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.