Guerras de Estrellas / el suero

Hi everyone, and welcome to the last few days of our time in Bolivia. Today was the last day at our centres, and we have just the weekend and Monday and Tuesday left - we fly early morning on Wednesday, the same long route home, via Santa Cruz, Sao Paolo, and Madrid to snowy England.

I have mainly this week been in hospital, so have missed every day at work, unfortunately. I'll have time on Monday to go and say goodbye to people though so all is not lost, apart from all that planning we did last week on our health workshop they'd asked us to prepare - oh the irony. Tom and Diana still did it without me (I had written a song about hand washing and tooth brushing - in Spanish!, with chords on the guitar and everything and was pretty excited about performing it... maybe one day in the future it'll come in handy).

To cut a long/boring story short(er) - on Monday night I got quite ill after dinner, and by 1am had a fever and was quite close to passing out, which is what happens when you're really dehydrated from diarrhoea (or vomitting - but it was the former in my case - sorry for the details). My stomach hurt a lot and I couldn't even drink a tiny bit of water without it hurting even more and not staying inside me. Nikki who I share a room with is very good at looking after people, and we decided to call David and decided I should go to hospital, so he and Mauge drove round to get us. I felt really bad about disturbing them as it was 1am but it did seem fairly serious to me. The first clinic put me on a bed and ignored me, so we went to another nicer hospital who put me on a drip and put blankets on me. The drip was weird when it first started and made all my insides go really hot. By 4am it was finished, and we left and I thought wow that was a first and hopefully a last. But by Tuesday afternoon it all happened again and it was impossible to eat or drink anything, so off we went again and there I was for 2 nights, in my own private room with air con and a tv and ensuite bathroom. Apparently it's where the president stays when he's ill in Cochabamba - exciting. Didn't see him.

Nikki stayed the first night with me which was really sweet of her, and David came to check on me regularly, and Zaida too - she liked the flat screen TV with all the channels, which inspired me to watch it for a while - I found Star Wars in Spanish which was nice - C3PO still sounded annoying to me though. The extremely expensive gastroentorologist saw me for all of 1 minute on Wednesday and said I should stay another night, and then saw me for another 1 minute on Thursday and said I could go. He charged £80 for those 2 minutes of wisdom. On Thursday afternoon a lady with a clipboard came in and said why hadn't I gone yet - I pointed at the needle in my arm attached to the drip, and said I didn't think I could with that still attached to me. Then I couldn't understand the rest of what she said so phoned David and he spoke to her. All in all I don't have a full understanding of what was wrong with me, but they mentioned parasites and gastroentiritis, and when I googled gastroentiritis that sounds about right, and it can be caused by a parasite.

The nurses were nice as far as I could tell. They got me up at 7 on the first day and pushed me into the shower after sellotaping a plastic bag round my hand, so water didn't go in the drip bit. That was weird. As is trying to have a shower and dry yourself with just one hand.

So my food diary for this week was: Tuesday - 6 crackers, tiny bit of watery soup. Wednesday: 12 crackers (3 for each meal and 3 at tea time), small bit of jelly, watery soup, cup of black tea (no milk). Thursday: 6 crackers and watery soup, then more crackers and watery soup at home. Friday (today): ditto, plus - exciting - a little bit of chocolate brownie tonight that Zaida has made. And it all stayed inside me since Wednesday and stopped hurting as of today. 

Good things about this week -

1. I now realise how dangerous dehydration can be - did you know diarhoea and dehyrdration is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) killers of children in developing countries. I wouldn't have understood this before, but now I do.

2. I got a LOT of sleep, most of it pretty good quality.

3. I watched some TV with Spanish subtitles so learnt some new words. Also my medical Spanish is now fairly good (suero is drip, and aguja is needle).

4. I looked at the nice view of the mountains for quite a long time.

Not so good things about this week -

1. Someone died opposite me in the emergency room on Tuesday night.

2. I got prodded with needles 4 times - the nurse got cross with me for wriggling around so much but it's like an allergic reaction, I really hate them. The first night they took a while finding a vein which was nice.

3. I felt ill for most of the week and I missed my last week at work.

I think I'm better now though. And another thing I think is quite weird is that I have never ever ever been ill like this before even though I've gone to quite a lot of developing countries for quite a lot of time. I've never even really been ill at all when travelling, let alone badly ill. I was quite proud of my stomach for this, and maybe that's why this happened. Lesson learned - I probably shouldn't have eaten that weird fried green vegetable last Sunday when me Nikki and Zaida when to a little festival in Tiraque.... I thought it was safe as it was a vegetable, but I think the oil it was fried in must have have fried a lot of other things in its time. The festival by the way was a festival of guinea pigs - oh how cute I hear you say... no it wasn't - they're not cute when they're fried with their arms and legs and head still on, all lying there fried in batter on a bed of rice and vegetables with their teeth still in their mouths - that is not cute I tell you!

We didn't eat them.

That was my week. I had more updates but they fell by the wayside for now. I'll try to fit another blog in before Wednesday morning 5am. Bye for now x ps here was the view from my hospital window:

Salt Flats and Oruro

As promised here is my update about our trip to the Salt Flats from 2 weekends ago. In Spanish this is called Salar de Uyuni. Salar means Salt Flats, and Uyuni is the place where they are. I have in fact been there before, with Abi and Laura, back in 2008 when we first came to Bolivia, but as it is quite a unique place and everyone else was going on this trip, I wanted to go again. Greedy huh.

(Just to update in real time - on Tuesday, Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, died - he was very good friends with Bolivia and with Morales, so this could effect us here in some way. There is obviously lots of coverage on TV about it all. Alicia was telling me about a political satire programme on the radio that was talking a lot about the close relationship between Hugo and Evo (Morales), and that they'd said what would you get if you joined Hugo with Evo? HUEVO (meaning EGG in espanol). I liked this joke, mainly because it's probably the first Spanish political joke I've understood (not that I've heard that many). The taxi driver this morning was pretty anti-Morales, due to his drug policies - a valid point. Sorry for the digression but it's quite an important update).

We had to get up at 430 on the Friday to get the 6am bus - Noelia from the Spanish School came with us again as she had to La Isla del Sol. She's very sweet, and so patient - she didn't even get upset when pushed over by the nasty Quechua lady getting on the trufi in Oruro. She's also a very good Spanish teacher, and last time I had a lesson with her I had to tell her the story of Little Red Riding Hood, in Spanish, to practise using past tenses. I had to keep asking her what the story actually was, as I couldn't remember. I forgot the all important bit about the wolf dressing up as the grandma. Anyway. We met Noelia at 6am and got on the bus to Oruro, from where we were taking the train to Uyuni. Oruro is about 4 hours away to the Southwest, but it took about 6 hours as there'd been a landslide the day before and the road was pretty congested because of this. I pretty much slept and listened to panpipe music, and drank water, but not too much as there was no loo. This is the continual problem when travelling around here - it's a bit of a catch 22 because you don't want to get dehydrated, especially if you're going somewhere at high altitude, but you don't want to drink loads of water and not be able to go the loo. Luckily I was still recovering from my weird stomach bug so mainly just slept and didn't eat or drink anything just in case.

We got to Oruro and went for lunch - possibly this is where some of us got typhoid, as someone later mentioned that Oruro isn't the best place to eat. Anyway afterwards we went to get the 3.30 train - it goes about 3 days a week from Oruro to Uyuni, and sometimes to some towns close to the Chilean border too. It's really clean this train, and had a bathroom - que luxury - and a restaurant car too. Food was slightly strange but it's always exciting to have a restaurant car on a train as it makes me feel like I'm in a film. Again, I did a lot of sleeping, and a lot of gazing out of the window at the huge scenery passing by - mountains, lakes, plains, the odd flamingo here and there, amazing clouds and rain and and sunshine - I listened to Janacek's Sinfonietta because it keeps mentioning it in the book I'm reading (1Q84 by Murakami), and I was intrigued to find out what it is so had downloaded it. All in all I was pretty happy on the train, possibly even a bit euphoric.

We arrived to Uyuni around 1030pm and found our really cute little hotel nearby - there were no windows in the rooms, so it felt perpetually like the middle of the night in there. I shared a room with Noelia, whose alarm went off at 5am and made me jump. That's when she normally wakes up - wowsers.

The breakfast tables were made of salt, which from a distance looked like polystyrene.

We took breakfast up to Lee as she was suffering a bit with altitude sickness - it's a bit higher there, probably about 3800m. We had time to wander around Uyuni a little bit before 2 jeeps came to pick us after breakfast. It's a very touristy little town, you become one of many gringos there, which always upsets me somewhat. I did jump on the bandwagon however and buy some llama wool leg warmers and an Andean cross necklace.... When in Rome...

Me and Shiv - not sure what the weird leg posture is about

Our first stop in our jeeps was the train cementery, which is exactly what it says it is - a load of dead trains, just outside the main town. We climbed all over them like a climbing frame in a playground, and I spent quite a bit of time gazing at the mountains and clouds again. It's kind of easier to just show you the pictures, so here you go:

a message for me seemingly...

After this we drove to a lake that had some flamingoes in it, and nearby there were some llamas and we also found a little lizard and held him in our hands - that's a first for me. I have also managed to get over my fear of small to medium sized moths, and so far have caught 2 of them in my hands to take outside. The others seem to not share my 'no killing of insects' policy (apart from Nikki) - Santiago stood on a moth the other day and I told him to never do it again please. Anyway the lizard was very well behaved and sat very still on my hand, you could feel him breathing quite fast. After a while of staring at him we put him back under a little bush near the llamas.

My picture of the flamingoes was too far away to see them, so here's a nice sign instead

After that we carried on to the Salt Flats themselves via another little market where I bought some more gringotastic souvenirs, including bolivian flag earrings. In some places the salt at the salt flats is 6 metres deep, and in other places it's 12 metres. That's a lot of salt, given that the salt flats cover an area of about 2000km in all. There were some men piling the salt up into little pyramids, called conicos de sal, and then lorries come along and pick them up and take them away. Apparently they don't export much of the salt, but use it here in Bolivia mainly. This is good if true, because when they started exporting quinoa (a super healthy protein-rich grain) to the rest of the world it put the price up too high for locals to afford it anymore, which is not good as it was a staple food for them previously, and is really good for you. This is an example of bad development. Here are some salt pyramids:

We ate lunch on the salt flats, which was weird - see picture. It felt like eating lunch on the moon, but with more gravity I expect:

Then we took pictures of perspective-defying things:

And jeeps, jumping, and half jumping

Maz, Shiv and Beth jumping

there's a bit of water on the salt flats as it's rainy season at the this time of year

mid jump - not easy to get us all in the air at the same time

We visited a salt hotel, which is made of salt (I saw some pretty serious looking structural cracks inside, so not sure I'd like to stay there and end up buried in salt the next morning). The roof is made of plastic obviously because rain + salt would = no roof. I don't actually have a photo of the salt hotel - but here's the flags that were outside (there wasn't an English one - I said that was fine with me, but Tom was upset there wasn't one and said I should be more patriotic...), and the inside of the salt hotel:

a salt llama

a non-salt Snoopy - he was on the curtain inside

After all the salt excitement we headed back to Uyuni for some food - pizza - and a long wait for the train which left back to Oruro at 11.45pm. An angry Quechua lady kept coming in to the waiting room and shouting something in Spanish about how we weren't allowed to use the plugs to charge our phones etc. We thought maybe she needed a hug, it might have helped dissipate her anger, but none of us gave her one. The train back was the same train we'd got the other way, I think we were on the same carriage in fact. This time I had a window seat again and was right next to a heater which blew very hot air on to my legs, which was quite annoying. After getting cold on the journey to La Isla del Sol via La Paz I had brought loads of warm clothes for this trip, and a blanket, and I wanted to make sure I used the blanket no matter what, but I had to give in and get rid of it as I was literally boiling hot.

We got to Oruro about 7 and went for api and bunuelas in the market, followed by a small mining museum complete with a trip down into the mine (no thanks for me as I still have claustrophobia and my life is just fine without going into small dark spaces like mines - I looked after the bags outside instead and listened to dogs fighting in the street).

api - left, bunuela - right

I had 4 apis, as people couldn't finish all theirs - I really like them, it's made with purple corn - you can't eat purple corn apparently, it's only good for making into api.

view from my bag watching position - I think of a miner - probably rising up in revolution as they did over the years against the terrible conditions down the mines

After this we went to look at the view of Oruro from up a big hill where there was a Christ statue - this is where Noelia got into the fight with the nasty old Quechua lady who pushed her over...

Virgin Mary on the hill opposite us

And that was pretty much the end of that. We got the bus back to Cochabamba, which was more or less uneventful, I did my favourite thing again - sleeping while listening to music (mainly panpipes this time), and when I woke up it was really hot again - it seems the weather had changed this weekend and the rainy colder season was over. It's nice to have some sun, but I always find as an English person that it really zaps all my energy, and I need siestas. Or maybe I'm really getting old these days - Tom and Diana found some grey hairs and pointed them out to me very proudly... thanks guys. Me Beth and Nikki went for ice creams at our favourite ice cream place - Frozz - and then we went home.

Sorry it took so long to get this update written, the thing with blogging is the longer you leave it, the harder it gets to remember everything even though I keep notes - it's better to do it closer to the time to capture the mood properly. I bought a nice new notebook and some coloured pens so I can be more organised with my to do lists and blog notes etc - Leanne has taken to calling me a nerd (in an affectionate way I think....) - I think she might be right :)

Over and out and happy mothers' day! Pepinillo xx

Machi - International Women's Day

Friday the 8th of March is International Women's Day, in honour of which I am going to tell you about Machi, who works with us at Mosoj Yan. She is in her early 30's and has 2 children - a 10 year old boy and a 9 year old girl.

Machi spent her childhood and adolescence on the street - she is from Oruro originally (Southwest of us here in Cochabamba). She came from a household where her father abused her mother, so she ran away to live on the streets, and later ran away from Oruro's streets to Cochabamba's streets. She quickly got into sniffing glue and smoking marijuana, it became her favourite thing in life. Her and her street 'family' started robbing people, and fighting with each other and other groups on the street. In order to enter a street gang you had to have self-inflicted cuts on your hands, stomach, feet etc. The one with the most became the leader - this was Machi. She got a lot of respect from the other kids as the gang leader, and everyone on the streets knew her well. Her and her gang would spend weeks down by the river smoking crack and taking other drugs - she referred to this as a very sad time in her life.

She moved from various hostels to orphanages, to various centres which are dedicated to helping street children. None of these other centres had the same philosophy as Mosoj Yan, which is to motivate these children to change their lives - they maybe just provided shelter and food, and some advice but nothing that was strong or effective enough to really change them. When Machi found Mosoj Yan it changed her life due to its focus on motivating children and helping them with self esteem and psychological issues. Through finding Mosoj Yan and starting a relationship with God and learning about the Bible, she changed her life, and she gives thanks to Mosoj Yan which is now the only family and only life she could ever want.

There is a lot of discrimination of course from society towards street kids - they are dirty, they rob people, they have nowhere to go, nowhere to call home, they are drug addicts, and often have escaped abusive families and start to abuse others, or be involved in prostitution. But they all have a story, and they have all essentially had part of their life and future and hopes and optimism destroyed thanks to abusive families, the economic situation in Bolivia, total lack of self-worth and no sense of being loved. Machi is an amazing and lovely woman, and is totally dedicated to Mosoj Yan, having started working for them 5 years ago. She is so warm and kind and generous  - you don't need to fully understand someone's language to see these qualities. I am proud to have the chance to work with her, and the other women at our centre, and to know first hand of the good that Mosoj Yan has achieved in people's lives.

This is Machi in the kitchen at work, making 60 bread rolls for the kids - soon she will start teaching them about growing food and cooking it themselves - we have a small vegetable garden at work for this:

Machi cooking bread

You can watch her testimony here, in Spanish - you may not understand the words, but you will get the sentiment.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=1920216405920&set=vb.255508761139996&type=2&theater

Thanks for reading and happy International Women's Day everyone x

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

more graves

a golden man in tiquipaya

don't know what this is about but I liked it

a church that looks like a castle

me Beth Shiv and Nikki doing cartwheels today