. Permanently. There's a little girl at my work, she's probably six or seven, and all of her front (baby) teeth were all rotted and she was crying because they hurt her so much. I don't want to know what her teeth'll be like when she's an adult. P.S. Mom, can you make me a dentist appointment for when I get home?

• Museums - I went to a natural history museum a few days ago, and to be honest, I was actually shocked by how incomplete their collections were. They had a leg bone from a mammoth, a skull from a prehistoric alligator, and a shell from something like an ankylosaurus that I'd never seen before. They had parts of some 12,000 year old man, but it was more like half a skull, a few ribs, and a bunch of walnut-sized rocks that were apparently bones. In museums in Canada, things like that would never happen - a museum wouldn't even consider showing an incomplete skeleten before at least making plaster replications of the bones they were missing.

• Traffic laws - in Bolivia, there aren't any speed limits, you don't need a license to drive, traffic lights are optional, most cars don't have seatbelts and many have headlights that don't work, and no one's going to stop you if you drink and drive. I saw a really terrible car crash up front and personal about a week ago, where I think a car was going the wrong way down a one way residential street. Both cars were going at least 50 km/h, and I'm honestly surprised no one died (as far as I know).

• Refridgeration - in my house at least, it's quite common for food to be left out of the fridge for hours. If someone isn't hungry, their food sits out until they feel like eating. If meat's for dinner, it's probably going to sit on the counter in the hours between when dinner gets planned and when dinner gets cooked. No, I don't think I've gotten stomach worms yet, but we'll see when I get home.

• Clean running water - of course Canada is the land of freshwater, but it's nice to remember that every once in a while - in Canada we don't need to boil water before drinking it, we can brush our teeth with tapwater, the toilet doesn't randomly decide not to flush, nor does the shower randomly decide to turn off while you are in the middle of shampooing. And having prevalent, cheap, drinking water, means people actually drink water with meals instead of soda (which is cheaper here)... see point number two about bad teeth.

So basically, all the things that I'm coming to appreciate fall into the category of health and safety. Jeez, I feel like a mom, I should start driving a minivan.

You've GOT to be kidding me

So it's been winter vacation here for the past three weeks. Today was supposed to be their first day back.

But no! It's too cold, they say. So believe it or not, school has been cancelled for another week on account of the "cold."

Look. Right over there. That is a weather report, for today, for right where I am. It's evening, the sun has set, and it's 21 degrees out!

Please, someone, tell me. How exactly is that cold?

Parade!

Yesterday, there was a parade that I accidentally stumbled across while heading home. Not that it was hard to miss or anything. Anyways, they had amazing costumes, and I bet that everyone was exhausted because they were dancing down the streets like all day.

I looked it up, and the parade - well really the whole weekend, is the "Virgen Carmen" festival. Being horribly uneducated, I didn't know what that was. Wikipedia is my friend, and it turns out to be a festival for Mother Mary, who has as one of her titles Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Apparently, it's a big deal here.

As a side note, as the festivities are the whole weekend, I got woken up this morning by fireworks. At like 8am.





















And this one's for you Josh. If you read it closely, it says "From Alaska with devotion for the Virgen Carmen festival."

Weird brown cloud

This is what I saw looking out my window today. Probably just smoke from a fire or something, but looks pretty nifty.

Mom you wouldn't like this...

Okay first of all, the event in recent history that Bolivia is arguably most famous for is the Water War of 2000, where basically the whole city staged huge protests against the water company. The reasons for it were basically because people didn't like their water being owned by a foreign multinational, but the reason it got privatized to begin with is because historically, water provision in Bolivia sucks, and something like 50% of the people in Cochabamba didn't have running water.

Second of all, it's the dry season, which means that for about six months, it doesn't rain. At all. And up here, we're way up in the mountains, so there's no humidity whatsoever and rain is even more rare.

So the question I have to ask is, why do people in Cochabamba care about having green grass? They don't even have sprinklers, so people just hose down their lawns, which I imagine causes all kinds of soil erosion and stuff, and it makes big mud puddles.

Birdies

Back at home, I remember my dad calling Purple Finches "Raspberry Sparrows," because he said that they spilled raspberries on their tummies.

I wonder what this birdie have been eating too much of? (Sorry it's not a great picture, but they fly away so damn fast!)

I'd call them Banana Birds, but it's more of a lemony colour than banana... Lemon Larks?

Funeral

Don't worry, not my funeral. On my way here, I came across the most odd and interesting procession of cars that we got stuck behind. I was so confused as to what it was, at first.

First, I heard music. I figured someone was playing it really loud at their house, then I realized it was moving with us. Then I noticed how slow we were going, we were stuck behind this bright lime green bus with fire painted on it. Sorry I don't have any pictures, but I didn't bring my camera.

As the taxi driver went to pass the bus, I looked inside and saw that there was a full brass band inside, that was playing the music. Sort of like a marching band... but not. Then, I realized that the bus was following a hearse.

It finally dawned on me, like five minutes later, that the bus was the funeral procession. Well. That's pretty cool, in my humble opinion.

Soap

I mentioned previously that Warmi makes soap. Most of what they make is like industrial strength, brick-sized soap, probably for washing clothes or what have you. But one of their recent... inventions? Is... Paper Soap! Yes, very exciting I know.

I put the word inventions before a question mark because I have no idea if it's their invention or not, but it's the first time I've ever seen it. So allow me to present the coolest thing since sliced bread.

This soap comes in a little book, sort of like a match book, and in the inside, there's a whole bunch of what looks like paper. It is paper, but it has soap soaked into it, or something. I'm really not sure how they make it, but it's so cool. I tried it, actually, you just get the paper wet and it's all frothy and soapy. Weird. The downside is that the paper doesn't dissolve, you have to throw it away when you're done, but hey, there's usually garbages in bathrooms, right?

Anyways, why is this so amazing? From a development studies point of view, it's a really local solution to a local circumstance. Most public bathrooms around here lack soap (and usually toilet paper too - I try to avoid them), so they came up with a product for ladies to carry around in their purse so that they can clean their hands if there's no soap. Very interesting, and obviously something that most Canadians would never think of, because we're used to having soap available all the time. But from the point of view of a traveller, it's really cool too because you don't need to pack a wet slippery bar of soap into your toilettries bag - it's really portable. Anyways, this is what I learned at work.

What I'm Reading

Although I'm not done it, I'm really enjoying reading White Man's Burden, by William Easterly. He's an author I was introduced to in second year in my development economics class as a really educated, really cynical economist, who started off trying to save the world and then realized how much everyone trying to do the same thing screws up.

Now he writes about how people in the development field have no idea what they're doing and keep screwing up, and writes about things we should be doing instead (but probably never will).

For example, in White Man's Burden he writes about how Development Plans will never work because they lack accountability and feedback, two things that he says are vital for improvement. Since these things are missing, a scary amount of money is being wasted on things that people don't need, can't use, or don't want.

I'd recommend this book to anyone in the international development field (i.e. people in my class).

¡Cows!

I am very much enjoying the randomness of life here. You think everything's going all calm and normally and then BANG, there's a bunch of cows and sheep eating from the dumpster a block from your house.

The letter "R"

... or more specifically, "rr." My new pet peeve.

Allow me to explain. First of all, most of you know that I can't roll r's to save my life, therefore, I can't pronounce the Spanish r sound. My fallback default, the French r sound, is not correct either. So I get the choice of swallowing my r's (and sounding like I'm dying) or saying the horrible American pronounciation of the letter r, you know, as in the word "argh". Put that sound into "arriba." Just doesn't quite sound right.

But, I am taking Spanish classes, and I've been workin on it, and now I don't sound quite so horribly American, and I thought I was doing okay.

Then EGAD! I started working at Warmi. Most of the kids there speak both Spanish and Quechua, so they have weird accents. That and they talk like kids. For a while, I just didn't understand what they were saying. Then slowly, it dawned on me that they pronounce some sounds differently.

Por ejemplo: we were talking about Shrek. For some reason, the kids think I have a crush on Donkey, who in Spanish is called "Burro." But do they pronounce it Burro? No, they pronounce it Bujo. Once I realized that, I freaked out a little bit, but then I remember reading something about that in our orientation package. So I calmed down a bit.

Then, I met a guy who runs the youth group at my work, who introduced himself as "Zay". I asked him about it, and he said it was short for "Zaynaldo." Oh! You mean "Reynaldo!" Yes, that's what it was.

Thus, I come to the following conclusion: the letter R is out to get me.

This broadcast also brought to you by the number 3.

Street signs

I mentioned a few posts ago how I missed street signs. That might sound really random, so let me explain a little.

In Cochabamba, I haven't seen any street signs remotely "normal" by Canadian standards. Instead, there are signs posted on the sides of buildings and on walls and gates labelling the streets. For example, to the right.

Most streets don't actually have these signs, you have to look really closely at the address. In Canada, we have a number for our house, here there's the number with the street name underneath it. In case they want to change the name of the street halfway down, I guess.

Then, there's a significant portion of the city that doesn't have named streets. I have a map that has a lot of blank streets and I wondered if they were just too small for the mapmaker to put words on. No, the streets just don't have any names. You have to tell the taxi driver: "left here, right here, passed this street, etc."

Also, in Cochabamba they have an annoying habit of having like a million streets named the same thing, so you can't even say "Calle Antezana, por favor," because there are at least two. Here's a photo of the intersection of Pando and Pando.

Cochabamba also has a really strange habit of naming streets after important dates. It's entirely possible to say "we're having dinner on the 25th of May" and mean a location. Or, even better, "I live on September the 10th between America and Beijing."

I'm pretty sure I've also seen only two different stop signs in the whole city. I realized this when, after being here for two weeks, I still didn't know the word for stop. So how do the drivers here deal with this? They honk some more.

So here's the breakdown, as far as I can tell, in terms of when people might honk:

• To see if you want a ride
• Because someone else is driving stupidly
• Because they're approaching an intersection and don't feel like slowing down
• Because they see a cute girl

In case you're wondering, it's really hard to tell which is which.

Warmi

So some of you know this, some of you don't, but I wasn't really enjoying working at CEDIB. Sorry to Josh and anyone else who was just starting to figure out what it was I'm doing in Bolivia.



Anyways, my placement got changed, and now I'm working with an organization called Warmi, which means Woman in Quechua. It started off 20 years ago as a women's support group, and since then has expanded to include a lot of other activities, like a day care, after school program, youth group, and soap factory. I'm not exactly sure how the soap factory fits into the big picture, give me some time.

It's currently winter vacation in Bolivia, so that means that at Warmi, the place has pretty much been transformed into a camp. I get to play with kids all day, woohoo. So far I've taught them a bunch of English, I've learned a tiny bit of Quechua, and I've taught them how to play Optiball and a few other sailing games.

Bolivian Security

It's kind of odd around here. There are tons of military people, but very few police officers. I think I've seen a total of three police cars, and two motorcycles in the month I've been here. Most of the police actually can be seen in banks (and they're armed with really big guns, too, it's a little scary). I'm pretty sure it's illegal to photograph military installations so, well, I haven't.

It's not that neighbourhoods are unsafe to live in, far from. It's really common to see little wooden buildings, about the size and shape of outhouses, on the side of the street. I wondered what they were for, for a while, then I realized that they were for security guards to hang out in when it rained. At night (and other times too, I guess), a guard sits near his little box, and watches the cars and the houses nearby for signs of unsavory activity. They like to blow their whistle a lot too, and for a while I wondered why - but it's so that would-be criminals know that there's a guard around. The houses nearby all get together and pay a little bit of money to keep the guard around.

Even more scary is the neighbourhood in which my work is. I think the sign speaks for itself: "warning: armed vigilante community."

A plea for help

Hi everybody, here's a little update.

Overall, I'm doing just fine here in Bolivia. I was pretty homesick for a while, but I'm figuring things out now. I can get around in the city just fine, my family and I have come to an agreement regarding food, and I have a new thing for work so that's good too (I'll explain when I get some decent pictures to post).

So here's an interesting list of things that I never thought I'd miss about Canada:

• Q-tips
• French
• wearing shorts (yes, I'm at the equator and I don't get to wear shorts)
• being able to pet the cute doggies I see
• the sun not setting at 6pm
• street signs
• humidity
• no smoking
• normal keyboards

Things that I don't miss about Canada:

• expensive things (I'm getting used to paying 25 cents for an hour of internet usage and 10 cents for a Coke)
• being in a hurry or late all the time (here if a meeting is supposed to start at 2, that really means at the earliest 2:30, and someone probably won't show up)
• having to drive everywhere (that's more directed at Oakville than Canada in general)
• having to go inside to buy something and
• having to go somewhere specific in order to buy something

Things that, if someone was being nice and thinking about sending a care package, keeping in mind that it might take a month to get here, I might hypothetically want included:

• a burned copy of the Princess Bride, if it has a Spanish language option. Or a real one, but don't count on it coming back in one piece.
• the real estate section of the Toronto Star (my sister here is an architect)
• Harry Potter 5 and/or 6
• really, anything to read that's in English
• Q-tips
• candy and junk food. I miss gummy worms and cheesies and cookies that aren't Double Chocolate Oreos
• my bed, but I don't think it'll fit

Anyways, thanks everybody for reading my blog! I'll try to keep posting, but my life is becoming slightly duller and I don't have a steady stream of cool pictures to post.

¡Hasta luego!

The morning line up

Every morning as I go to work, I pass a bank in between where the bus stops and where I work. And every morning, there are hundreds of people lined up. Here's a picture of the front door of the bank, but let me tell you that the line goes all the way down the block to the corner.

I asked about it, and turns out they start lining up at five in the morning. I think it's for something like welfare cheques. They said that every month they get them, but it's staggered so every day there's a lineup, for a certain group's turn.

Makes me wonder though, how much money they get, and how many people don't get welfare that need it.

This is going to sound like a strange example, but one of the other volunteers works with people in prisons. She says that it's really difficult, because there's like no state funding, so prisoners are forced to pay for the cost of their incarceration - that is, buy food, toilet paper, their uniform, even build their own cell. Apparently, the state only provides funding for about 1.50 Bolivianos per day per prisoner, which is approximately 20 cents. And while it's true that money goes a lot farther in a country like Bolivia, the UN has declared the international poverty line to be 1$ per day.

Anyways, so that sort of makes me wonder if the state funding for welfare is around 2Bs per day, in which case, no wonder there's so many homeless people around. Well it's just really sad, I guess, to see so many poor people gathered together in one area. I think I'm done rambling for now.

(As for why one of the volunteers works with people in prisons, the answer is this: because it actually costs money to go to prison, most families of prisoners can't afford to keep their house, and go to prison with the convict. The organization works with the mothers and children, ensuring that they get a decent education and stuff like that.)

Weird foods

Don't let the title throw you off - I'm not going to start talking about how Bolivian food is so weird and tastes funny and how terrible it is or anything like that. Instead, I just want to point out a few things similar, but very different between Bolivian cuisine and Canadian.

For example: sometimes I get tea from the cafe down the street from my office. Well one thing I've noticed since I got here is milk is always hot. In order to put milk in tea, they heat it up for you. To me, that's silly, why not just put it in and let the tea heat up the milk. Anyways, this particular cafe insists on frothing up the milk, and putting not only milk but also foam in my tea. I find it amusing.

At first it was fun to learn that in addition to the bunches of Bolivian cookies and candy, etc., you can also get American brands, like Chips Ahoy. You can also get Oreos, but only the double chocolate kind. You can't get M&Ms here, but instead they have "Chubis" - which look exactly the same, but the English translation says "candy-coated chocolaty lentils." I'm not sure about those...

In the mornings, everyone likes to drink hot drinks. It is winter here, after all, and these Bolivians are not from Canada and don't know what a real winter is. Anyways, we have a few choices, and all of them, in my humble opinion, are weird. We can drink tea (which is pretty good, they put cinnamon and cloves in it), except for it's like this syrupy stuff that you're supposed to add hot water to. Like they'll make a pot of tea every few weeks and boil it down to just some syrup, and then keep that and pour a little bit into a mug and add boiling water. Voila, tea! There's a similar thing for coffee. I think they pretty much make espresso, and then you're supposed to pour yourself a little bit and water it down with hot water. They call it "concentrated coffee" - I don't know if that means something different than espresso or not. Or, one can drink Avena, my favourite. That's what's in the pot to the left, but you can't really tell what it is. Well, it's basically really really liquidy oatmeal, and you drink it instead of eating. It's actually really delicious.

Another dish that they have here that sounds a little confused is peanut soup. No, not peanut butter, peanut soup. They put like potatoes and meat in it and it's all yummy and warm. Yes, peanut soup.

Political graffiti

One of my favourite things in Cochabamba is the political graffiti all over the place. At first I was really surprised that there was so much writing everywhere, but now I'm actually reading it and find most of it terribly amusing.

The picture above and to the left says "Viva la insurreccion popular y armada." In English that means "Long live popular, armed insurrection." I love it.



"No to the payment of the foreign debt"






Oscar Olivera was the leader of the "Water War," a time in 2000 when basically the whole city got together and overthrew the company that privately owned the water system.