Hola All,
I´m sorry this second email has taken so long. It´s been a rough three weeks but today I started feeling better, a little more settled and like I can get on with life.
Since I last wrote, I saw my first huge South American spider and it actually wasn´t that huge. It was, however, on my bed. Points for that. We got rid of it and that was fine. I´ve also been out bunches to what seems to be the one club in Cochabamba, it´s the one all the locals keep wanting to go to with us, anyway and while it´s fine I have to wonder whether there isn´t more to this city...
Still no llamas, sorrow of my life, but apparently they live at higher altitudes (like 8250 feet isn´t high) so I´m just going to have to venture to La Paz or Oruro to see them, which is fine because I have plans for both. Llamas will be seen, or I wont come back.
What else...I´ve adjusted to the food. Thank God and am actually quite fond of it now. I get crabby around 12:30 if I don´t have piles of food in front of me which I never thought would happen back in my first week here. I still have meals where I wonder how on earth I´m going to get through it without being sick but those are much fewer and far betwen now. Yay! Also discovered salteñas. So wonderful.
The city is really beautiful. When I first stepped off the plane I was definitely a little overwhelmed because it is very different from anywhere I´ve been before. It´s not shiny like Berlin or old and orderly like Oxford, there´s no sea and everything that goes with it like in Croatia, and it definitely isn´t the US. But, once I started really looking at it, I noticed how cool it really is, assymmetry is lovely really and the whole city has this color about it, it´s like a sheen...like a sepia photo but this is like a creamy orangey-pinky color that´s really quite beautiful. Too, once you figure out how to do stuff in the markets and on the streets the idea of a supermarket is a little offensive. The thing that´s still tough for me is the water thing. We don´t have running water all day. We do have a tank but if it runs out we can be water free for hours and hours. Water gets stored in 2 litre pepsi bottles for doing dishes and things but taking showers, brushing teeth, all of these things I have to be so much more mindful than ever before. It´s so far beyond that whole turning off the tap while you´re brushig your teeth thing, it´s interesting and I´m surprised at myself how long ít´s taking me to adjust. The drinking water problem is the hardest though. To me, longtime hardcore fan of Seattle´s finest, this is a shock. You really gotta plan ahead or pay big time (ok, it´s relative) and I´ve been caught out dehydrated more than once.
Cutest thing. I was walking down the Avenida de las Heroinas downtown yesterday and spotted this baby girl who must have been about 10 months old sitting in a cardboard box behind her mother who was running one of the little stalls that are everywhere that sell gum and candy bars. Well, something about it struck me as both absurd and completely practical at the same time and I must have been smiling because she looked at me and started to smile and pull her self forward and up onto her feet in her box to get closer to me. People, after 3 weeks of being either ignored or stared at everywhere in public and at work to have someone smile at me like that was incredible. I can´t even express how amazing it felt. I stopped in my tracks and the two of us just beamed at each other for what must have been half a minute before her mother noticed me and looked at me like I was insane. I just said, "your daughter is beautiful" and went on my way but it made me happy all day.
So, on the work front. As I mentioned in my last email, I was a very unhappy bunny at my job. I was working with a great organization called Centro Cultural Tinku which does a whole lot of things. It runs a school/daycare for kids of low income parents, a restaurant and bakery which supports both the school and a lot of the parents as well as serve as training ground for skills necessary for working in a restaurant or bakery. Very very cool. Absolutely not what I had in mind when I committed myself to 10 months in Bolivia. I had planned on working with a microfinance organization. Preferably Pro Mujer which is an international organization that gives loans specifically to women on a Latin American group lending model AND provides some of the most extensive support and training services in health and business management of any similar organization. I spent 3 weeks making empanadas (seriously) before I went to the program director here and basically said that I didn´t think anyone had actually read my application and I resented the fact that people in the San Francisco office had lied to me (because they did) and I wanted to be moved to Pro Mujer immediately or we would need to talk about terminating my time with FSD in Bolivia prematurely. A weird week followed where I tried to create an unsuccessful compromise which had to be abandoned and today I started at Pro Mujer. What a world of difference. My supervisor is delighted I´ll be here for so long. She´s going to train me up as a supervisor so I´ll deal with loans, capacitation planning and implementation and other stuff and I´ll get to carry out a research project and evaluation which may result in a project depending on what I figure out and resource availablity, etc. the hard part now is that working for real requires a lot more spanish than messing around in a bakery all day, but I´ll just learn faster I suppose.
Life with the family is still an adventure. We´re settling into each other more and more and the fact that my spanish keeps improving makes everything better. We definitely have some issues. One is that the grandparents like to treat me like I´m about 15 in terms of independence and I have never in my life been treated like I was 15 in terms of independence, so this is a problem that we are trying to communicate about. The girls are interesting, the situation is complicated and Dayana is definitely 12 and likes to treat me like I´m stupid. She keeps forgetting that I a) understand more spanish than I speak and b) actually speak a fair amount of spanish so tends to talk about me as though I´m not there, which is offensive. She also seems to think that I can´t make decisions about...whether my window is open or shut, whether I want salt on my food or
not, whether I actually need to go to work or not and likes to argue with me about these things that have nothing to do with her. It´s interesting and frusterating. Aside, though from these two things the family is incredible. Karina, the mom of the yonger girl is wonderful wonderful and we chat all the time which is just really great for me because I feel like I have someone here I can talk to who is a part of the culture so I can go ask why and how and what should I do and she has answers that are relevant. She really is lovely. The grandparents, aside from the control issues, are really sweet and fun and funny and the whole situation is great because when I go home I really go home to a family and someone is always there to ask how the day is and to chat and to worry and to play with.
Wow, I do like the sound of my own typing. Sorry all. I promise I´ll write again soon and it will be more interesting, more about, you know, Bolivia and less about my garbage. Again, keep the emails coming. I live for it. I really do. It´s the mot english-y part of my day and I revel in it! Also, I feel cut off and miss you people and would love love love to hear what´s going on in your worlds, seriously, make a dehydrated volunteer´s day!
LOVE!!!!!!!!
Mollie
I´m sorry this second email has taken so long. It´s been a rough three weeks but today I started feeling better, a little more settled and like I can get on with life.
Since I last wrote, I saw my first huge South American spider and it actually wasn´t that huge. It was, however, on my bed. Points for that. We got rid of it and that was fine. I´ve also been out bunches to what seems to be the one club in Cochabamba, it´s the one all the locals keep wanting to go to with us, anyway and while it´s fine I have to wonder whether there isn´t more to this city...
Still no llamas, sorrow of my life, but apparently they live at higher altitudes (like 8250 feet isn´t high) so I´m just going to have to venture to La Paz or Oruro to see them, which is fine because I have plans for both. Llamas will be seen, or I wont come back.
What else...I´ve adjusted to the food. Thank God and am actually quite fond of it now. I get crabby around 12:30 if I don´t have piles of food in front of me which I never thought would happen back in my first week here. I still have meals where I wonder how on earth I´m going to get through it without being sick but those are much fewer and far betwen now. Yay! Also discovered salteñas. So wonderful.
The city is really beautiful. When I first stepped off the plane I was definitely a little overwhelmed because it is very different from anywhere I´ve been before. It´s not shiny like Berlin or old and orderly like Oxford, there´s no sea and everything that goes with it like in Croatia, and it definitely isn´t the US. But, once I started really looking at it, I noticed how cool it really is, assymmetry is lovely really and the whole city has this color about it, it´s like a sheen...like a sepia photo but this is like a creamy orangey-pinky color that´s really quite beautiful. Too, once you figure out how to do stuff in the markets and on the streets the idea of a supermarket is a little offensive. The thing that´s still tough for me is the water thing. We don´t have running water all day. We do have a tank but if it runs out we can be water free for hours and hours. Water gets stored in 2 litre pepsi bottles for doing dishes and things but taking showers, brushing teeth, all of these things I have to be so much more mindful than ever before. It´s so far beyond that whole turning off the tap while you´re brushig your teeth thing, it´s interesting and I´m surprised at myself how long ít´s taking me to adjust. The drinking water problem is the hardest though. To me, longtime hardcore fan of Seattle´s finest, this is a shock. You really gotta plan ahead or pay big time (ok, it´s relative) and I´ve been caught out dehydrated more than once.Cutest thing. I was walking down the Avenida de las Heroinas downtown yesterday and spotted this baby girl who must have been about 10 months old sitting in a cardboard box behind her mother who was running one of the little stalls that are everywhere that sell gum and candy bars. Well, something about it struck me as both absurd and completely practical at the same time and I must have been smiling because she looked at me and started to smile and pull her self forward and up onto her feet in her box to get closer to me. People, after 3 weeks of being either ignored or stared at everywhere in public and at work to have someone smile at me like that was incredible. I can´t even express how amazing it felt. I stopped in my tracks and the two of us just beamed at each other for what must have been half a minute before her mother noticed me and looked at me like I was insane. I just said, "your daughter is beautiful" and went on my way but it made me happy all day.
So, on the work front. As I mentioned in my last email, I was a very unhappy bunny at my job. I was working with a great organization called Centro Cultural Tinku which does a whole lot of things. It runs a school/daycare for kids of low income parents, a restaurant and bakery which supports both the school and a lot of the parents as well as serve as training ground for skills necessary for working in a restaurant or bakery. Very very cool. Absolutely not what I had in mind when I committed myself to 10 months in Bolivia. I had planned on working with a microfinance organization. Preferably Pro Mujer which is an international organization that gives loans specifically to women on a Latin American group lending model AND provides some of the most extensive support and training services in health and business management of any similar organization. I spent 3 weeks making empanadas (seriously) before I went to the program director here and basically said that I didn´t think anyone had actually read my application and I resented the fact that people in the San Francisco office had lied to me (because they did) and I wanted to be moved to Pro Mujer immediately or we would need to talk about terminating my time with FSD in Bolivia prematurely. A weird week followed where I tried to create an unsuccessful compromise which had to be abandoned and today I started at Pro Mujer. What a world of difference. My supervisor is delighted I´ll be here for so long. She´s going to train me up as a supervisor so I´ll deal with loans, capacitation planning and implementation and other stuff and I´ll get to carry out a research project and evaluation which may result in a project depending on what I figure out and resource availablity, etc. the hard part now is that working for real requires a lot more spanish than messing around in a bakery all day, but I´ll just learn faster I suppose.
Life with the family is still an adventure. We´re settling into each other more and more and the fact that my spanish keeps improving makes everything better. We definitely have some issues. One is that the grandparents like to treat me like I´m about 15 in terms of independence and I have never in my life been treated like I was 15 in terms of independence, so this is a problem that we are trying to communicate about. The girls are interesting, the situation is complicated and Dayana is definitely 12 and likes to treat me like I´m stupid. She keeps forgetting that I a) understand more spanish than I speak and b) actually speak a fair amount of spanish so tends to talk about me as though I´m not there, which is offensive. She also seems to think that I can´t make decisions about...whether my window is open or shut, whether I want salt on my food or
not, whether I actually need to go to work or not and likes to argue with me about these things that have nothing to do with her. It´s interesting and frusterating. Aside, though from these two things the family is incredible. Karina, the mom of the yonger girl is wonderful wonderful and we chat all the time which is just really great for me because I feel like I have someone here I can talk to who is a part of the culture so I can go ask why and how and what should I do and she has answers that are relevant. She really is lovely. The grandparents, aside from the control issues, are really sweet and fun and funny and the whole situation is great because when I go home I really go home to a family and someone is always there to ask how the day is and to chat and to worry and to play with.Wow, I do like the sound of my own typing. Sorry all. I promise I´ll write again soon and it will be more interesting, more about, you know, Bolivia and less about my garbage. Again, keep the emails coming. I live for it. I really do. It´s the mot english-y part of my day and I revel in it! Also, I feel cut off and miss you people and would love love love to hear what´s going on in your worlds, seriously, make a dehydrated volunteer´s day!
LOVE!!!!!!!!
Mollie
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