Pickles volunteers in Bolivia: Pepperland

Hi fans

It's been a long time, I know - I'm sorry about that. It's been a combination of being busier, and not feeling totally inspired to write anything for a while. You have to be in the right mood to write an interesting blog, but I can't procrastinate any longer as that stresses me out, so I hope I'm in the right mood for now. That's not the best introduction, but it's just the truth - things are trundling along pretty much fine out here, we have just 3 weeks to go now, which is strange as it feels like we're just getting our teeth into things. Including some contaminated food apparently as a few of the group have been struck down with typhoid fever - not as serious as it sounds once you get it treated, though it did involve Mariam spending the night in hospital on a drip - she's totally fine now. Me and Shiv stayed over with her to keep her company - got a room with 3 beds and 2 tvs - luxury - but no water in the bathroom tap, just to balance the luxury out. The hospital / clinic was about 30 minutes away in an area called Quillacolla, which much to Shiv's dismay didn't have any shops that sold Quaker oat cookies - we made do with plain crackers for breakfast instead. Interestingly typhoid is often misdiagnosed, and you can wrongly test positive for it because of having had the vaccination in the UK. Fact.

Other medical issues have involved more root canal surgery, a tooth being pulled out altogether, and just the usual dodgy stomachs, including mine again. Not sure what's causing it, perhaps meat, or milk, or lettuce or tomato - it is literally a mystery. Anyway, in terms of work and what's been going on at our centre, here are the finished lockers, and the freshly painted walls around our centre:

me in a newspaper hat to protect me from the sun - with Diana in a normal hat

We visited some more schools to give out our leaflets to encourage the kids to come in. The schedule now is that Monday and Tuesday afternoons we go to a centre in the South, called Camara Junior, and Thursdays and Fridays kids in the local area come to us. Mon/Tues are 2 hour long sessions - so far we did the Tuesday one as Monday was our day off (not so any more) - this involved Tom playing football with some of the kids, and me playing volleyball and other games with a lot of the girls, while Diana helped a load of them with their homework and the staff interviewed them and their parents if there. Being foreigners, they are all quite intrigued by us, and when we played gato y raton (random children's game involving us holding hands in a big circle and 2 people being a cat and a rat and playing tig), there were actual punch ups between them about who would get to be next to me and hold my hand. I'm not saying that in a big-headed way - it would be the same for any foreigner that came along and played with them I'm sure. At one point they jumped on me so much that the only option to save myself was curling into a ball on the ground while they continued jumping on top of me. Very amusing / totally insane. We were pretty tired at the end of that session, and let's hope there's a little bit more structure to the next one...

Thursday I missed due to being ill again, but Friday we had about 35 kids come in to our centre. We fed them, they pay 1 Boliviano for that (10p). I kept an eye on them and made sure they ate all their food, and then washed it in the washing area. They were again quite intrigued by us, and quite shy too. I got a world map and we pointed out countries to explain where I was from - anywhere from India to America was suggested, and I could have told them I was from Kazakhstan to be honest, but decided against it. We played snap (tried to), dominoes (upside down/back to front), Connect 4 (some understood the concept, others just liked making nice patterns regardless of winning or losing), duck duck goose (pato pato pollo (duck duck chicken)), and I read a book to one of the girls (a few pages anyway). We helped them do homework if they had it - one boy had to draw the solar system, so we found a picture of it in his dictionary, but he looked pretty concerned about not getting it wrong so I think he was leaving it to research more over the weekend. Perhaps he didn't fully trust me. Another girl had to write out numbers in words, so I went to ask Mache how you spell 16. I then had to ask Nilda, and Vera too - seems it's a tricky one and they couldn't quite agree. We came up with diciseis (any advance on that, let me know). One boy was seemingly writing numbers out from 1 to 3000 - not sure how useful that is but I guess it's something to do. I'm glad I have enough Spanish to talk enough and be helpful in some small way, but it's sure frustrating not having more. I got Diana to teach me some useful phrases - namely - no lo/la pegues (don't hit him/her); silencio (silence); no lo/la empujes (don't push him/her). There were 2 small boys (Roli and Samuel) who once there were anywhere near each other were rolling around fighting like in a cartoon. I still think Bolivian children are cute, even at such close quarters, and even when fighting.

Vera with the kids at the end of our session

Meanwhile Diana made orange / lemon juice from the oranges and lemons that grow in the garden there, and helped with homework and games too. At the end, all the kids had a meeting with Vera in a big circle, and then we gave them some fried dough thingys (don't know the name for these), and some juice, and off they went. Or at least most of them did apart from the ones who were waiting for their parents still. Overall it was great fun, if a bit hectic, and definitely very tiring. I hope we get to do some things like arts and crafts, and maybe even some English with them, or maybe some little trips around town. The way it works in Bolivia is that you go to school either in the morning or the afternoon - so the kids that we see in the afternoon have been at school in the morning. The idea is that they come to us to have fun, but also to learn social skills, make new friends, and have workshops about the dangers of drugs, the importance of good health etc - more of a social intervention scheme. I don't know the stories of any of the kids yet, but I'm sure some of them are from families that don't care too much about them, or that send them to work on the streets after school, maybe til very late in the evening which is not safe of course. The only story I know is of one girl whose cat ate her parrot - when I sympathised about the parrot and said well at least you still have the cat, I then found out the cat got run over soon after. I didn't know what to say after that.

lemons on the lemon tree in our garden at work

On Wednesdays we would have normally been doing sessions in the afternoon at La Cancha (the big market in the South), but we sadly don't have a room there anymore that we can use. Carla is looking for a new location, but for now I think Wednesdays we'll be doing more maintenance around the centre - we have to paint the inside walls now which are much in need of it. I spent a while taking small bits of sellotape off the ceiling in preparation for this - I think there had been balloons stuck to them at some point. Looks a lot neater now anyway. I don't fully trust the ladder we have there, but I suppose if I fell off it it'd be an interesting story for the blog.

As for non work and non medical things - I sent some postcards recently - we had a nice chat with the post office lady and gave her some English and Polish coins as memento. We showed her a £10 note but didn't leave that with her. The stamps here are pretty big so you have to remember to leave a big space when writing the postcards. They often come with envelopes too which apparently is to stop opportunistic postmen along the way stealing them when they see a llama / panpipe picture they particularly like.

We're still playing volleyball and eating lots of ice cream - more so now the weather has changed and it's mainly nice and hot - around 25 degrees most of the time. The rainy season is over, more or less, which also means the throwing of water bombs has stopped too - a relief. This weekend we visited a convent in town - built around 1750 but it stopped being a convent in 2004 and started being a museum in 2006. There is a new section of it where there are about 9 nuns living - we spied on it from the roof of the old convent but couldn't see any there, just their washing hanging out. They only leave to the outside world in cases of medical emergencies apparently. There was a beautiful square bit (is that the part called cloisters?), with a 200 year old palm tree - he was very tall, taller than the convent itself. And lots of Jesus and Mary images and statues, some fairly gruesome and severe. In the olden days the nuns could have visits from their relatives, but not see them, and another nun would be there listening to everything they said to each other. It's not like that now, thankfully. We paid 20 Bs (£2) as foreigners to enter the convent and have the tour, and the locals pay 10 Bs (£1) - most of the people on the tour were foreigners, ie us, and some Germans. The only local was Zaida. The lady doing the tour spoke Spanish very fast and I couldn't get any of what she said apart from really obvious bits. Zaida complained to her afterwards that why should the foreigners pay more and get less and please in future speak slower. Go Zaida!

convent roof

old palm tree

This morning me and Nikki visited a part of Cocahbamba called Tiquipaya, with Zaida. It's not far from us, but is more verdant, and quite quaint, it definitely had a different feel to it. Apparently there is much nicer fresher water there, which means better trees and flowers, and it feels more like a little village. There was a Sunday market on - we've learnt not to look at the meat stalls, but sometimes you just can't help youself even though you know it's bad for you - today's had goats heads, complete with fur still on... There were some grey bits of meat all stacked up too, maybe that's the tongue and liver and kidney bits. Then we went for breakfast - api and bunuelas (api is purple corn drink and bunuelas are like fish and chips without the fish or chips, ie just large bits of batter). I wasn't that hungry after the goat's head incident, but managed to down the api and half a bunuela. We bumped into Zaida's friend, the one that makes amazing dolls of different types of traditional people from Bolivia.

Api!

Tiquipaya flowers!

dolls in traditional Bolivian outfits, made by Zaida's friend

Then we walked to the cemetery. There were the rich graves - large family tombs, and the poor graves - makeshift crosses and small angels etc. If the family doesn't pay the grave rental, the body gets dug up and burnt to make way for someone whose family will keep up the payments. Harsh. We saw a big compost heap at one point, which was mainly dying flowers and grass, with the odd broken coffin thrown in too. I scuttled past that bit and tried not to think of goats' heads too. We saw a father with about 6 very cute small children in tow, carrying flowers and water, and I could only conclude they must've been visiting their mother's grave, which made me very sad. All in all I like cemeteries because it's a a good reminder of many things, and the one thing we have in common, and the peacefulness is like you experience sitting in a church. But inevitably they are sad when you start thinking too much about the people visiting them and what their stories might be.

rich bit

poor bit

We got a trufi back to town and I went back to bed after all the excitement. A trufi by the way, is a minibus, which follows a certain route, as buses tend to, but whose main aim in life seems to be to see how many passengers and their luggage you can fit into as small a vehicle as possible without anyone dying or falling out of the window. They are cheap, which is great, but that's why. You just hail them anywhere and they pretty much do an emergency stop to let you on. If you want to get off you shout 'a la esquina por favor' or 'vamos a bajar' (at the corner please, or, we're getting off here). And then you push past everyone else on there to get off - or everyone has to get off to let you off because you're sitting in the corner at the back, underneath some Bolivian children and shopping bags. We got one in Oruro last weekend on our trip to Uyuni (more to come on that later), and Noelia was actually pushed over right on to the ground by a feisty older Quechua lady in her haste to get on. We gave her some evil looks after that, but she was pretty unmoved. In conclusion, a trufi is not something you'd feel like travelling from Land's End to John O'Groats in, but thankfully the longest I've spent on one so far is probably 20 minutes and it got me from A to B.

This afternoon we went with Zaida to her single mothers' group, which she does once a month. It wasn't so busy this time, we met 3 new people though and some of their children. Zaida explained that they are like a family for each other, which I think is lovely to have such supportive friends, and lovely of Zaida to organise it each month. Her friend Gaby was there, and another lady who sold us some hair bobbles, and another lady with her son. I can't remember their names, but will hopefully see them again next month. Nikki showed us how to do poi (those twizzly things you spin around, I can't really explain, but it's really fun), and we did some cartwheels and handstands and things in the sun, and chatted to the women and ate crisps. It was really nice. Last night we went to Violeta's house - she is one of the volunteers who is working with the other group at their school. Her family obviously have money as they live in a swanky appartment block in a nice part of town - with a jacuzzi on the ground floor. I think we managed to invite ourselves back there. We played some games and ate ice cream, then went for pizza. Possibly the best pizza you'll find in Bolivia - if you ever need that, it's called Sole Mio, and I can't remember the address. I believe it's run by, or was set up by, Italians. It took a while to decide what to order, by which time I'd had a minor nervous breakdown due to the indecision and lateness and hunger. This is the problem with doing things always in a group, but obviously there are many nice things too about being in a group. It was worth the nervous breakdown as it was amazing pizza.

Last Monday we went to David's house for a mid term review type thing. We played a lot of team games, the finale being making a construction out of newspaper, string, sellotape and a balloon, which would mean you could drop an egg out of window without it smashing. Ours did pretty well, it got a dint in it - but the other team won as there's had not even a dint. Another game we did was you had to move 5 small bits of pasta from the top of a small tub to the top of another - with chopsticks. I had to do that one, and I was doing pretty well but then the 4th bit fell off and after that it was all downhill, and my hand was all shaky. Try it, but with 6 people watching and cheering you on, you'll see it's not that easy. We also had to keep up 7 balloons in the air for as long as possible - with only 6 hands per team that's quite hard too, we lasted 20 seconds or so.

We continue to do our learning sessions every Monday, which are so interesting and make me want to do an International Development MA as there is so much to know and think about. We discussed how do you decide who to help when setting up a project in a developing country, and the importance of listening to local people with local knowledge and not just coming in with your preconceived ideas of what needs doing, or wanting to do the particular thing you like or are good at. For example, I would love to do some English teaching while here, but am also super aware that that might not be the thing they want us to do, or that is most helpful for them. It is a compromise basically, and a fine balance of what the partner project wants, and what the volunteer wants. I think the success of a project comes from proper planning and also sending the right type of volunteers. It's hard not to be slightly cynical about the value of us being here, and the impact we are having / not having. As non-Spanish speakers, we already have a huge obstacle to how effective we could otherwise be. I suppose the hope is that the children we work with feel that because we have given up our time to be with them, then they are important and worth something - just by being around them we can influence how they feel about life and themselves and their futures. I hope so. It's all interesting to discuss anyway, and David used to live and work in the Amazon region of Bolivia on a water filtration project, and has a degree in International Development, so is really great at getting us to think about issues we face here.

I am going to stop now and will write about the Salt Flats trip next time. Have to get a good night's sleep as we're with the crazy kids tomorrow afternoon in the South, then having a dance lesson with Zaida in the evening - yay - we're learning a dance called Cueca. Will keep you updated. Over and out and here's some more pictures for you xx