geoffinbolivia's Homepage

geoffinbolivia's Homepage http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:12 EST Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:12 EST Zorpia.com Madidi and San Xavier http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1731835 Thursday, September 06, 2007                                                              San Xavier The last few months have seen quite a bit of travel but very little in the way of posting pictures and journal entries. At the end of July and the beginning of August I was lucky enough to go to the Amazonian town of Rurrenabaque, which is the jumping off point for swamp tours and rain forest tours in the National Park Madidi. Parque Madidi has been featured twice in National Geographic magazine and along with Peruâ€™s Parque Manu is considered to be the best preserved park in South America. Madidi is such a rich center of animal life that it is said to contain over 50% of new world mammals including Tapirs, Jaguars, spotted Andean bears, toucans, parrots, and thousands of other birds. There are really only two ways to get to Rurrenabaque. One is to ride an old school bus anywhere from 18-24 hours from La Paz down the worldâ€™s most dangerous road which I biked down last year. The other and option I chose was to fly into Rurrenabaque which takes about 45 minutes from La Paz or an hour from Trinidad which is closer to Santa Cruz. Now the planes that you go on to Rurrenabaque would possibly not even meet the English definition of a puddle jumper. Boarding in Trinidad consisted of a lady shouting, get on the plane, find an open seat and make sure you use both of the seat belts, shoulder straps included. So after choosing one of 11 available seats, mine being right behind the captain and co-pilot to keep an eye on them, we got ready to go. The flight actually went well and the views of the endless swamps and jungle in the morning were incredible. When we got to Rurre about and hour later and were landing my fellow volunteer Jenny remarked that she felt like we were landing in Jurassic Park which was right on the money. The landing strip in Rurre is a dirt strip that stretches out from the jungle and is capped on the other end by 600 foot mountain foothill. It was truly incredible and definitely one of the most beautiful surroundings for an â€œairportâ€ that I have ever seen. So after we touched down at the airport and waited for our bags to be thrown off onto the runway we hopped in our tour companyâ€™s land cruiser and made our way the 2 hours to the beginnings of the swamp. We spent 4 days in the swamp and saw everything from pink Amazonian river dolphins, monkeys, caimans, alligators, and capybaras which are the worldâ€™s largest rodent. Our camp was basic along the river and completely full of mosquitoes. I have never seen as many mosquitoes in my life, and it was the dry season. Apparently during the wet season there are so many mosquitoes that the screen doors and windows of the cabins are black. So after 4 days of cruising up and down the river in our small boat, and wading through waist high water in the swamp searching for anacondas it was back to the town of Rurrenabaque for a shower, good meal, and a nights sleep before headed off for the jungle part of the tour in Parque Madidi. The Madidi part of the tour was amazing and while we didnâ€™t see many animals, seeing trees that were over 1500 years old, and watching different types of macaws fly by was awesome. The sad part about all of this is that the local people are constantly being under pressure to sell the trees and immigrants from other parts of the country are constantly encroaching on the fringes of the park and subsequently engage in slash and burn agriculture. Unfortunately the future of Parque Madidi is anything but secure and one can only hope that the positive impact of tourism and outside dollars can preserve one of the last unspoiled areas of South American forest. So after Madidi it was back to Rurre and then back to Santa Cruz before going in the completely opposite direction to Argentina for a few days. I had a few days vacation left and a free place to stay in Salta, which is about 17 hours bus ride from Santa Cruz, so off I was again. Salta was nice and once again the contrasts between Bolivia and the rest of the world were apparent in all sorts of ways. Taxiâ€™s with meters, police officers doing something other than looking for bribes or getting drunk, dogs on leashes and all sorts of things like that highlight the fact that Bolivia still has a long way to go. So after taking advantage of the great restaurants and wine in Argentina it was back to Santa Cruz before headed to my close of service conference for a week in Cochabamba. So here I am back in San Xavier and things are going great! We just finished our second workshop that we organized that had all of the tour guides from the entire Jesuit Mission Circuit involved. I think the guides are starting to realize the potential for tourism and the basic fact that if they fail to organize themselves as a solid network they will not be able to capitalize on the tourists that come to the different towns. In July we had over 1200 tourists come by to tour the Mission. To end this entry I want to relay something I heard yesterday. So during conversation yesterday someone brings up a recent scandal that happened in town. Apparently during the last major soccer match between the two main teams in San Xavier a fight broke out. Someone decided to call the Police station who dispatched two of their officers to come and â€œinvestigateâ€. Well it turns out the police were not exactly the best people to call because they were both hammered upon arrival to the field. It also turns out that the officer who was driving was so drunk that he crashed the police truck into a car that was parked watching the game. It turns out the car was owned by the mayorâ€™s office and had been driven there personally by the mayor. Needless to say it was not a good career move for either officer who were subsequently shipped off back to wherever he came from. Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1731835 Sat, 29 Sep 2007 08:36 EST May 2007 http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1680266 Wednesday, May 09, 2007 9:42 AM San Xavier   Yesterday the first Sur of the year came in so it is really cold. It was raining, cloudy, and about 40 degrees, which may not seem that cold but for people used to temperatures in the 90â€™s most of the year 40 is really cold. I got back last week from going out near the Brazilian border to help Donovan teach some video editing techniques in his site. Donovan lives in RoborÃ©, which is on the train line that runs to the Brazilian border. The only way to get out that direction is to ride 9 hours in what lonely planet calls the â€œdeath trainâ€ or you can drive in a private vehicle which takes even longer. Currently this is the only way for Brazilian goods to be imported and for Bolivian goods to be exported to this side of the country. Luckily though, the European Union is funding a new Concrete highway that will one day run from Corumba at the Brazilian border, all the way to Santa Cruz. I think the train actually averages about 35 miles an hour because of the bad conditions of the tracks. So after we finished our work out in Robore I decided that I was going to try and visit Ashley and Jenny in nearby San Jose de Chiquitos because it was their town festival on the 1st and I might as well take advantage of being somewhere close. I figured I would try my luck hitchhiking from Robore to San Jose as the highway has recently been completed between the two towns. Because the highway is completed the 5 hour train ride between the two towns has been cut down to a 2 hour drive. The other problem with the train is that it only leaves at 10pm and gets in to San Jose at 3 in the morning. So I marched with Donovan out to the highway and waited, waited, and waited. Eventually I gave up trying to catch a ride after 3 hours of waiting. I guess the death train was going to be the option of the day. So come 10PM I got back on the death train for the 5 hour ride to San Jose. In San Jose I got to see Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, again. He was in San Jose to commemorate the opening of a hospital that the Cuban government has supplied with most of the equipment and several of the doctors. Check out the photos to see the Cuban flag flying at the same level as the Bolivian flag. So things other than that are going great, I am coaching the 17 and under boys basketball team amongst other things that I am involved with in San Xavier. Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1680266 Sun, 13 May 2007 14:25 EST Dengue Fever, Cooking, and Basketball http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1671895 Monday, April 09, 2007         San Xavier               Well I turned 25 the other day. I guess it almost makes a week now and though I donâ€™t feel any older I canâ€™t wait to get back home to reap the rewards of lower car insurance rates. I had a great time for my 25th birthday but letâ€™s just say that Bolivia didnâ€™t choose to repay me in kind.               On Friday the 30th 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 25th 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dengue_fever">Dengue.</a> 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 â€“ 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 â€œpoor meâ€ 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 â€œthe devil was here yesterdayâ€ 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 â€œimperialistâ€ and subscribe to Chavezâ€™s type of thought. After talking with Marco we just decided that it wouldnâ€™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, â€œthere goes one of the devils nowâ€ 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 cafÃ© 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 cafÃ© 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 donâ€™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 didnâ€™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.            <a href="http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/album/812371/album/page=all/">PHOTOS</a>   Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1671895 Sun, 22 Apr 2007 07:12 EST Salar de Uyuni http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1649922 Sunday, February 25, 2007     7:45 PM      San Xavier             Well here I sit in the bus on the way to Santa Cruz to go and get my money for the month. What an interesting few weeks packed with carnival, getting stuck in the desert, a visit to the former richest city in the world, and a fun few days in San Xavier. It all started on the 15th of February when I went in to Santa Cruz to buy a few things and meet up with my traveling companions for the Carnival this year. We were going to the Salar de Uyuni, which is the worlds largest salt flat and one of the must seeâ€™s for anyone coming to Bolivia. First I had to get there which proved to be a little bit more difficult than I thought it was going to be.             This rainy season has been particularly brutal here in Bolivia. It has been raining non stop and several of the roads have been flooded out due to mud slides that have occurred over the past month. Letâ€™s just say that wet roads are a pretty big deal in Bolivia where only 2% of the roads are paved. Dirt roads plus 20 inches of rain in a week doesnâ€™t really make for that good of a time. So the Salar de Uyuni is next to Chile and the Atacama dessert which is pretty much on the other side of the country from where I live. Our plan was to ride a night bus to Sucre from Santa Cruz, normally 12 hours, and then continue on from there. The road turned out to be washed out to Sucre and even if they were leaving it was taking 30 hours so I had to buy a plane ticket. At this point I should have read the writing on the wall and realized that our trip was doomed from the start!           So we all arrived in Sucre which is a beautiful historical colonial city at a little under 10.000 feet. Everything was great in Sucre and when I met up with my traveling companions, 6 girls, we took a 2 hour taxi to PotosÃ. I guess mistake number two was going to one of the most deserted places on the planet with 6 girls! Now PotosÃ is an interesting city that most people have never heard of. During Boliviaâ€™s colonial days the Spanish discovered a mountain high up in the altiplano that had large amounts of silver in it. It turned out to be the richest silver vein that has ever been discovered and the story goes that the Spanish could have built a bridge all the way to Spain with the amount of silver that the they took out of the mountain over 4 centuries. So over 400 years the Spanish Kings and Queens took all of the silver out of the mountain and financed the their luxurious lifestyles and palaces in a large part due to the silver dug by the indigenous peasants that were forced to work in abysmal conditions in PotosÃ. At one time in history PotosÃ had more people living in it than lived in London and it was also the richest city in the world. It is currently the highest city in the world at 4100 meters which is about 14000 feet. The history books say that the gutters of the rich mine owners were made of pure silver, and that the street between the mayorâ€™s office and the church was paved with silver bricks. Fast forward 400 years and Potosi is still the highest city in the world which makes it extremely hard to breath. Potosi is also one of the poorest cities in Bolivia as the mountain has been virtually stripped of all the precious metals. There are still several mines where local people work together in cooperatives in order to make about 2 dollars a day extracting tin ore and some silver. The conditions are abysmal and havenâ€™t improved much in the last 100 years. The life expectancy is only 14 years after entering the mines and in fact the miners are eligible for pensions once their lung capacity has diminished by 50 percent.                     So of course once we got to PotosÃ we tried to get transport to Uyuni, which is the jumping off point for the Salar, only to find that all of the buses were booked and we would have to wait until the next day to travel the 8 hours on the school bus to Uyuni. Now Uyuni is a pretty interesting town. As we were pulling in to Uyuni my only thoughts were, this is where George Lucas got the inspiration for Tattooine, the desert town where Luke Skywalker grew up. I mean here is this town where there is almost no vegetation and nothing anywhere nearby except for the salt flat. I swore that I was going to roll in to town and find Jawas running around. All we found were a bunch of foreign tourists, a lot of Llamas and perhaps the best pizza in Bolivia. It turns out that there is an American that has established a pizza restaurant in Uyuni that is truly top notch.           We finally booked our tour, 75$s each, and prepared to leave at 10:30 in the morning. It turns out that the land cruiser, in typical Bolivian fashion rolled leisurely up an hour late. We didnâ€™t even make it to the Salar before we popped our first tire. Sign number three. The first day went relatively well other than that and the salt flat is truly one of the most interesting, strange, and surreal places I think that anyone could ever visit. We stayed the night in a hotel where the beds, floors, and walls were made completely out of salt.           The next day was when our troubles really started. We left our hotel, and unbeknownst to me the last bit of civilization we would see for a while. Everything seemed to be going well. We made it about 20 minutes before our muffler fell off. Well it didnâ€™t fall off completely. It was still attached to the frame by one bolt. After the driver realized he didnâ€™t have the right size wrench to take it off he came up with a great solution. It turns out that we would, â€œjust drive until it fell off and then pick it up so you guys make sure to keep your eyes outâ€ Obviously I objected to this on the grounds that driving with no extra tire with a sharp piece of metal dragging behind us couldnâ€™t be that good. After convincing the driver of the folly of his logic I used gringo force and Natashaâ€™s leathermen tool to finally get the muffler off of the car. This made for some noxious fumes for the other 2 days of the tour.    So we continued on until we arrived in a secondary salt flat that is about 60 miles long. We were at least 4 miles from anything other than salty dirt when our rear tire popped. It turns out that this was our last spare as the first tire we popped was never repaired. So here we were in the middle of the dessert with no spare tire. Luckily the driver had a spare inner tube, yes they do that in Bolivia, which come to find out was like all of our inner tubes â€“ patched at least 20 times each. We started to jack the back wheel up and I was thinking to myself, damn this 2 foot jack is not big enough for our car. Here we were in the middle of the dessert with a jack designed for a Honda civic using it on our SUV. Turns out I was right as the car fell off the jack and the rotor was sitting dug in to the sand. After we patched the tube, replaced it, and inflated the tire again . . . with a freaking bicycle pump . . . we started to work on getting the rear wheel out of the sand. Our driverâ€™s solution for this - use the highly pressurized propane tank we have for cooking to support the entire weight of the land cruiser while we jack the SUV up little by little. Hmm, 2 tons resting on a propane tank . . . only in Bolivia. After three hours of slowly working the civic jack in to position we finally got the tire on. So we climbed back in to the SUV to find that it wouldnâ€™t start. Now we are at almost 3 hours lost and it turns out that the distributor cable was â€œfregadoâ€ or broken. How do we fix it, with precision engineering, he decided to fix our distributor cable with speaker wire. Yes a carbon cable with speaker wire! It really didnâ€™t work out to well and we limped along the rest of the trip at a great 20 miles an hour. I was really pissed off as the vicuÃ±as, a wild relative of the llama, were running faster than us at one point. We finally rolled in to the next stop at about 10 pm and the driver promised to fix the car for the next day. I guess there was a large supply of speaker wire at the hotel or something. The next day didnâ€™t get any better and the trip pretty much proceeded in the same fashion until our vehicle struggled back in to Uyuni 2 days, five more flat tires, and more motor trouble later. The Salar was impressive and lakes at 5,200 meters, about 18,000 feet were very impressive. If anyone wants to know that some form of life can exist anywhere on this planet, I can think of no better place to witness this than the abysmal dessert of the altiplano, the photos tell the story. When we finally got to Uyuni I demanded to see the manager of the company we went with so we could get our money back. I was told that this was impossible until tomorrow as it was fat Tuesday or the last day of carnival. I decided, in all of my fury to take a little deposit or guarantee so that I was sure the owner would show up the next morning. I got on top of the land cruiser and stole the propane gas tank and told them they would get it back when the owner talked to us. So here I was, steaming, walking through the cold streets of Uyuni carrying a confiscated gas tank. We finally did get 200 of our 500 dollars back.  The Salar is one place I will never ever visit again in my life despite its strange beauty.   Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1649922 Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:16 EST Welcome Dinner, off to the Salar http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1644406 Saturday, February 10, 2007 10:26 PM San Xavier Well here I am after a great night. The feria productive, which translates roughly as the producers fair, held a welcoming dinner here for me in San Xavier. They are the group that solicited my help. They seem really with it. I mean they brought up setting the date for their next meeting, the 26th of this month which is utterly incredible in Bolivia. I mean that is like 16 days away. I was shocked. I mean here I was eating a great dinner that they organized and put together, and there they were planning for the future. Who would have thought this could happen here in Bolivia. Maybe I am just running on a high, or perhaps I am in shock after living with the realities that were San Antonio for over a year. I suppose I also feel a little bit guilty right now because I feel like I am just living to nicely. I guess over the last year I got used to the fact of the way I was living and even more frustrating, how work was going. Or for that matter not going! Either way I am in a much better place now and am ready to kick ass and take names and for now at least, it seems that the group is going to be there right along side me. So besides working with the guides, and the rest of the artisan makers there seem to be a plethora of opportunities. I think I will try and do at least one business simulation during the first three month with a small group of high school kids and I might teach a 10 course small business course at the soon to be opened alternative technical high school. This school is where they teach kids to be mechanics, electricians, vets, etc . . . After talking with the director he said that there was a big lack in learning on how to actually run your business and he needs someone to teach a few classes on the basics. So that might be another option. That is it for today, still rainy and muggy around here. If it clears up tomorrow I am off to the pool in ConcepciÃ³n! Geoff   Monday, February 12, 2007 9:20 AM San Xavier So I went to the pool over in ConcepciÃ³n yesterday and it was a pretty good time. I had to pick up a sleeping bag from the volunteer there because I am going to the Salar de Uyuni, a huge salt flat at one of the most remote places of the earth on Friday. Because this salt flat is located above 10000 feet it gets pretty cold at night. Well that is it for now I hope everyone has a good mardi gras, carnival, and for those of you who are in Chicago, Wisconsin, Michigan etc. . . every time it takes you 5 minutes to get ready to brace the cold outside just think of me sitting by the pool sipping a fresh squeezed passion fruit juice. Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1644406 Mon, 12 Feb 2007 09:06 EST the end of january beginings of feb http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1643182 Tuesday, January 23, 2007                  7:50 AM San Antonio de LomerÃo               Well here I am successfully completed my last arrival to San Antonio de LomerÃo  in the micro. As I wrote last time, I will be moving away from San Antonio, and getting a site change in Peace Corps jargon. I do not feel a bit nostalgic for the 20 de Enero, the name of the micro line, as the last ride out here was more of the same. In fact it was a little disturbing riding on the micro this time.             Chris, Vanessa, Lauren and I went Friday to buy tickets for Saturday, the 20th, to ride back to San Antonio and wisely decided to buy tickets for the Sunday instead. You see the 20 de Enero, or 20th of January was that Saturday and the micro got about halfway before he decided that he would rather sit and drink at the party for the microâ€™s birthday then go to San Antonio. I guess I really canâ€™t blame him at all. But celebrating a cooperativeâ€™s birthday is indicative of the party before responsibility kind of attitude that is prevalent in Bolivian culture. Well because of our genius, we bought tickets for Sunday. So Sunday we arrive and take our seats on the Micro at 7 AM when a lady gets on crying and they put a box at Vanessaâ€™s feet. It turns out that the lady had her dead baby in the box, which was a coffin. Our first feelings were disgust and general discomfort knowing that there would be a dead baby between Vanessaâ€™s feet for at least 10 hours. Then after we got over our initial phase of disgust, we felt so bad for the mother. I mean here she is having lost her baby and now she has to ride with it in the micro for hours and hours. Needless to say it was one of the saddest micro rides that we ever had and another sad story to add to the books about Bolivia. This even fails to mention the poles that were poking Chris and Lauren in the back, and the non-working T.V. that was mere millimeters from Vanessaâ€™s head. I guess the stickers on the micro did say it was â€œlujoâ€ or luxury. Thank goodness that I completed my last ride in the micro, an 11 hour ride that I will be trading it in for a 5 hour greyhound style bus ride. Chris also turned thirty the other day and I guess he decided that it was time to grow up a little bit and that hippy decided to cut his hair!. Ha. It is a totally different look and I gave him a little bit of hell by telling him I would now consider hiring him for jobs other than cutting grass or cleaning pools.  He even donated his hair, some 13 inches or so to one of those groups in the states that makes wigs for kids with cancer. Well that is the news for now, off to breakfast and then to break the news to my friends in town that this Saturday will be my last day in San Antonio   Geoff   Friday, January 26, 2007                     9:02 AM San Antonio de LomerÃo               Well I broke the news to everyone the other day that I was leaving town and my family is sad that I am leaving but most of the people understand that I want to achieve something with my remaining year and that it just wasnâ€™t going to happen in San Antonio. I told one lady here in town and she was like, well what about our accounting classes we businesses owners wanted to do. I responded by saying, that was four months ago, and you guys havenâ€™t even brought it up again with me. Yeah she said, â€œbut Lucio was supposed to organize it, it goes to show that he is just all talk.â€ I then got pretty mad at her because I was like, what is wrong with you. Everyone here always wants to blame the situation on someone else and almost no one has initiative and even if they do they never have the follow through to accomplish their objective. I guess the typical San Antonio work attitude was summed up the other day when Chris was walking from one of the water tank projects. He walked by a house where one guy was digging a hole, and another was lying in a hammock. He asked the guys what they were doing and the guy in the hammock, waking up from his stupor, replied, we are working. Chris and I were thinking, working on what, your tan, your coca chewing techniques, what! Hay San Antonio. That and my counterpart Juan hasnâ€™t come by to see me yet. I went by his house twice to talk with him and asked his wife to have him come by when he got back from the countryside. I told her it was really important and here I am 3 days later and he hasnâ€™t come by yet. It is so typical of the reason why I am leaving. Here he is the president of the artisans and I have something important to tell him, I go by his house twice, and he canâ€™t even take the effort to come by my house one time, a whole 250 yards away. Oh well I guess I am off to greener pastures. San Xavier is even mentioned in Lonely planet and I quote,               â€œFounded in 1691, this pleasant little settlement is the mission circuitâ€™s oldest town and is becoming a favorite holiday destination for wealthy cruceÃ±o, â€œpeople from Santa Cruzâ€ families. Martin Schmidt arrived in 1730 and founded the regionâ€™s first music school and workshop to produce violins, harps and harpsichords. He also designed the present church, which was constructed between 1749 and 1752. It sits on a forested ridge with a commanding view over the surrounding hills. Restoration work was completed in 1992 and the newly restored building appears pleasantly old. San Javier is quite proud of its cheese factory, which you can visit. In addition, there are some inviting hot springs 14 km northwest of town. A further 6 km along is a natural pool and waterfall, Los Tumbos de Suruquizo.   Sleeping and Eating The four-star CabaÃ±as Totaitu, easily the mission circuitâ€™s nicest accommodations, occupies a dairy farm 4km northwest of town. Ammenities include a pool, golf and tennis . . . . .   So either way I look at it, San Javier seems to have a lot of potential for work and seems to be on its way to development. The first thing I plan to do when I get there is a battery drive to collect used batteries, that normally get thrown out into the ground and eventually contaminate the water, and bury them in an environmentally safe way. I figure I can advertise on the local radio, and visit the schools, maybe even the communities and that it will be a way for me to get to know the town well as well as a quick win. Well that is it for today I have to finish packing.   Geoff   Monday, February 05, 2007    7:06 PM                                  San Xavier               Da Da Da. Here I sit in San Xavier having arrived here today in San Xavier after watching what was perhaps the worst played Superbowls in a while. I mean you know something is wrong when a Prince hit from almost 20 years ago was probably the highest quality thing that happened in a 3 plus hour broadcast. On Saturday and Sunday I made a marathon run in the land cruiser with Armando from our office to go and move all of my things out of San Antonio. I arrived back by plane to Santa Cruz from Cochabamba where I had meetings all week and then Armando and I left for San Antonio at 12PM. We arrived in San Xavier at about midnight. We put my stuff in my new room the next morning then made a run for it back to Santa Cruz so that I could buy a few last minute items and to watch the SuperBowl.   Well this morning I went down to the bus terminal through several flooded out Santa Cruz streets. Let me tell you how fun it is to ride in a 1970â€™s era Toyota Carola through water that comes in by way of the floor board. I guess I need to get a picture for you guys but taxies in Santa Cruz generally come with only two things, a driver who may or may not be drunk, and a seat of varying quality. Functioning door handles are only a crap shoot with odds at 3:4 and windows that roll down are about a fifty-fifty proposition.  Oh and the driver being drunk, that is probably about a 1:5 depending on the time of day. So we had to ride through some streets with some high water as the rainy season has been brutal this year thanks to our good friend el niÃ±o, otherwise known as the niÃ±o . . . but then such is life             Here is when things get really good though. I get on the greyhound-style bus recline my seat back, and settle in for the 4 and a half hour ride on an all asphalt road. It was cake! I mean compared to what it used to be. When I passed by the mud road exit to San Antonio I did make some vulgar gestures and said a few bad words about the road. It actually looked more like something I would imagine a mad taxi driver in Italy doing after being cut off. But alas I arrived here in San Xavier and had a nice lunch.  Then did a little unpacking, called my counterpart with my cell phone that now works in San Xavier and we hung out for a while. After that I went down to the internet. Then to the market where I bought spinach, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, and other vegetables and made a salad. Something I really havenâ€™t been able to do for dinner for the last year. Well that is it for today, off to go and take a real shower!!!   Geoff   Tuesday, February 06, 2007    9:28 PM          San Xavier               So I had a good day in San Xavier and I still feel like I am in not supposed to be in living conditions this good. Today Magno, the head guide and most probably the guy who will be my work counterpart, showed me around San Xavier and introduced me to some of the key people here in town. I got to go by the hospital which is the best in the Chiquitania. I also got to meet the Cuban doctor who is working courtesy of the Cuban government here in Bolivia along with about 200 other of her colleagues. For those who didnâ€™t know Cuban doctors are considered the best in Latin America as one of the benefits of their â€œexperimentâ€ has been major benefits in health and plenty of doctors. I suppose enough of them to send some to Bolivia. I also met the other Cuban here in town that is teaching literacy to people here in town. He is the only black guy for miles around and is teaching people to read in the outlying communities as well as those who live in town and are not already literate. The Cubans also have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America. I still would never want to live under their system of government, but there is something to be said for a country that sends doctors and professional teachers to a country instead of troops and missiles. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from the dirty commies after all. LOL             I also found my lunch place today which turns out to be owned by a guy named Marco, who lived in LA for ten years and loves Mexican food. So I have definitely found some people in town that are interesting to say the least. On the Mexican food note I did dig up several JalapeÃ±o plants in San Antonio and put them into pots to bring here to San Xavier. They are still alive and I hope they make it through the transition to the big city.  If you would like to learn more about San Xavier and the rest of the Chiquitania and Jesuit Mission circuit you can check it out at <a href="http://www.chiquitania.com/">www.chiquitania.com</a> and about San Xavier specifically under the San Xavier part of the website under missions.             I also found out today that in addition to internet access, cell service, surrounding natural beauty and so forth that San Xavier has a cable t.v. company which means ESPN and sports center, and a bottled water delivery service. I also had a meeting with a lady form the mayors office, with her initiating the contact and everything. In addition to that I met the American guy in charge of the American NGO World Concern here in Santa Cruz. They specialize in micro-finance loans and have recently added San Xavier to one of their communities where they will work. That is all for today.   Geoff   Thursday, February 08, 2007              7:56 AM                     San Xavier               So here I am in San Xavier and it has been a good few days. Daniel my boss, was passing through San Xavier again yesterday and stopped to stay the night here along with two other people. So for dinner we went to Luigiâ€™s the Italian restaurant. It was really good and I had the fettuccini bolognaise. Yesterday morning started out pretty well. Jack, the World Concern guy, invited me to attend the first distribution of the 150$ micro-finance loans here in San Xavier, and we talked of ways that I could hopefully collaborate in the coming months. He said that they would be having some donors come through in May and would like it if I could give a presentation of the affects that the micro credit has had in town, levels of savings, access to banking services, and other such themes.  After that I went and showed Vivian, the worker in the mayorâ€™s office, the powerpoint presentation for the ecological latrines and we agreed that we would like to do a pilot program in the outlying communities and that I would do my best to bring in a basic sanitation volunteer to teach the method.               Magno then gave me a tour of the lookout points in town, and the rock that the indigenous people based their religious festivals around. It is so beautiful here and there seem to be so many people already working but just looking for that extra little boost, little bit of technical aid etc . . . I talked with the kinder garden director and I think that I am going to go and read books, the ones Kay gave me, once a week at all three of the kinders here in town. Magno also lent me the movie The Mission, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons that is based on the Jesuits push into this part of the world. I highly suggest renting it if you want to get a taste of the area I am living in. Ok that is it for today, I am going to go and bike to the 4 star hotel and check out the pool and â€œgolfâ€   Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1643182 Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:07 EST January 2007 http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1636402 Friday, January 05, 2007                                1:42PM Santa Cruz               Well here I sit in Santa Cruz after a brief stint in the United States which was refreshing and full of great friends, family and food. I think the strangest thing about arriving back in Bolivia is that I left the United States and all the luxuries of the first world only to fall asleep and wake up in Bolivian heat, pollution, and poverty. It was a surreal experience and in a lot of ways I felt like Rip VanWinkle. Tomorrow I am off to San Xavier to talk with the head of the tourist guides there as I am considering a move away from San Antonio. San Xavier has several material advantages including asphalt road only 5 hours from Santa Cruz, a Unesco World Heritage Site in their Jesuit mission, cell phone service, running water, email access and a whole bunch of other luxuries. The main question that I have to decide is if the people in San Xavier are willing and ready to do some work as I have become very frustrated with the apathy that I have encountered in San Antonio. Obviously the main drawback of moving would be leaving the friends that I have made behind in San Antonio. I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to know a little bit more about the whole situation.   Geoff   Thursday, January 11, 2007                            8:55AM San Antonio               Well I got back to San Antonio on Tuesday evening after a harrowing journey in the land cruiser. We got stuck three separate times, and had to push the land cruiser, a 4 wheel drive vehicle, because the road was in such horrible condition. The whole time I am pushing the vehicle, with mud halfway up my shin, I am thinking site change, site change, site change. Please get me out of here. I had a very good visit to San Xavier last Saturday and there seems to be so many more opportunities for work in San Xavier. I would be upset at this point if I didnâ€™t get the chance to make the move and think I many of my frustrations will be mitigated by some of the material luxuries. Besides the material luxuries I was duly impressed that the people there were already doing things without the help of any outside organizations, like running an artisan organization, and giving the tourists passing through good advice on the entire mission circuit. The two other volunteers in my group on the mission circuit, Ashley in San JosÃ© de Chiquitos, and Shannon in Santiago de Chiquitos, are both very supportive of my possible move as San Xavier is the gateway to the Jesuit mission circuit and almost all tourists going to any of the missions go through San Xavier. So I will be here in San Antonio for a few more days before I have to meet Daniel, my boss so he can get on board with the whole San Xavier site change thing.   Geoff                                                                           7:00 PM San Antonio   I forgot to write about the most exciting thing awaiting my arrival in San Antonio. I have a whole bunch of JalapeÃ±os growing in my garden. Some were even big enough to eat yesterday with lunch. Yeah!!! In other news today, I had the first game day coming back to San Antonio and we started with story time with the books that Kay gave me when I was back in the States. I wonder if these kids have ever had anyone read them a story before. After game day I gave out the majority of the helicopter balloon toys that I brought from home and San Antonio turned into a whistling nightmare of amateur aviation for a while. As I was handing out the helicopters I could just see a kid passing out from trying to fill the balloon, or a smaller one choking on some of the parts. Neither has happened so far but only 4 hours have gone by.   Geoff   Thursday, January 18, 2007                            6:30 PM Santa Cruz               So here I sit in Santa Cruz. The PC evacuated all of the volunteers out of Cochabamba the other day and made the rest of us evacuate from our villages to townes where there are air strips. This is all due to escalating violence that was happening in Cochabamba city. I have been here for two days and they have now given us the all clear for returning to our sites as everything is normal, at least as normal as Bolivia can be!               In other news it is now official. I am moving sites. I will be leaving San Antonio to move to San Xavier. In many ways it is going to be sad to leave friends that I have made during the past year, but in so many other ways I think that I am just going to be a happier person. Alright well I am off Saturday morning to the LomerÃo on my last ever trip in the Micro, thank goodness. After that I will be going to Cochabamba for a meeting and then moving my stuff out in the land cruiser on the first Monday in February. Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1636402 Fri, 19 Jan 2007 09:35 EST November http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1616106 Thursday, November 16, 2006                       San Antonio de LomerÃo               Back here in San Antonio and things were surprisingly normal upon my return. Or so I thought . . . So I arrived back in San Antonio to find that my garden was growing well but looked like a small jungle due to 2 weeks without weeding. This was quickly taken care of yesterday with the help of some of the kids in town who I paid for their work. As of now I have a few jalapeÃ±o plants and plenty of squash growing. Who knows if it is going to continue to grow but for the time being it gives me something to do.             I guess the most shocking thing that I heard when I got back needs a little bit of background context in order to be understood. If you read the last few journal entries you might recall the second alcohol related death in the past 6 months when a drunken townsperson drove his bicycle into a ditch. Well it looks like the people have solved the riddle of why he died in a way that I never would have imagined. It turns out that the reason that the drunk guy died had nothing to do with his .3 blood alcohol level, or just the fact that you shouldnâ€™t be going down a hill on a bicycle when you are as drunk as a college frat guy. No it turns out that in a neighboring town, a mere 20 miles from San Antonio, a male witch or wizard, had put a spell on him and cursed him to this fate. Now remember this is 20 miles from San Antonio, where I live, in a small village of about 200 people. So now the word was out that the drunk guy was cursed and that this witch was responsible. So the Sunday after the President of Bolivia arrived in a helicopter here, some of the townspeople in this town, 4 of them in particular, got together and decided to take care of the witch in the best way that witches can be taken care of. They rounded up the witch and burned him alive . . . I repeat it is now the year 2006, in a place where the President of Bolivia flew in a helicopter the day before, and they burned a guy alive for being a witch . . . I couldnâ€™t believe it when I was told the story. Subsequently 4 of the culprits have been taken to jail in the city for their parts in the killing.             What truly disturbs me is that the people in the town stood by while one of their own was burned alive for being a witch, and even more shocking to me has been the lack of response and disgust of the community here. I mean I am truly disturbed to my core that a human being was burned alive on purpose because of witchcraft.             So there it is . . . I donâ€™t really know what else I can say today other than my complete shock and just a general sickness that I fell knowing that this happened in a place close to where I am living.   Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1616106 Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:12 EST La Paz, titicaca, worlds most dangerous road http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1611533 Friday, November 10, 2006    10:00 AM   Cochabamba, Bolivia             Wow the last few weeks have been amazing and really fun filled. First of all I came to Cochabamba about a week ago to have my one year medical exam and by some miracle I am free of all intestinal diseases. I really canâ€™t believe that it is true but if the doc says so it must be. I also was able to go to the dentist where I was cleared of all cavities.           So it was pretty nice to get together with all of my fellow B-40 volunteers and be out of San Antonio for a little while. The best part was after the medical exams when I went on Vacation for a few days.           We arrived in La Paz, which is one of the most breathtaking cities I have ever seen. La Paz is situated in a small valley with houses going up almost 2000 feet all the way to the rim of the canyon. Other than a little bit of difficulty breathing it was great. We even found a German restaurant that had real beer!!! Now talk about a cheap drinking situation. Try drinking an 8% beer at 12,500 feet.           The one thing that really freaked me out about la paz was all of the gringos that are there traveling along the gringo trail, basically machu picchu to la paz. I definitely am not used to being around gringos that are not volunteers. The second day in la paz we road down the worldâ€™s most dangerous road, as declared by the world bank, which was the most intense thing I have ever done in my life. About 26 vehicles fall off the road every year.You have to check out the photos in order to believe how crazy this road is. The road starts at about 4200 meters, or 14000 feet and descends in about 30 miles all the way down to 1100 hundred meters. You reach speeds of 40 mph on your bicycle and some times there are 1500 foot cliff drops just three feet to your left. It was incredible and even the photos I have donâ€™t do it justice.           After that we headed out to lake Titicaca and chilled out for two days there. Titicaca is amazing and it is pretty crazy starring out at a lake and having a hard time breathing because the lake is higher than some of the peaks in Colorado. The last day of our trip we went out to the ruins at tiahuanacu, where there are some amazing pre-inca ruins.           So that was the events, in short, of the last few weeks. I canâ€™t wait to see most of my friends over Christmas and details will be forthcoming of the a get together.   Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1611533 Fri, 10 Nov 2006 09:45 EST October fun times http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1608012 Tuesday, October 03, 2006     6:50 PM               San Antonio de LomerÃo             So umm, did any one else wake up this morning, go to their latrine and find a chicken in their and did it scare the crap out of you because that is exactly what happened to me this morning, that and the light wasnâ€™t on again last night, and I sweated about ten gallons last night.           So now it is about 2:40 in the afternoon and I am sitting here recording this on my new mp3 player that my amazing parents sent me sweating my butt off because it is about 100 degrees with an immeasurable amounts of humidity. I have already drank about 5 liters of water but I have already eaten two mangos so I guess it all evens out.             6:50 PM                Hallelujah, Hallelujah . . . guess what just came on in town. Now brace your self for something unbelievable. No the war in Iraq didnâ€™t end, no you didnâ€™t win the lottery, but something almost as unlikely has occurred. As I sit here typing this jamming to some inspirational John Legend tracks the lights are on in town, and it is lightning because it is about to rain. Now some of you donâ€™t understand the incredibleness of the situation right now, I mean after living for 4 months without electricity, just because of managerial inaptitude, or without a really good rain the joy that these two things can bring. Honestly I ran outside when the electricity came on and I screamed at the top of my lungs . . . whoop!!!   Thursday, October 05, 2006   7:25 AM               San Antonio de LomerÃo             So brace your selves, pestilence, war, famine, and their other horsemen friend of the apocalypse are assured to be released upon the world soon. The concurrence of the events of the last few days can point to nothing less than something of Biblical proportions. There is no way that the electricity has been on for 2 days straight. That and the cement arrived for Chrisâ€™s project. He is building 20, 10,000 liter rain-water catchment tanks here in town and the supplies arrived on the truck yesterday. Every single piece of steel, every roll of chicken wire, and even an extra bag of cement was on the truck when it arrived, even if a day late, which is a miracle within itself here in Bolivia. So Chris and I gathered up the families who are going to be receiving the tanks and unloaded 305 bags of cement in an area of the Church that the new padre has been kind enough to let us use. (Check out the photos) Even the kids were getting into the unloading of the truck by carrying the chicken wire and moving the bags of cement to the doors of the truck so it could be unloaded.           I would also like to let you guys know that you are now reading the words of a verifiable, by people here at least, radio star. Yesterday I was on the radio with a guy named Domingo,(yes he was born on a Sunday) talking about the town fair that is now less than 2 days away. I am so crazy busy right now with the artisans arriving back from Expocruz, the tanks which I am committed to help managing, and the town fair just around the corner. That is it for today, it is time to go and move some cement and lay the foundation for 2 tanks.   Geoff     Thursday, October 26, 2006   8:16 AM San Antonio de LomerÃo             Wow, I am sitting looking at the date of the last journal entry that I made and am stunned at how fast the time has flown. I donâ€™t even really know where to begin as each day has been pretty much full to the brim with activities.           Ok well as I last stated things here in town for some crazy reason decided to turn themselves around and everything seemed to be working. Strangely enough things have seemed to pretty much stay that way. The town fair has yet to occur, we will talk about that later, and the artisans are on the outs with me, but so many other good things have happened in town since I last wrote.           Ok well like I said the materials for the tanks have arrived and we actually have started with the project and are moving at the speed of light by Bolivian standards. As of today there are 4 completed tanks, and 2 tanks that only have about another day of work in order to complete them. That means that in 3 weeks of work we have pretty much completed 6 tanks. So I think that we are both fairly encouraged by the progress so far, even if Chris has almost a daily breakdown because the people can be difficult sometimes.           As can be seen by the photos I have pretty much been ankle deep in cement for the past 3 weeks. LINK Here is one funny story about all the tanks. So Chris goes out looking for John Flowers Aka Juan Flores who we joke about being Chrisâ€™s son here in town even though he is about 50 years old. So Chris is looking for ole John Flowers in order to ask a question regarding the water tanks and his wife tells Chris that John is working on putting a top on one of the water tanks mas alla which means more over there but in Bolivia stands for any or all of the cardinal directions and also distances. For instance if you are looking for something in the city and you ask a storekeeper and they donâ€™t have it they will always say it is mas alla in the opposite direction of which you were coming from. Let me just say that if it was left up to Bolivians for earthly exploration I doubt they would have ever made it past the Andes. So that being said Chris went in search of the mythical land, mas alla, and eventually came upon a house that seemed very familiar to Chris. It seems that when Chris arrived for the first time in San Antonio, to visit Steve who he would be replacing, Steve was working on his last tank in town. So 1 year and 4 months ago when Chris arrived and went and talked to Steve here in San Antonio Steve was working on his last tank that only lacked the top and Steve said something along the lines that normally he lets them finish the tanks by themselves as they know how to do it and it is not that big a deal. Now, fast forward, 1 year and 4 months and Chris is searching for John Flowers and has arrived at this house where Steve was letting them put the top of the tank on. Now Chris hopes, prays, and curses all at the same time that they are not just now putting the top on the tank. Sure enough John Flowers is up there finishing the tank, which now must hold the record for longest time to ever complete a tank in history, as the construction is at most a ten day process.           In other San Antonio news the economics class has been going really, really, well even if I might be stirring the local population into harassing the mayor a little bit. It turns out that the mayorâ€™s office sets the price of beef in town, and we proved in my economics class that the reason there is never any meat is because they have the wrong price set. I worked this into the class on free-enterprise, command economies, and so forth and asked the profes who owned the cows, the mayor or them. At this point there were lots of rallying cries that it is not right that the mayor controls the price of their private property.           So that was my work against the mayorâ€™s office this last month but I guess that I also worked with him as we finally had the monthly fair like I have been trying to do for some time. The only difference is that somehow the fair eventually morphed into a visit by Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia. Evo came out to celebrate 2 new tractors, a water tanker, and some other things that were being given to our town and the mayor and I decided it would be good to take advantage of the presence of the authorities to sell traditional food and artisan goods. One funny thing that occurred when I was planning the fair was my talk with Domingo, you know the one born on Sunday. So I was talking to Domingo and I said knock on wood and asked him if he knew the expression. He said that he did know the expression but that people in San Antonio donâ€™t believe in superstitions. I could hardly contain myself. I mean as far as I am concerned the people in San Antonio are the most superstitious I have even met. So I asked him if they donâ€™t believe in superstitions what is the deal with sitting on hot rocks and getting sick to which he replied, well everyone knows that one is true . . .           In other good news I have found funding for my Sunday game day with the kids while the parents get wasted. Unfortunately there was another death last Sunday related to alcohol in the Lomerio area. It turns out that one of the guys in a town nearby left the soccer game completely hammered on his bicycle and crashed it in a ditch on the way out of town injuring his head and killing himself. Yet still the town doesnâ€™t see the drinking as a problem. They all said the reason he crashed was because of a fight with his wife and it had nothing to do with his .25 or so blood alcohol level. Either way I really hope to get this game day going with the nuns and the priest in town. My only worry is that it might turn into an incentive for the parents to get even more wasted as the kids will be occupied. But I guess if the parents donâ€™t care now then why would they change their behavior now.           Well that is it for now and I will write again after my bike trip down the worlds most dangerous road and trip to lake Titicaca. Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1608012 Thu, 02 Nov 2006 10:16 EST It's been a long september . . . http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1595563 Friday, September 08, 2006    7:15 AM          San Antonio de LomerÃo   So guess what? The motor is fixed. Although now the motor has to be broken in for a few days before it will work again. That and they do not have diesel for it now. I also heard that the telephone is working again. Needless to say I believe that two things are likely to happen very soon. A â€“ the entire town of San Antonio will spontaneously combust because it is now, with the motor fixed and telephone, tempting the universe with such a high level of irregularities. B â€“ Is going to snow for the first time in like 500 years here. I really canâ€™t believe it, but I guess that I still have a few more days till I actually have a light bulb that works in my house so letâ€™s knock on wood.             The ride back here was fairly comfortable yesterday, all things considered, and other than having to wait at a gas station for about 30 minutes because of a diesel problem right now in Bolivia it went really well. On the way back I saw more animals then I have ever seen on the road here, unfortunately due to burning, which is driving the animals from their hiding places in the forest.             Last night I also had my economics class with the Profes and as far as I am concerned the interesting part of economics started last night. Last night we talked about costs in terms of economics, opportunity costs, and I think it completely blew their mind to think of the cost of things as a loss of opportunity not just money. It went really well and apparently the econ class is one of the talks of the town so that is really encouraging.   Geoff   Sunday, September 10, 2006  9:00 AM          San Antonio de LomerÃo               Who would have believed it? Yesterday our dry cycle was ended by light but continuous rains for almost half of the day. I danced a little jig in celebration and it was definitely nice to see water falling from the sky. We also had a neighborhood well cleaning where all of the men in my sector went down to dismantle the well and clean all of the mud off the filter and from the inside of the 40 meters of tubes. Chris and I were definitely giving each other looks as we were taking the steel tubes out of the well hole and thunder was heard nearby. I thought that somehow we might get unlucky and demonstrate Benjamin Franklinâ€™s experiment again to the local townspeople.             Yesterday Peace Corps finally got a hold of us after trying since Thursday to tell us that we were in the alert stage of the emergency plan. Basically we couldnâ€™t travel. The PC was about to send people out here to San Antonio to look for us as they were going to declare us missing volunteers.   Geoff   Monday, September 11, 2006 4:05 PM         San Antonio de LomerÃo               I am back in the mayorâ€™s office as there is still no light in town. It turns out that the motor is fixed, but now they donâ€™t have any diesel in order to break in the motor or supply electricity to the town. Yesterday I had about 6 of the neighborhood kids over to play an Uno like card game at my house yesterday. I also made a huge plate of banana bread, which didnâ€™t last but about 10 minutes with all of the 8-14 year olds over at the house. I definitely think that the games will work. Now all I have to do is get some money in order to buy the games because these next few months are going to be pretty expensive on my PC salary.             The monthly market day here is moving along rather well. The ads are printed and our mayor has even helped even more by securing the meeting of the state government to be convened here in San Antonio for the first time ever. This should be interesting as the Governor of Santa Cruz is one of the strongest proponents of autonomy. Who cares about all of that? I am just imagining all of the money that can be made by the people with a sudden influx of politicians of Santa Cruz, the Governor, and their staffs.             Chris and I had a good laugh today and I had an I told you so moment with Chris. About 6 months ago Chris sold his hammock to another volunteer with the intention of getting another one made, bigger and better in order to replace his. He ended up asking this lady in town to make it for him. I was like, what the hell dude, why didnâ€™t you get it made through the Artisans who I am working with. There was really no excuse but it was no big deal. So mistake one: not going through the artisan group in town but contracting privately through some lady. Then he paid her 300 bs or 75% of the hammocks price up front. Mistake number 2, never pay for anything here until you physically have it in your hand or else it will never get done.             So today, 6 months later, Chris goes to get his hammock, which he ordered pure red and black from the SeÃ±ora. (Side note -  Chris is color blind and has a hard time distinguishing between greens, reds, and grays, which makes it even funnier that he offered to help me do the color wheel with the artisan group, but that is another story) So he comes to my house, and has this hammock which is fuchsia, black, peach, and red orange. He said he could tell that the colors were off but that he didnâ€™t know how bad. So here is Chris with this hammock that looks like some horrible hyper color shirt that was left over from some 1980â€™s music video. On top of that the hammock is perhaps the most poorly woven piece of artisan work I have seen in a long time. Either way my mom just keept saying, â€œHay, Chrisâ€ and we all laughed for a long time. At least he learned the lesson and is now going to order another hammock from my Artisan Group.             Geoff   Thursday, September 14, 2006 7:08 AM                    San Antonio de LomerÃo   So still no motor, still no telephone. I guess San Antonio is not going to spontaneously combust after all, the universe is still in balance, and you are all safe for a while. That is all.   Wednesday, September 20, 2006 3:40 PM                Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz   Well here I sit in the PC office in Santa Cruz trying to figure out if I am going to Cochabamba to help with training of the new group who just arrived to Bolivia. Right now all of the main roads out of Santa Cruz are shut down by socialist campesinos who are demanding more money from the government amongst other things. Either way it is pretty frustrating as I might be stuck here in the city and not get to go and escape the heat for a little while.   Thursday, September 21, 2006 6:19 AM                    Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz               Well here I sit in the airport in Santa Cruz using the wifi connection waiting for my flight to Cochabamba. In the meantime I hope that they resolve the issues of social unrest as the people who are really suffering from this blockade are my artisans who wonâ€™t be able to attend the trade fair here in santa cruz and may be out as much as 40% of their yearly income. Agggggggggggg.   Geoff   Friday, September 22, 2006    9:10 AM                      Cochabamba, Bolivia   Wow I just want to comment on how nice it is to be up in the mountains where it is not humid, tropical and hot like in Santa Cruz, although this heat and tropical culture in Santa Cruz has its advantages as well. Most of the advantages have to do with the clothing selections of the female variety. Well that being said I am still glad to be here even if it is for a day or 2.             So for some reason I am really lucky right now because as I sit in the hostel I am watching Sports Center, which is being broadcast on ESPN Latin America for some reason. I donâ€™t really care it is just awesome to watch sports center.             Ok well I miss everyone bunches and will see you soon. Geoff   Tuesday, September 26, 2006             9:00 PM          Santa Cruz, Bolivia               So here I sit in the hot hotel room here in Santa Cruz. The past few days I really havenâ€™t gotten a whole lot accomplished other then checking up with the artisans at the fair called Expocruz which is basically a huge state fair that accounts for something along the lines of 10% of Boliviaâ€™s GDP so needless to say it is a pretty big deal. Unlike at the state fairs back home all of the people who are trying to sell stuff are models! Yeah! SO needless to say I have come pretty close over the past few days to buying a thresher, bags of cement, and other things that I really donâ€™t need but the prospect of talking with such beautiful women is such a draw that I might end up buying something I donâ€™t need before the week is out.   Friday, September 29, 2006                3:30 PM          Santa Cruz, Bolivia               The past few days have been pretty interesting. So far I have been able to hold out from buying anything really unnecessary such as cement, bricks, livestock or anything else but alas I am going to Expocruz one last time tonight so it should be pretty interesting! I plan to take quite a few pictures with the hot women of models but we will see how that turns out.             The artisans are doing well except that they are out 150$ because the fools didnâ€™t listen to me. Sometime I feel like I am banging my head against the wall and the following story makes me want to punch something, bang my head against a wall, and scream all at the same time. Before I left for Cochabamba the artisans had a big meeting at which I explained the benefits of using a cash register, which I helped the artisans make. The cash register as us Americans know it does not really exist in Bolivia except for high end restaurants, stores, and a few other random places. Most medium sized or small sized businesses take care of their cash in the following way. They basically have an envelope, pocket, or if you are really lucky a dedicated drawer where they just drop all of the bills and coins without any sort of method or system. I told them this was not going to fly with me as money was bound to get lost, they can never make change fast enough with this system, and a myriad of other problems that just throwing cash in a box posses in a hectic situation like Expocruz. So when I went the other day to check up on them I was thoroughly astonished that they were using the cash box. They were all like wow Lucas, it is so much easier to make change and stuff with this cash box. So that was victory number 1 for the fair.             Victory number two comes in the form of the inventory registration system that I helped them with and that they were also actually using. You see, pre-Lucas, I like to define the artisans in these terms, they once again just went to the fair and sold stuff and figured it out when they got back to san antonio. So that didnâ€™t go so well.             So there are the two victories. The big loss is that before they left for the feria I told them that they had to get a machine to detect fake dollar bills and Boliviano bills. I even offered to help them do this but warned them that it makes no sense to not spend 10 dollars on a machine that can avert large losses of cash. It turns out that they never did go get the machine because they didnâ€™t have time to get it. AKA they didnâ€™t believe me that it was important and now have in their possession a hundred dollar and a fifty dollar fake bill.   So please think of me and send me some positive vibes so that I donâ€™t end up slowly banging all of my brains out of my head.   Till next month, Geoff             Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1595563 Sun, 01 Oct 2006 13:40 EST August and everything after . . . http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1586242 Monday, August 14, 2006      7:00 AM                  San Antonio de LomerÃo Back here in San Antonio after a fun dust filled micro ride of 10 hours. Yeah. Well tomorrow will mark two months since the motor has been broken and I have been assured that the mechanic is going to start working on this motor today! Yeah. I really hope he gets it done because the relative comfort of 80â€™s temperature wise is slowly disappearing in favor of the 100â€™s that it is going to be for the rest of the year and the possibility of sitting front of the fan for 3 hours a day is looking sweeter as the days go by. So the fan and that it has not rained a drop in 3 months now which is really a double edged sword. On one hand the road is passable and I havenâ€™t had to push in a while, (knock on wood) even though the micro did flip over on its side when I was in it a few weeks ago which is another story, on the other hand it is completely dusty and our water tank is almost empty. Thankfully the wells are not dry as in other years so there still is water in the wells even though supply is getting low. So I went last night and talked with the new Catholic Father here in town who is American. I think he was a little shocked when I walked up to his house in the church compound and started talking to him in English. The Padre is from Michigan and is taking a 6 month break to work down her in Bolivia while our Franciscan Padre recovers from some back issues in the hospital in Santa Cruz. Well that is it for now. I miss all the friends back home and hopefully a few of you will remain unmarried, 3 good friends engaged in the last month. I hope that by the time I get back still have a few people to go out with! Geoff Tuesday, August 15, 2006      8:44 AM             San Antonio de LomerÃo So it starts today. We are now officially on water restrictions and the lines have started down at the water pump and all of this during the hot part of the year. I have thus been cut down to one bath every two days. It is ok though because my sweat right now serves as about the equivalent. Right! I guess that is why Chris is here helping the people here build these water tanks at their houses. It just turns out that most of the people squandered a lot of the water by using it to wash clothes and so forth instead of for drinking which they now need it for.  Well I am off to find some way to cool down today and maybe go harass the motor mechanic as to how much longer it is going to be before the motor is fixed. Thursday, August 17, 2006    11:00 AM             San Antonio de LomerÃo I just got back from meeting with the professors, or high school teachers, about the economics class that I would like to start teaching and they are all for it. I am starting the class this Monday and it will consist of ten classes during a two month period. Once again I sit here in the Mayorâ€™s office to use the generator as the motor has been fixed, but now has to be broken in until Monday before it can begin providing electricity to the town. So it wonâ€™t be maÃ±ana, but several maÃ±anas before I can start using the electricity that runs to my house. The Mayor has also asked me to come back and meet with him this afternoon about organizing this monthly fair so we will see what happens this afternoon. I hope that he gives me some one on his staff, preferably someone who has some extra time and the ability to introduce me to all of the community leaders when we go out to the comunidades, to help with planning the monthly market day. I think it should work out pretty well and if anything maybe that will be my lasting legacy here in San Antonio as who knows what the artisans will still remember about me 5 years from now. The truth has pretty much come out about the profe that was killed and it is more disturbing to me then previously thought. Apparently the attacker, profe Antonio, called Profe Anicleto, who died, a maricon or fag, as he was walking by to go and use the bathroom. Profe Anicleto came back after using the bathroom and said something along the lines of why donâ€™t you say it to my face and not like a punk at which point profe Antonio stood up and essentially sucker punched Anicleto in the jaw, (all of the profeâ€™s lower teeth were broken so he must have really hit him) Anicleto was knocked out and fell and his neck/head hit a piece of wood that was lying behind him. Then this is the most disturbing part for me. The people who were at the party left Anicleto lying on the ground for 25 minutes before they went and got the ambulance. Some of these people were supposedly his friends, including two of our artisans who I had been refering to as shady 1 and shady 2 due to the various shady and unscrupulous activities that they engage in. Their actions really disturb me as I already didnâ€™t trust these two because I think they steal money from other community members and they have sold me out several times. I mean could you imagine seeing someone who was knocked out right in front of you and not doing anything about it until the body starts twitching? And this is someone who thought you were their friend. I mean who knows if it would have made a difference as I think he probably died instantly from the neck trauma, but it could have made a difference and more than anything shows me not to trust those two with anything. We will see what the fallout is with the artisans. I think that it will be yet another dividing political force between them. I mean would you want to be in a room with someone who stood idly by while your husband died. I donâ€™t think I would. So yet another struggle in what is the daily life in San Antonio. I miss everyone, and tonight when you go to bed and wake up with a fan, or air conditioning, just think of your good old buddy Geoff who is sweating up a storm down here in South America but on some twisted level still enjoying it. Geoff Friday, August 25, 2006         3:22 PM              San Antonio de LomerÃo Well things have been pretty busy here in San Antonio over the past week. Hey hey. So weird, yesterday was my one year anniversary here in Bolivia. There was no cake, no ring, no romantic dinner and the day passed as any other did. But one year, wow! I once again sit here in the Mayorâ€™s office as the motor is still not fixed. Come to find out that once the mechanics fixed the main problem they found that another replacement part was needed which is going to cost another 800 dollars which who knows where that is going to come from. So for now it seems as if we are going to be without electricity for quite a while longer. Several people in town have said that it is without hope. On Saturday morning I went out into the jungle to participate in a minga. A minga is when the community gets together to work for one person in town usually doing manual labor of some sort. Think of it as a barn raising. About 45 men, and one super gringo (me), armed with machetes and axes went out to clear a field for one of the elderly men in town. We got their about 8 in the morning and worked until noon. I couldnâ€™t believe how much land we cleared. It was a track about 200 yards wide and 300 yards long. It was a lot of work and my hands were blistered and my machete dull after 4 hours of hacking down shrubs and small trees. Needless to say I came back at noon, drank about 2 gallons of water, chowed down my lunch, and passed out for an hour until I was awoken by friends to come and drink chicha, the reward for our minga . . .yeah. My economics class was great this past Monday. 14 of the professors showed up and it was great to see that they were learning something different and a bit out of the ordinary. I also hope that maybe they can take away some of my teaching style, i.e. interactive, fun, participatory and so forth and apply it to their classroom teachings. In Bolivia most of the learning is rote memorization style and that type of learning is not very effective or captivating for the students. It was a great class and several of the profes commented that the hour passed in what seemed like minutes which was encouraging for me. I got back to my house to find that it had been temporarily converted into a slaughterhouse. Yeah. My family was going to be butchering two cows over the next 2 days and if you have never had the pleasure of hanging meat in your living room then you havenâ€™t lived but who says that you really want to. It doesnâ€™t really bother me that much, other than when you wake up in the morning to what seems like some bad scene out of the Godfather awaiting you in the living room of your house. The thing that I really donâ€™t like about them butchering beef is that people start arriving to buy meat at about 4:30 in the morning and like to talk about it right outside my window. I have been meeting with the new padre here in town as I hope to collaborate with him on a few projects. After seeing the effects that alcohol has here in town, the most sad for me being that a lot of the parents go off and get drunk on Sunday afternoons and leave the kids with nothing to do but sit at home. The padre and I are going to try and set up a program on Sundays where the kids in town can come and play games like monopoly, uno, life, etc . . . I have already seen that the kids love playing these games and more than anything I hope it gives them a positive place to be during the afternoons on Sundays, instead of waiting for mom and dad to stumble back to the house at 8 or 9 oclock. Well that is it for today, I miss everyone and everyone do a little rain dance for me. Thursday, August 31, 2006    6:09 PM          RoborÃ©            (Near Brazil) So here I am sitting in RoborÃ©, Bolivia which is on the way to the Brazilian border. I am here in RoborÃ© with plans to help one of the tourism volunteers give an accounting workshop to all of the local hotel owners in her town. Things have been going pretty well since I last wrote. Except for holding someone down who was possessed by demons while they sprinkled holy water on them . . . So the night before I left for Santa Cruz, last Tuesday, I had an economics class. It was once again a success other than the fact that somehow the subject of what Bolivia needs to do if it needs to be a success economically came up. And that could be a very long conversation. Subsequently I came home at about 8:30 on Tuesday night and was chilling and having a nice evening when I heard a lot of noise coming from the space outside my room. I opened my door and saw that my uncle was being held up between my mother and my grandmother. My first thought was that he had to be drunk. You can imagine my thrill after the past several weeks events involving drinking and drunks. It turns out that my thought process was only half true. It turns out that he was having convulsions, which I recognized to be epileptic seizures. He had been drinking fairly heavily and the only other time it happened, Easter, he was drinking as well. So Chris and I had to hold him down for what amounted to about 2 hours as he went through several seizures which were very severe. The doctor in town couldnâ€™t give him a tranquilizer because of the alcohol in his body and just told us to make sure he didnâ€™t hurt himself. Now he was having severe convulsions that looked exactly like what happens in the exorcist, minus the green vomit. My family obviously thinks that somehow the devil or somehow a demon is at work inside of him and if it wasnâ€™t for my upbringing I would most likely place the blame on satanic powers as well. Holy water was thus sprinkled over him to thwart out the demon. How much longer I have to wait before we do a full out exorcism is still to be seen, but I donâ€™t think our new American Padre will most likely not participate. So that has really been the last few days. Anyone else helped hold down someone who is possessed while they are sprinkled with holy water in the last month? I feel like I need my own MTV true life show. . . You think you know, but you have no idea . . . . Geoff Tuesday, September 05, 2006  11:26 AM Santiago de Chiquitos (Near Brazil)             So the last few days have been really awesome. I am out here in Santiago de Chiquitos and we have finished teaching our accounting workshop and it went really, really well. A tourism volunteer from my group, Shannon, invited us out here to work with all of the small business owners in order to strengthen, or more likely than not, start some basic accounting of their businesses or organizations. The workshop went well and this morning we worked with the people on setting up their books.             That pretty much covers the work part of the last few days but the best part about being out here was the surrounding natural beauty. This is the first place that I have been in Bolivia where I would actually come as a tourist. As can be seen in the photos, there are amazing waterfalls that are virtually deserted, great views of endless valleys where toucans, parrots, macaws and so forth fly all over the place, and more than anything the â€œnaturalezaâ€ is what makes this place nice. On Saturday we hiked up to this waterfall and went swimming in the pool below it. We were the only ones there and it was great just to relax.             One interesting thing regarding Shannonâ€™s site is the presence of Milton, an American Quaker who left the states as a conscientious objector during Vietnam and continues to live here in Bolivia as a sustainable farmer. Who would have thought that on the fringe of the Amazon basis there would be an American with 5 kids with Indiana country accents? I had a really good time talking with Milton and even better was eating the milk, cheese, and yogurt that are homemade from their cows.             That covers the past few days adventures but I also want to comment a little bit on the political situation here in Bolivia which most Bolivians are saying is pretty â€œgraveâ€ or grave. For those of you who are not aware Bolivia recently elected a new president, Evo Morales, a former coca union leader and the head of the MAS or movement towards socialism party. Through his leadership they are busy trying to write a new constitution that is more â€œrepresentativeâ€ of the Bolivian people. As of right now the process has almost completely broken down because the two sides, neo-liberalist and socialist, are very far apart on a number of issues. During the elections the voting line was basically split along the lines of the poor, indigenous, campesinos voting for Morales, and the wealthier, more mestizo, city dwellers voting for Tuto, an Aggie, who was president about 5 years ago. Even more difficult is that the voting was split along regional lines with the wealthier provinces of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni, and Pando going to Tuto and the provinces of the west including Oruro, Potosi, La Paz, and Cochabamba going to Evo Morales.             Basically the two conflicting views come down to the haves and have-nots. That is if you could even break down hundreds of years of history into two issues. Either way I am starting to worry about the complete breakdown of the political process as it looks like the constitutional assembly is about to dissolve and many people here are . If that happens all bets are off as to what will happen. Many CruceÃ±os, people from Santa Cruz and the wealthier districts think that autonomy or even civil war may be the only solution. Either way the signs of increasing tension here are troubling and living day to day not knowing what the future holds or how much longer I might be here is a little troubling. I guess all I can do for now is hope that the democratic process works itself out and that the glass half empty people here in Santa Cruz have erred in their judgment of the current political situation. Either way it is time to keep the passport with you for any quick escapes that may be necessary.             That is it for now, I am back to Santa Cruz tonight and then to my site for another 3 weeks. Who wants to make bets whether or not the motor has been fixed? Oh yeah, how about the phone as well. It has been broken for a month now as well. So I had no idea about the political situation until I came into the city. Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1586242 Wed, 06 Sep 2006 11:01 EST July Journal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1572998 Thursday, July 06, 2006          7:20 AM          San Antonio de LomerÃo               Ah San Antonio. What a crazy, work filled, few days it has been since coming back from Santa Cruz. Sunday the 2nd was the day of elections for the constitutional assembly. Bolivia is going to rewrite their constitution so we will see how that process evolves over the next several months, right? On Sunday my host mother had her first day of selling food and chicha at the house. She is going to open every other Sunday and sell plates of chicken, pork, chicha, beer etc . . . Needless to say once the generator got going and the music was pumping the people showed up ready to party at my house. It ended up going till 3 in the morning with me dancing with some 45 year old women to Outkastâ€™s â€œBombâ€™s over Baghdadâ€ and Jay-Zâ€™s â€œH to the Izzoâ€ It was awesome and kind of surreal. At one point the music was going and everyone was standing around waiting for more Chicha which my host dad, AndrÃ©s had run to the other side of town to get. It really reminded me of college, no wait there is another keg on the way, hold on, I swear he went to get another one!             Monday morning I went really early to Vanessaâ€™s site and woke her up telling her that she was coming to San Antonio, A â€“ to have some fun, B â€“ to help me register and monitor the accounting while we registered things in our new raw materials bank for the first time, and most importantly C â€“ Blow some stuff up on the 4th of July. So Vanessa came and helped me register things with our two, responsables, for the raw material bank. They really understood what we were doing and I think that in six months, my timeline for turning over complete control to them that they will be able to teach others how to run the bank, enter things into the credit and debit columns, calculate the unit price etc . . . Either way I feel good about the whole situation at this point.             On Tuesday, the 4th of July we actually loaned out the raw materials to Artisans and then the afternoon was dedicated to preparing things for our tech exchange, the 10th 11th and 12th, baking a cake, and getting things ready for the 4th of July. That night, with photos as evidence, Chris and I decided to combine our pyrotechnical â€œgeniusâ€ to make Molotov cocktails, which we wrapped with firecrackers. It was a great time and fun to give a shout out to the U.S.A. even if there was no meat in town for a grill out.             Well that is pretty much it for now, nothing much else is going on. There is no power in town as the motor is once again broken. It will be fixed by maÃ±ana, at least I have been assured to such.   Geoff   Monday, July 17, 2006           7:22 PM                      San Antonio de LomerÃo               So it is MaÃ±ana now . . . The motor is still broken and we donâ€™t have any electricity. It has now been over a month, since the 15th of June, since we had power here in San Antonio. Today I powered up my laptop at the mayorâ€™s office from their generator. They have been kind enough to offer me a desk to work at until we get power back in town, which according to the people here in town could be quite a while. I just got back from Natashaâ€™s site where we had a technical exchange. Two of our Artisans went with me. We basically shared with Natashaâ€™s group, who is a little bit more advanced than ours, all of their experiences in regards to selling things, fairs, accounting, problems that they have encountered along the way, etc . . . It was a good experience and I hope that now the artisans here have a better vision of how their association can be once they resolve some of the simple issues that they have. Otherwise things have been good and I am already scheming up my next two projects that I want to do here in San Antonio. My plan for the next few months is to.   <ol style="MARGIN-TOP: 0in" type="A"> <li>Make the raw materials bank self sustainable by training the ladies intensively â€“ I am moving up the date when I leave them by themselves by 2 months </li> <li>Work with the Mayor to have a once a month market day here in San Antonio. Right now there is no official market day for people to bring their left over yucca, honey, corn, or whatever to sell. Basically they just need someone to help organize them </li> <li>Go through all of the official paperwork and formalities, ie. Write a formal proposal to the school director and so forth,  to start my econ class I want to teach </li> </ol>   So that is it. There is a wine and cheese festival in Santa Cruz at the end of the month so you all know that I am going to be there to pay my 5 dollars entrance fee to taste all of the wines and eat up all the cheese that exists in Bolivia.   Geoff   Friday, July 21, 2006                                                  San Antonio   Well coming to you live from the Mayorâ€™s office here in town. I met with the mayor the other day and he is all in for making an official monthly market day here in San Antonio so I think that that is going to occupy my time for the next few months. I often times wonder why they donâ€™t take initiative to come up with some of these ideas by themselves. I guess it is a big cultural difference that we are always raised to look at problems that exist and think of a way that we can solve them. I think that here the culture tends to lead them toward finding someone else to find the solution. Sometimes this can be really frustrating as evidenced by this whole motor situation here in town. I could solve this motor problem in a week if they let me get control of things. The problem would be that I would be vilified by the community for cutting off power to those who havenâ€™t paid. I guess they all expect that someone else has to pay for everything, which I see as a pretty common attitude throughout Bolivia. I am ready to get back to the city for a few days of r and r, a hot shower, and a little bit of good food but who is to say that rice and potatoes isnâ€™t good food?   Geoff   Sunday, August 06, 2006                                           Santa Cruz de la Sierra   Well here I am in Santa Cruz and what an eventful week. Two weeks ago,the 24th, I bought some things with the artisans on Monday, went out to Jaysonâ€™s site Camiri from Tuesday to Thursday, and then made my way back to Santa Cruz for the wine and cheese festival. Jayâ€™s site was pretty cool even if it was the complete opposite of mine. 32 thousand people and basically everything you could want or need including several internet cafes. I had a good time and it was nice to see another part of Bolivia. We returned to Santa Cruz in time for the Friday night wine and cheese festival which ranks as one of the best nights yet here in Bolivia. There was a large group of volunteers as well and Bolivian friends and girlfriends that enjoyed all that the wine festival had to offer and ended the night going out here in Santa Cruz till still undetermined hours of the night. So there is that. The pictures tell a better story then the journal does.             Nothing much went on this week in San Antonio until yesterday when the whole community of San Antonio was sent in to shock. Today is Independence Day here in Bolivia and so the parades start the evening before on Saturday. San Antonio had planned to have a parade where all of the children in town carry candlelit stars in the colors of Bolivia and the national flag and so forth. It was supposed to be a good time with music and something different happening in San Antonio. So at 7 Chris came by my house and we went over to our friend Lucioâ€™s store to grab a soda and hang out until the parade started. About 730 we started to hear screaming and several people sprinted by going to the hospital which is about a 100 yards away from where we were. The ambulance soon raced by and stopped at the house 4 doors down from us, while people were screaming the profe died the profe died. It turns out that two of the professors, high school teachers, in town ended up getting into a fight. During the scuffle one of them fell and broke his neck and was instantly killed. It turns out that the profe who died is one of the artisans husbands, in fact one of the 2 new responsables for the materials bank who I have been working pretty closely with over the last month. So I knew the guy pretty well and feel really horrible for his wife, who is now widowed and left with three kids and the only breadwinner in the family gone.  Needless to say, both of the men were reported to be wasted. I was really upset last night at the whole situation involving alcohol in San Antonio. I mean the people just get so wasted that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. I canâ€™t stand to be around the chicha most of the time because the pressure to get completely hammered is so strong that it is not even fun and not even a social event involving alcohol, but an alcohol drinking event that happens to coincide with some social occasion. I just donâ€™t understand the whole obsession with getting completely blasted out of your skull, and that being the objective of the evening. I feel like the social events in San Antonio are just an excuse to drink. In a lot of ways it is sad to walk down the street on a Sunday afternoon and run into someone who I normally like, who can hardly walk straight, and is slurring their words and tries to talk to me about something. Sometime I just want to be like, hell man drink, but drink like a freaking adult and not like some 17 year old at junior prom. So enough of that rant for now! Tomorrow I am headed to Cochabamba for a workshop with my counterpart. Till then . . .   Geoff Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1572998 Mon, 07 Aug 2006 07:03 EST June Journal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1555603 Friday, June 30, 20 9:07 AM         Santa Cruz   Things I have done in the last month.   Danced with a 6 year old   Danced with an 80 year old   Walked on fire. OK it was more of a run but it sounds cooler to say walked.   Stood up on a micro, short bus, for 9 hours.   Gotten a bacterial skin infection.   Kissed a nun. On the cheek of course.   Made Molotov cocktails.   Thrown several little kids into the air.   Jaywalked part of the widest street in the world in Buenos Aires.   Collectively drank / gave away to friends about, a full jarra, 25 gallons of Chicha, the locally fermented corn beer drink. It still makes my taste buds water.           Well here I sit in Santa Cruz after a whirlwind month that was completely insane and has moved at such a fast pace it is scary.   At the beginning of this month I made my way for 7 days to Buenos Aires Argentina to meet up my friend from High School Jessica. I arrived in Argentina and was immediately shocked by how nice everything was. I mean there were turnpikes on the highways, a toll tag booth, actual lines to delineate the highway lanes, dogs on leashes, little trash all over the place, and a million other little things that brought to my attention how used to living in Bolivia I have become over the past few months. Either way it was a great trip where I ate well and had some cultural stimulation in the form of the opera we attended at the famous Buenos Aires Teatro Colon and the art museum. It was a great trip and a nice little break from Bolivia.         The day after I returned to Santa Cruz I had to make my way back to my site where my town festival was about to get underway. Natasha, from my group and Sarah, two of my volunteer friends made the trek with me out to my site. The fun part about this whole trip was the fact that there were no more seats left on the short bus by the time we could buy tickets. I ended up standing for 9 hours and the girls sat on my bag in the aisle. This proved to me how salty these girls really. I mean 9 hours on a short bus sucks anyways, but without a seat. Big props to those two!         We got to the town festival and it was a great time. Chris and I bought a whole pig and a whole jarra, about 25 gallons of fermented corn beer called Chicha. We also had some rum and cachaca which is a brazilian liquor. We wore our traditional costumes and danced with the people and generally had a great time during the whole festival.         After the festival I made my way with Chris, to Santa Cruz as we both had these weird skin infections, his on his legs and mine on my face. Sexy right? Well we went to the dermatologist here and he told us we had bacterial skin infections and put us on medicine for a week. Since we had to go back to see him 5 days later there was no way I was going to go all the way back to my site just to have to turn around and come back to Santa Cruz. Instead I went to Muyupampa to visit Sarah in her site since she was finishing her service a few weeks later.         Being in Muyupampa with Sarah was awesome as I didnâ€™t really have to do anything the whole time except eat. She took care of me like a little kid and it was the first time in Bolivia where I didnâ€™t have to cook a single meal. Basically I was lazy guy that sat on the couch while the girl cooked him amazing Chinese food, waffles, and all sorts of other yummy stuff. It was great as I normally do all of my own cooking and it was good to see that even Yankee girls have a little bit of southern charm to them. For those of you reading this back home, please donâ€™t take this as a demonstration of my attitude towards females.           After clearing up my skin infection I left Sarah and headed back to San Antonio where I did two days worth of classes for my project, the revolving fund/raw materials bank. I have high hopes for this project and my next few months I will be concentrating my effort into ensuring itâ€™s sustainability and long term success.   Friday the 23rd was San Juan day and in my town on San Juan day to clear your self of sins and prove your faith you walk across hot coals the first 5 minutes after midnight. I was thinking to myself. No way this is real. I mean I have seen fire walking on the discovery channel and what not but here. Then I realized that I am kind of living a National Geographic special as it is. So the town people started the huge logs on fire about 10 pm and let them burn something fierce for 2 hours. At midnight, after 2 hours of drinking (I only had 1 beer but in retrospect should have had more) the took the logs away so that only a huge bed of red hot coals remained. I was looking at them thinking ok no way I am doing this. Then I thought, what the hell this is what I am doing peace corps for. Somehow though in the back of my mind I dreaded and foresaw me calling the PC doctor with a conversation that might go like this. â€œHi Dr. Mauricio, uh can you send a vehicle to come and take me to the hospital, it turns out I have 3rd degree burns on my feet, oh how did it happen, well you see I decided to walk over red hot coals in my site . . .â€           Well after some reflection I decided to take the necessary steps and I did it. I walked, ok letâ€™s go with skipped rapidely across the hot coals. My feet didnâ€™t burst into flames and it was definitely an exilerating experience that I will never forget. Plus I burned all my sins away!   So that brings me to this week. I arrived here in the Scru on Tuesday and met up with my artisans to do all of the purchases for our raw materials bank. I was all over Santa Cruz buying everything from whole leather hides, to ear ring backings to 50 kilos worth of yarn. It was definitely taxing.   Yesterday Sarah arrived here in Scru as here flight back home was leaving this morning. We hung out and had a great dinner out last night at one of the better restaurants in Santa Cruz and I said goodbye to her at the airport this morning.   Well that pretty much sums up my month so far. This next month is going to be jam packed as well as I have a technical exchange with Natasha and her artisans on the 10th through 12th, back to Santa Cruz for the wine and cheese festival, and then I will be teaching some accounting to some hotel owners at Shannonâ€™s site near the Brazilian border at the end of the month. Either way things seem to be popping off quite well here and between isolated bouts of loneliness everything really seems to be falling into place.   I miss everyone and look forward to seeing as many as possible this Christmas/new years when I will be home for a few days.   Love, Geoff   Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1555603 Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:34 EST Starting Thursday may 25th http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1538222 Thursday, May 25, 2006    7:31 AM             San Antonio            Well back here in San Antonio for another week. I got here on Monday evening after yet another exciting bus ride! Basically it was horrible as always. This time it was a little bit more bearable as Chris, Lauren, Vanessa, and I all rode back together on the 20 de Enero, the name of the micro line syndicate.           We all had a good time in the Scru as it was the going away party for B-36, the group that is about to finish their service on Saturday. Unfortunately it was really cold when we went to the resort area and we were unable to take advantage of the pool. We played American football, danced, and had a nice going away party even if I knew that I wouldnâ€™t see most of the people again. My friend Jason, who is the next group to leave, B 37, says that being in the Peace Corps, â€œIs like changing high schools every three months with one group of friends leaving and a new one coming inâ€. On Sunday I did nothing but sit in the hotel room in the hostel we stay at, watch TV and movies, and eat pizza. We were watching cinemax and this show came on with this guy who grew up in Euless, Texas. I said to everyone, hey that dude is from where I went to high school. This guy had tons of tattoos and had according to him â€œalready done the body piercing thingâ€. According to him he was ready to take it to a new â€œspiritualâ€ level and have the ultimate body decoration, a gunshot wound. Now this fool proceeded to pay some guy in Dallas, who surprisingly has done this for a few people already, 500$ to shoot him through the shoulder with a .38 special in this guys â€œgunshot parlorâ€. I was pretty disturbed by the whole thing and really got to wondering why people in our society are so dissatisfied with just living and why there are people who have to go to such extremes as shooting themselves just to feel different. I mean here in San Antonio life may be simple but no one would ever shoot themselves just to have a scar. I mean most of the people here share the same last name in some form or other and you donâ€™t see them desperately, i.e. shooting yourself, looking for attention. Whatâ€™s more I was greeted by some encouraging news when I arrived back to San Antonio. The Artisans held another fund raising lunch. I guess as soon as one group does something and proves that they have success they put the pressure on the rest of the group to do something. Either way we have about 1000 Bâ€™s and lack another 600 which they have 3 more weeks to complete in order to complete their contribution for the raw materials bank, which is my keystone project this first year. They might even knock it out this weekend. That and the meeting we had Tuesday night only lasted an hour which just completely astonished me. After we get this bank we will have hopefully solved the issue of never having raw materials to make things. Needless to say it looks as if I might actually be accomplishing something with the Artisans after all. Tuesday also happened to be Lucioâ€™s birthday. Lucio is pretty much my best friend here in town and really works hard to make things better for his kids. He is a teacher at the high school and with his wife runs one of the better stores in town. He is the kind of guy that is intuitive in giving his customers service. He uses a plastic bag to pick up bread with his hands, always has cold beer, keeps accounting books, and I think probably the guy that is most â€œwith itâ€ in town. I even saw his wife teaching his kid how to read out of a book the other day. I have not seen anyone under 18 reading a book here in San Antonio since I have been here. Needless to say I end up spending a lot of time with him and his family. We exchange English classes for Besero classes and I think that I am going to teach an Econ class to the professors in town. I originally planned for it to be for the high school seniors but after reviewing my syllabus I realized that it is probably too advanced for them. I figure I will run the 10 class course by the professors first and then ask them for their suggestions. Lucioâ€™s birthday was fun as the Nuns, his family, Chris and Me, and a few other people were in attendance. There were plates of chicken that had a BBQ flavor which who knows how they made. It was good nonetheless. So we had a few beers and ate chicken, rice, potatoes, yucca, and a Brazilian dish the Nuns made. My favorite part of the day was when the one nun, started acting like she was pulling beers out from behind her veil. We joked with here that I had to take a photo to send to Benedicto. Everyone had a good time and I was even able to eat two lunches that day. Tuesday was essentially a win, win, and win some more day for me here in San Antonio. Geoff  Saturday, May 27, 2006    8:45 AM             San Antonio            Today is Motherâ€™s Day in Bolivia and true to form I have been invited to 3 lunches. Mark one down for the visiting team. Yeah! Last night the school put on a program for the mothers in town that started at 7. Unfortunately the lights on the basketball court were out of service, wouldnâ€™t you check that the night before? They thus proceeded to fix the lights and true to form the program didnâ€™t begin until about 7:30 or so. It was pretty strange because the program consisted of the National Anthem, gymnastics/cheerleader pyramid building shows by the older kids, singing songs by the younger kids, and the most rapid poetry readings I have ever heard. All in all it was interesting and I was able to notice some similarities between Motherâ€™s Day here and in the U.S. First of all Motherâ€™s Day is always celebrated more the Fathers day. Dad gets a tie, mom gets a gymnastic program. As Chris Rock says, â€œNobody cares about daddy, what does daddy get? Nothing but the big piece of chickenâ€!           In other great news there is something growing in my garden that is not weeds. I think it is eggplant, some green beans, and a whole bunch of lettuce. We will have to wait and see what is growing as I didnâ€™t really mark down where I planted things. After I finished building the gray water system and the fence for my garden, Chris and I realized that neither of us really had an idea of how to garden or plant vegetables. So this first run was kind of like, uh lets put it in the ground and see what happens.  Wednesday, May 31, 2006 11:08 AM           Santa Cruz, Bolivia            So got in to Santa Cruz last night, and given the circumstances of the trip it went pretty well. Essentially I was planning to leave San Antonio to come to Santa Cruz on Wednesday morning. Chris kind of hustled that plan along as he was bitten by a dog and PC, with rabies concerns sent the landcruiser to get him. Naturally I took advantage of the free ride and faster trip. It took us 4.5 hours as opposed to 10. Well here I am in the PC office doing some work before my trip to Buenos Aires for a week.           On the home front, San Antonio, the Artisans have raised all the money they need for the raw materials bank, 3 weeks early!!!! I can hardly believe it and am convinced that it is going to snow as this happened, our meeting lasted only 1 hour, and there were sightings of 50 cent taking a bath the other day. There is no way that all three of these occurrences are isolated.  That is it for now,           Geoff           Personal http://www.zorpia.com/geoffinbolivia/journal/1538222 Wed, 31 May 2006 10:19 EST