Sunday,Apr 22 2007, 12:12:44 PMDengue Fever, Cooking, and Basketball

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  April 2007

  (18 photos)

Monday, April 09, 2007         San Xavier

 

            Well I turned 25 the other day. I guess it almost makes a week now and though I don’t feel any older I can’t wait to get back home to reap the rewards of lower car insurance rates. I had a great time for my 25^th birthday but let’s just say that Bolivia didn’t choose to repay me in kind.

 

            On Friday the 30^th we had a big bbq in Santa Cruz and made real hamburgers which I had been craving for a few months. Here if you get a hamburger it consists of probably about 20 grams of meat that is pounded to the thickness of a fingernail. We did them right, New York strip steak ground into hamburger meat. The burgers turned out great and we proceeded from the bbq to the hottest club in Santa Cruz where I had some tables reserved for us there, being a VIP at the club and all ha ha ha. So we stayed there until about 5 in the morning and used the next day to recover. I started feeling really bad late Saturday night and attributed this to celebrating my 25^th birthday with a little bit too much fun. Sunday I felt worse but still made it back here to San Xavier despite everything. At this point I was thinking there was some limit that happens once you get older that your body reaches and says no more. I had a presentation planned with all the feria productiva members and with Andrew, a agri-business volunteer and a fellow Texan. On Tuesday we talked about the process of selling their products to supermarkets and all of the different stages that the process would entail. We finished about noon and I still felt horrible with a headache and everything. Wed morning I woke up and had a huge rash on both arms and decided that I should probably call the PC office and maybe go see a doctor in Santa Cruz which I did that evening.

 

            Bolivia, not wanting to miss out on my birthday, decided that it would like to give me a little present in the form of the mosquito born Dengue Fever. Now Dengue is a disease also known as break-bone fever and essentially is a 10 day fever where you feel like hell and the platelets in your body explode and make you look like you have a rash. If you want to read about dengue you can Dengue. So anyways I win the award for best birthday present ever.

 

So that is pretty much all that is going on here right now. More updates to come.

 

Geoff

 

 

Monday, April 16, 2007   9:11 PM                                         San Xavier

 

            Today has been a pretty eventful day here in San Xavier. This morning we recorded the voiceovers for the first commercial that we are doing. I was working with Marco – my friend who does the local television reporting and Neko the camerman. Marco went to high school in L.A. for two years back in the day so he knows all about the states. The commercial is the first part of an anti-littering campaign that Marco, Neko, the mayors office, and myself are doing to be put on the local airwaves here. The idea is that San Xavier is a town that generates quite a bit of income from tourism and should strive to take pride in its town. In most of Bolivia the accepted method of disposing of plastic bags, coke bottles, candy wrappers, chip bags, etc . . . is to just through it down on the ground. As one can imagine, this can lead to some pretty nasty trash piles in a town of 8,000 people like San Xavier. My hope is that by using local actors for the radio and television spots, as well as designing locally relevant posters and so forth, we can educate the people in town that throwing trash on the ground is unacceptable. Especially when there are public trash cans available.

 

            The other thing that happened today was my first practice as head coach of the San Xavier, all city basketball team. We surprisingly have a few players with some ability, even though most of them have never seen a full basketball game in their lives. Part of Peace Corps goals is to share American culture with host country nationals. Tonight I accomplished that by sharing the American tradition of running gasers or suicide sprints. For those who have never had the pleasure of running a suicide it is where you begin at the baseline of the basketball court, sprint to the free throw line, back to the baseline, to halfcourt, back to the baseline, to the far free throw line, baseline and finally baseline to baseline. At first I think the kids thought I was a little crazy when I showed them what they would be doing. I think they liked it even less when I told them the last 2 to cross the baseline would have to run again.  About the 5th set of gasers I think I had almost killed all of the kids. You would swear they were not all 15-18 year olds but rather out of shape thirty year olds. The players ran more tonight then they ever do in soccer training. It should be interesting to see where this whole basketball team goes. We have our first game June 1st so we have some time to prepare and I hope the kids get a lot of it. More than anything I think the lessons that serious sports training can teach them are lessons that everyone, and especially Bolivians teenagers, who live surrounded by a cultural attitude of “poor me” can learn from.

 

Geoff  

 

Thursday, April 19, 2007        8:40 AM                      San Xavier

 

            So today in San Julian, a town about 30 miles from here Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator, I mean President, is going to make an appearance and give away a few thousand dollars to locals. I thought about going, just out of curiosity, to hear Mr. Chavez and his anti-imperialist rants that he goes on. I am sure everyone heard his comments at the U.N. when he said “the devil was here yesterday” referring to Bush. I am sure some of you might agree with him. Under a normal administration such remarks would probably go unnoticed or even discarded as crazy by most people in most countries of the world. Unfortunately under our current administration our standing and reputation has been damaged to the point where the kind of communist drivel that Chavez endorses is being listened to and accepted by more and more people.

            After thinking about it for a few minutes I decided that going to San Julian would be a bad idea. In San Julian most of the people are highlanders who have immigrated down to the lowlands and also tend to be anti-gringo aka “imperialist” and subscribe to Chavez’s type of thought. After talking with Marco we just decided that it wouldn’t be good for Chavez to be up there talking about the damn gringo imperialists and our evil ways only for some highlanders to point out, “there goes one of the devils now” and for me to get killed by a mob of angry San Julianos.

 

            In other news over the past few days I have been teaching one of the local internet café owners how to reformat here 4 computers. She had no anti-virus running and several of the machines, ok all of them, were infected to the point of no repair. Our winning computer had something like 1235 viruses on it. I was there all day but I hope the internet café owner learned a little bit and will continue to generate some income. More than anything she saved about 100 dollars that a tecnico would have charged her. Tonight is our second basketball practice so we will see how many repeat players show up tonight.

 

Geoff

 

Saturday, April 21, 2007        10:19 AM                    San Xavier

 

            Last night I held my first cooking class for some of the ladies here in town with the goal being to show they how to cook something a little bit different. Hopefully the things I teach them how to cook will contain quite a few vegetables as most people don’t really know how to use vegetables. So on the menu last night was sezuan beef with carrots, green beans, and peppers and for dessert I taught them how to make banana bread. They loved both plates and especially the banana bread. They used to have so many bananas go bad and before I showed them the banana goodness that is banana bread, they didn’t really have any good uses for the bad bananas. It was so funny hearing the ladies leave my house saying, oh yeah I am going to make this for my kids tomorrow but with chicken breast. Or wow this would be good with peas. So check out the photos of us cooking last night. It was truly a good time.            PHOTOS

 

Geoff