Talismania

Hola chicos - haven't had wifi access until now - am sending this to you from our Spanish school where we just started lessons this morning and have a small break before going home for lunch. All is fine - the altitude has given me a headache for the last 3 days which I'm trying to defeat by drinking copious amounts of coca tea, so not feeling great today, but otherwise all is going fine out here so far and everyone is getting on well / behaving. Below is the blog I've been writing so far over the last few days. It's long, and I can't even offer you a photo yet as I only have 10 minutes to be online, sorry, but I hope you enjoy it. Adios por ahora xxx

Hi everyone. I'm writing this from our apartment in Cochabamba, it's Saturday night 730pm (1130pm your time). I haven't been able to get any signal on my phone or to get on wifi at this point in time, thus the not being in touch yet. But mum I hope you got my text from the team emergency mobile which we all used to text home and say we had arrived. I am of course listening to my Bolivian pan pipe music as I write.

So we luckily left England just in time to miss the snow you've had, though the worst it would have done would be to have made a 36 hour journey into a 46 hour one I suppose. I don't want to dwell on the details of an essentially boring long journey so here's a summary:

Flight 1: to Madrid. Nothing of note happened. Nikki did a suduko, Leanne ate an apple, I ate a melted crème egg (regreted it) and read some of my book.

Flight 2: Madrid to Sao Paolo. Had 2 hours in Madrid airport, it has a lovely curvy roof. I had some garlic potatoes, then raced against Leanne and Darryl – them on the travelator, me on the normal floor. We finished together, but I had power walked whereas they had strolled.

This flight was 11 hours of flying. The lady at the desk had said there would be tvs in our seats, but there weren't. Nikki did a sudoku. I read my book. Darryl and Tom were sandwiched between 2 fat snoring men, one of whom put all his food on Darryl's table, and then poured coffee all over his leg, and at the end of the flight offered them some money. We don't know why. Mariam got the one seat on the flight that had no seat infront of it, thus 2 miles of leg room compared to our 2 inches. (Marianne, Beth, Siobhan, Zara and Lee are the other Bolivia group – they are working on a different project to us, but we're all living in the same apartment).

I have brought with me a little purse with some taslismans (talismen?) in – these are:

• a moonstone from Helie (it is a talisman of good fortune, hopes and wishes. It calms, balances and protects during travel. It aids intellectual reasoning, self-expression and insight. It helps you to understand changes in your life and universal destiny. It also helps with insect bites. It is the most amazing stone).
• a small blue Tibetan charm, which was blessed by some visiting Tibetan monks me and Luisa had gone to see in Kilburn one afternoon last year. I would tell you more about it, but I can't read the Tibetan leaflet that is with it.
• a Saint Christopher on a turquoise ribbon (he's the patron saint of travel and turquoise is my favourite colour)
• a piece of grass which I got in Dharamsala at one of the Dalai Lama's teachings. It is blessed by the Dalai Lama and I slept with it under my pillow for a long time after, following some of my Tibetan friends' advice – with the grassy end of it pointing East because that is the most blessed way to point.
• my prayer beads, also from Dharamsala, also most likely blessed by someone at some point.
• some valium (also bought in India, and blessed by the pharmacist).

Guess which one I trusted the most?

My left earring fell out on this flight, but I found it and have put it back in. This reminded me of Siobhan who had helped me put it in before I left, so just thought I'd mention that.

Around breakfast time, I spoke to the man next to me – it feels weird not to speak to someone when they're that close to you and having the completely same experience as you for those 11 hours, and also when you've jumped over them in the middle of the night to go to the loo. He was on his way back to Sao Paolo from some time in Scotland, and yes he had seen some of those cows with the long hair, it was one of my first questions too. We explained what we were doing in Cochabamba. He told us we could go to Sao Paolo city centre during our 8 hour stop there and eat some lovely steak at an Argentinian restaurant (he was previously married to an Argentinian lady but they had divorced – I thought it was suspicious him giving me that much information so didn't pursue that part of the conversation). I made an executive decision not to go to Sao Paolo, as it's $50 each way in a taxi and also it's hard enough shepherding my little group around an airport let alone into the 3^rd biggest city in the world for no good reason.

Interlude: 8 hours in Sao Paolo airport (which is weirdly only 3 hours behind England time). This was fairly uneventful. We stood in the sunshine outside for a while, Tom got sunburnt, Darryl called home and heard all about the snow. We decided to eat some food – there was a handy baked potato restaurant, so we ordered 6 batatas com bolagnesa y quiejo. Then realised that unless you have Brazilian Reales or a credit card, you can't pay for your batata. Leonie's bank card wouldn't work, so she bought a fanta at a different shop with dollars and got Reales in change. A large queue had built up behind us during the potato palaver, I was talking to the potato sellers in Spanish, because I can't speak Portuguese, without realising this is quite rude. We were quite typical English people abroad at this point. The potatoes were definitely worth the wait and hassle though.

Flight 3: Sao Paolo to Santa Cruz de la Sierra (southern Bolivia). Choppy flight. I consulted my talismen to calm me down. Anyone that has ever been on a flight with me will know I am one of the worst people to go on a flight with ever. Something strange has happened which is that because I am the Team Leader, I have to be mature and responsible (more so than normal), and thus I took on the ability to not panic. When we bumped up from Sao Paolo through some very turbulent clouds and everyone screamed, I calmly said – 'why are you screaming, it's just some bumpy air?'. How smug am I. Interesting psychological development, rather like the famous experiment to do with prison guards and prisoners, and people taking on roles that are assigned to them. I wonder what else I could become?

We were fed a small bready sandwich with some unidentifiable meat inside it on this flight, and a little cake too. Then tea came round. I asked for 'te negro please' – they said 'we have te normal' – I said 'that sounds fine please', thinking what could be more normal than black tea. But no – normal tea, in Bolivia (or at least in the sky above Bolivia) is cinammon tea. It's very nice, sweet and cinamonny. I got 2 cups. Other than the bumps and my smugness, I don't think anything else of note happened. Tom had a minor sulk as we had told everyone that this flight was 45 minutes long, whereas it was actually 2 hours and 45 minutes. There is a 2 hour time difference from take off to landing, and we didn't really realise this when looking at the timings on the itinerary. I reasoned that there was nothing we could do about this, and that given the length of our journey so far, it really was neither here nor there whether we ever stopped taking off and landing. I read my book, and Nikki probably did a sudoku.

On arriving in Santa Cruz we had 4 minutes to go to our next flight to Cochabamba. We had to go through immigration and fill in those little bits of paper declaring that we haven't brought soil or livestock with us, and remember to say 'turismo' if asked the purpose of our visit to Bolivia, and not 'trabajador' or 'voluntario'. We all managed to do this, and Darryl even managed not to sneak away for a cigarette, and a lovely Bolivian airport man walked us to where our gate was. They had held the flight for us and other people on the Sao Paolo flight which had been delayed, (probably due to the bumpiness of the clouds).

Flight 4: Santa Cruz to Cochabamba. This was 30 minutes long. We had a small rectangular crustless cheese sandwich, and a cakey thing. I sat next to an old indigenous Bolivian couple who asked me a few questions about where we'd come from and where we were going. (I always want to ask absolutely everyone this question when they are going on the same route as me somewhere). Came in to Cochabamba through some hills and mountains. Got off the plane and it was raining and humid and the airport was surrounded by green mountains half hidden in clouds. I instantly loved all the Bolivian people I saw.

We were picked up by David, our in country coordinator, who has lived in Bolivia for a good few years and knows a lot of things, and by Mauge (pronounced Mao-he), and Angelika – they run the Spanish school we'll be at for the first few weeks and are helping with the orientation process and our apartment. Our bags were flung on to the roof and tied on with rope and we were flung in to the mini bus and off we went to our new house for the next 10 weeks.

After dinner and sitting around and generally exclaiming that we couldn't believe we were here after such a long journey (it's certainly my longest: left Dulwich at 1.20pm and arrived here at midnight (UK time) the next day = 35.20 hours), we went to sleep, and thus ended dia uno en el casa del gran hermano boliviano.

Today (Saturday), David, Mauge and Angie gave us a tour of Cocahbamba. Lots of David's sentences seemed to finish with 'this is one of the poorest areas of Cochabamba', or 'this is one of the most dangerous areas of Cochabamba'. I bombarded David with questions to do with all aspects of Bolivian life. I had been worried recently that my question-asking ability / curse had diminished, but fear not readers, it is still there. I realised that I like to collate lots of information about things and then go and mull it all over, or write a blog about it if it is a blogging part of my life. Here is a summary of what I learnt:

• Evo Morales' socialist government, 3 years ago, kicked out all the NGOs because apparently Evo likes to have ultimate control of all the money that is coming into the country and what is done with it, and he couldn't do this with the NGO money, so they all had to leave. But these NGOs were working to help the lower classes, which are the indigenous people, of which he is one so it seems slightly paradoxical. He is essentially uneducated – he was a llama farmer (got to write a song utilising that rhyme whilst here), and then a coca grower, and still is the head of the coca growers' union. He has always been very politically active, as you would probably be if you were part of the uneducated and exploited race, that has no access to education or civil society, and no real voice, in a country where there is a huge disparity between haves and have nots. There is massive resistance to him from these rich upper classes, a lot of whom live in Santa Cruz. There are rich people in the North part of Cochabamba, and La Paz too and Potosi (which was once the richest city in the world, and whose silver mines helped Spain become so rich back in the days).

• There are a lot of Americans living in Cochabamba, who often pretend to be Candians by carrying Canadian flags in case stopped and asked. There is massive distrust of US in Bolivia, obviously due to their foreign policy – they have historically funded and supported the kind of military dictatorships that suit their interests in Bolivia (and numerous other countries), rather than the interest of the people, and recently they tried to ban the growing of coca plants here (even though they must be one of its biggest consumers!!!), but it has now been recognised officially as an 'acceptable' crop to grow, mainly due to Morales' campaigning and support of the coca growers. What would they do for money without it – but this is part of a tangled and convoluted debate to do with international development and right and wrong and many other things full of paradox and difficulty. We will be discussing things like this as we go through our 10 week placement here so I'll keep you updated as I'm sure it will be a fascinating learning curve into many things.

• There is currently a minor water shortage here. The mountains that surround Cochabamba used to have snow on them, which melted into water and was used for the city. Only one of these mountains now does, this is due to climate change, and the result is less water. There are times when the water is turned off completely. There was a film I watched before leaving, called 'la lluvia tambien', which is about the water wars in 2000 which was real and happened in Cochabamba – they privatised the water and the price shot up, and most of the non-rich people couldn't afford it and massively kicked off about it and it was reversed (watch the film, but obviously I've just ruined the plot for you).

• There are often riots in Cochabamba, or just peaceful marches, by the indigenous people, in support of the government generally. David thinks it is partially because they don't have too much else to do, and want to remind people about their presence. They used to close whole roads for days at a time, and really disrupt things. I hope we get to see one whilst here, though we have to walk away from it and not join in with it in case it gets more severe.

That's pretty much my summary of Saturday. During our city tour we also saw the locations of the projects we'll be working on and learnt a lot more about the street kids and their situation, and the Bolivians perception of them, and the government's lack of support of the organisations that work to help them – more on that to come as we learn more and get started on the placements, which will be next week – for now I think it's enough to say that it is not going to be easy to come to terms with what we'll be faced with when we start.

It's now Sunday, and we're sitting in our lounge chilling out after playing a few games and realising quite how competitive we are... Who knew a game of Tell Me could get that heated... (and thanks Luisa for lending it me, that killed a good 2 hours of a rainy Sunday afternoon). We're not really allowed to go out without either David or Mauge at the moment, until we've had all our safety and security briefings this week, and learnt how to order taxis and orientated ourselves around the city. This is fine, but so far I'm not feeling like I've had much of a Bolivian encounter as it's mostly been contained to our group and our apartment. This will all change tomorrow however when we start at the Spanish school – the plan is Spanish lessons every morning for 2 weeks – I'm so excited.

The one encounter I have had so far, was with the assistant pastor at the church we went to this morning. As we are here with the Christian charity Tearfund, normally the groups are Christian, and all the partners they work with are Christian too. We are the only non-Christian group that Tearfund send, but we are obviously made aware that we are working with Christian partners and that we may be invited to church etc. So this morning we all went to church, both 2 groups of us. It is an international church, and the sermon was given by an American pastor, preceded by some singing in both languages about Jesus and God etc. I like that bit as I learnt some more Spanish words. American pastor man talked about how to make good decisions and how to base these decisions on the consequences that you want to arise from them, and that they should be good consequences that you aim for. And then he referred to the bible a bit, and I struggled more with that bit as I'm not really a bible reader though I am technically a Christian in the sense that I have been christened. We had some really interesting discussions on the walk home though – it's really nice to be able to talk so openly to the other group about their beliefs and how they came to them and how they practise their faith. And essentially I would say that I have Christian values, but I don't have a particular relationship with God, like they do. For me the talk about the devil, heaven and hell is when I stopped listening to the pastor as I find it doesn't quite resonate with my particular beliefs. I do like the singing though and remain open minded about all things.

Me and Nikki left at the devil bit of the sermon and sat outside and talked to Jorge, the assistant pastor. He knows the projects we're working on and we arranged that he would come and visit us, so I gave him our phone number to arrange it. I'm not sure I was meant to do any of that, but it seemed like a nice thing to do. I did explain that we're not all Christians, and I'm not sure what he thought of that, but he certainly approved of us being here to help.

My final thought that I would like to say to finish blog post number 1 is that I have realised that the reason I didn't have any massively huge feelings before I left England (ie overwhelming excitement or nervousness or feelings of doing the wrong thing), is that this is TOTALLY the right thing for me to be doing right now. Please note capital letters.

Anyway, I think I will stop now as I'm kind of boring myself and I don't want that to happen to anyone else. It's a common danger on my blogs and as usual please accept my apologies. xx