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.