Journals
Sunday,Oct 30 2005, 01:02:19 PMPosted on October 31st 2005
Sunday October 30, 2005 4 Am back in Cochabamba for now
Well we just returned from our site visits and luckily they had us booked on flights coming back from Santa Cruz. The flight is about 40 minutes but the drive about 10 hours so it saved us quite a bit of time and hassle. That and the fact that they bridge on the main highway washed out and will not be open for use again for a couple of months thus making the journey on the old road even worse. I am not sure how they are going to get us back to Santa Cruz but I really hope they spring for the 50 dollars and fly us out there. For those of you who remember my Camp Guercio days where I was flying to San Antonio because it was too far to drive, ha ha how far removed am I from that right now.
I collapsed at 4 pm today when I got to Coch and just woke up and decided write this all out.
Well my site is pretty cool. I am located about 7 hours but probably about 140 miles from Santa Cruz in a town Called San Antonio de Lomerio. The town is about 100 years old and I am completely baffled by its existence. The people don’t farm on a large scale, they don’t have any natural resources, wood, ore, fruits, animals, that anyone in Santa Cruz highly desires. There is not a readily available source of water or a long standing mission. The Mission has not been around longer than 50 or so years and the new Church in the pictures has only been around since the late 80’s. I for one am really stunned at the existence of such a town as it is not even on the main road. I guess I have two years to figure it out but who knows if I will because even the people in town did not have an answer for me as to the existence of the town when I asked them.
The town of San Antonio is beautiful and small. Very small, I guess I did not join the peace corps to live in a city which I have the rest of my life to do. There are supposedly between 1500 and 2000 people in San Antonio. SA from now on. The city is located in about a 1.5 mile by 2 mile rectangular plot of land with the grass open plaza, and the church basically centering the town. The town has electric poles strung all around it that run off an industrial size generator that produces power for the town and runs to the houses about 4 or 5 hours a night form 5 or 6 till 10 o-clock at night. Funny thing about this though is that the generator has been fregado, or broken, for the last two months. Everyone in town has assured me that it is being fixed and will be running by tomorrow which is Monday, I am not holding my breath however.
The town is divided into 6 sectors that correspond to the number of hand pump wells in town where all the water comes from. Apparently they have a large problem with water in the dry season when several of the wells dry up and it does not rain for 4 months.
That bring me to Chris Salvagio, who is the Basic Sanitation PC volunteer in San Antonio. He has been there for three months and is working right now putting in dry latrines which basically rotate between 2 holes in a cement box every 6 months and you can use the waste as manure after the six months are up. Right now most people in town have wet waste latrines which are basically a hole in the ground that doesn’t have any casing or anything. Thus the water supply in town can become highly contaminated by leaking human waste. That is his first project to build about 20 of these more environmentally friendly latrines.
Chris has come into a very difficult situation as his Spanish is still developing, he came in at a level of “Taco Burrito” as he told me so that makes things difficult as I get the feeling a couple of people in town view his Spanish level as a reflection of his intelligence. Even harder than that he came in replacing a volunteer named Steve, or Estevan, who did some amazing things in town as a basic sanitation volunteer. He built several like 20 or 30 maybe more 10000 Liter water catchment tanks that take the water from the roofs of houses during rains and routes it into these water tanks. He also built latrines, a viewing tower in town, and who knows how many other things while truly integrated into town and everyone loved him and does not stop talking about him.
Even more sad than this was that Steve passed away shortly after leaving the PC right after Chris arrived. If you do a google search for Steve Peace Corps and Plane crash I am sure you will find several articles about him in the papers back in the U.S. I even think there was a 20 20 special about him. Well Steve left straight from the PC and met his mother in Peru to travel with her before returning to the U.S. Well a plane that he and his mother were on Crashed during my first month here and he and his mother were both killed.
Chris had to break the news to the town during his first few weeks there that their beloved Estevan had been killed so Chris has had a rough first few months but seems to be handling it fairly well.
My living situation looks to be pretty good. I am staying with one of the professors from the local high school. I am going to have my own room bigger than my one I have now and bigger than any room I have had in my life. It already has 2 beds in it a large 6 foot long dresser as well as a bookshelf. The house has ceramic tile roof and is made from cement. The floor is bricks or stone with cement. I can’t really remember right now. The Prof is married and has a new baby and a 3 year old so thing will be calm compared to some houses with 6 kids and pigs running around, roosters perching on your doors etc. . . I think my rent will be in the neighborhood of 5 dollars to 15 dollars a month. I anticipate spending almost no money in my town as there is really nothing to buy. Here are the things you can by in my town. Rice, potatoes, other dried grains, on a good week a Pepsi, sometimes a beer, rum, cookies, mustard and mayonnaise, onions, tomatoes, someone’s beef or chicken meat if they just killed the animal, toilet paper, salt, fireworks on occasion, and the artisan products that my group makes which are really awesome.
So as for my name, Geoff is pretty much unpronounceable in my town so I have been forced to make a change in my name. Geoff comes out as Chip, or an oddly sounding Chep. Well I have free range here and really thought about calling myself Lando Calrizian from star wars for a while, Chewbacca was also a good possibility, Dirk Diggler yet another, Kermit was also appealing but after a while I ended up deciding to go with my middle name Lucas. If anyone has any really awesome possibilities for good names I still have the ability to change my name in town so send me emails with your ideas and I will consider them The thing is that they have to be pronounceable in Spanish. Thank goodness the parents picked a biblical name for my middle name or I would be really out of luck in having a Bolivian pronounce my name.
So there is one phone in town and the situation works like this, you call and at this point ask for Lucas or maybe Chewbacca. Then they hang up on you and they send some little kid running all around town looking for me. I give him 10 cents for his trouble then go wait by the phone until you call me back. How funny is that?
That is pretty much it. So any food that I have to get I have to bring with me from Santa Cruz, or I have to go to San Ramon about 4 hours away where there are fruit and vegetables. There are 2 “Short Bus” transportation routes in a day from Santa Cruz so I am going to see if I can bribe the driver into bringing me fresh fruit and some vegetables once a week. I figure I should be able to get it done but we will see. I plan to cook for myself but the current volunteer, Chris eats twice a day at a restaurant where you get rice, pork, tomatoes and onions as well as a soup.
As for me I am on a strictly no pork diet. I have seen how the pigs live as they just wonder around town eating anything they can get there dirty mouths on. Plus there is a worm that can make a calcified hole in your brains that sometimes resides in pork meat. Pigs are so disgusting here it is incredible. They don’t get fed so they survive by eating trash, thrown out food from people, human poop, their own poop, and I have even heard that if they are hungry enough each other. Completely gross and it sucks for me that I don’t eat pork because it is the most eaten meat in town.
So that is that, I will write more about my work situation at a later date but I have several things going for me.
They are highly organized for a Bolivian Artisan group, they have great products, they have a good board and organizational leadership, and they have access to technical support and funding through a Bolivian NGO called Cruz Verde, or Green Cross. So I am coming into one of the more developed PC projects. Some volunteers are starting from scratch.
I hope everyone is doing well at home, whether that is in the Nederland, College Station, the rest of Texas South Africa, Ecuador or Peru, or Iraq for a few of you. Thanks for those of you who have sent packages and or emails. I will have plenty of time in my site to write individuals once I get my computer in Christmas.
Oh one more really amazing thing that stunned me about my site. While there is only one phone and no electricity in a much smaller town about 1000 people about 10 miles away there is an internet café with high speed satellite internet access. I figure I will be able to use it once every 2 weeks. Who would have thought that in the middle of essentially jungle, in a town of 1000 people with only generators producing electricity and one phone line there would be an internet place. What kind of world is this ? ? ?
Love to all,
Geoff
Friday,Oct 21 2005, 07:13:04 PMUpdated Friday October 21st, 2005
Friday October 21, 2005 7:45 Am
Well since I will no longer be continuing Quechua classes I have Friday as a free exercise day. I am going with Willie to go check out the mayors office and see how they function. On Sunday I am leaving to go to Santa Cruz, meet the regional director there and then go out to my site for a few days to meet my counterpart, the family I am going to live with, and other things that are similar to that. This afternoon I plan on going to an Artisan Fair where the group that I will be working with for 2 years is supposedly going to be. Other than that I don’t really have much of a plan today.
Geoff
October 18th 2005 7:02 Am Coch
Back at “Home” now. Kind of a nice finding out about the rest of the country but I am totally ready to sleep in my own bed. The trip ended awesomely because on Monday we found out where we will be living and exactly what we will be doing for the next 2 years of our lives. More about that later though.
So the hike was awesome and the view was made it all worthwhile. See Pics/ With the Amazon basin unfolding before me I feel and realize that I am a world away.
The trip from our last night stop in san Jose de chiquitos where the Amazon pictures were taken and where there will be a volunteer. Chiquitos is on the Jesuit mission circuit where 5 volunteers will be. Anyways the ride from Chiquitos to Santa Cruz was as close to horrible as I thought any ride on a “Highway” could ever be. From chiquitos to the modern and new santa cruz, lots of oil and business money there, it is only about 90 miles but at an average, spine rattling, bumpy, completely horrible “highway” ( a very loosely defined word here in Bolivia) ride of an average 15 miles an hour it was the most horrible traveling experience of my life.
So finally we got to SC and man was I happy. The first thing I did was grab a huge burrito and negro modelo at the Mexican restaurant near us. It was no Freebirds but was pretty good none the less. The next day I woke up and ate a foot long subway sandwich at a real subway sandwich store. Hells yeah. I think they put every single ingredient available in Bolivia on it. After that I a took a nap until I went to a movie theater that could rival any in the States and saw Dukes of Hazzard. I even sprung for a large popcorn and a big fountain drink. Over all it was just a nice time to chill in a modern city and get a little taste of some of the things I miss.
G
8:00 Am
Drinking coffee and having a pastry in Coch before I finally get to go to the Christo. So as far as my sight goes. Well yesterday was site announcements, where we are going to be living for the next two years. We went to the Micro-Enterprise directors gated community, hella nice, he lives in the same neighborhood as the current president of Bolivia. Well after a week of jockeying lobbying and downright waiting for my job I ended up getting a site in the province of Santa Cruz. It is a town called San Antonio de Lomerio. It has about 2000 peoples is about 8 hours bus ride from Santa Cruz to the north. And if you are really ambitious it is close to a small town called Concepcion in Santa Cruz Department. I will be working with a group of Artisans in this town. Apparently they are highly motivated but need someone with business knowledge to help take them to the next level. There products, so I here, are good and there commitment and motivation is strong. They lack, and I say this from just what I hear, is good marketing, pricing, accounting, leadership, organizational, selling, and general organizational skills.
So that is my primary job. To help them go from a good organization to great one. Poco a Poco. Little by little right. Well I am totally excited as starting this Sunday I get to visit the site for a week. Awesome right.
G
11:30 Pm
Sitting at the top of the Christo in Coch right now. It is bigger than the one in Rio de Janeiro and I am looking down on the Cochabamba skyline down below. See pics.
Photos don’t really do it justice but it gives a general idea. What a great town. It will be sad to leave Coch but Santa Cruz city just rocks out.
Geoff
Friday 14th of October 2005 San Jose de Chiquitos, Santa Cruz, 6:00 Am
Tech week has come to a close and has been really awesome so far. We are going to Santa Cruz City tonight which is the Big City. Most of our time has been spent in the countryside on what is called the Jesuit Mission Circuit, Really pretty 18th century Jesuit missions in the Amazon basin. You can really see the disappearance of the rain forest here where we are only 50 miles from brazil and people are using the land with slash and burn farming. Will it be here in 30 years . . .not unless we do something about it. That takes money and giving people other economic options for life. You can’t blame the people for wanting to use the land and make money. The thing is after about 5 years of soy bean farming there are no more nutrients in the soil and the land is useless. It is essentially like human locusts on the rain forest. So sad L. Well this morning we are going hike to this cool rock formation and have some good views of the Amazon down below.
Geoff
9th of October 2005 Asuncion de Guarayos 6:00 Am.
Wow tech week has been great so far. We are in a town called Asuncion de Guarayos. You might be able to find it on a map if you looked on the net. The town is the largest between Santa Cruz and Trinidad. It is a completely different world here than Coch. To get here we had to go east from Coch over the ridge of the mountains. So we climbed for about an hour and a half until we were above the clouds driving. We started our descent and you could instantly notice the difference between the Coch and the other side. So as we descended to the other side of the mountains things started to get much more tropical. It was a cloud forest where there is pretty much drizzle all hours of the day and thus the road washes out frequently. So this road was pretty salty or “hard core” Anyways after that we descended from the mountain into the region called Chappare, which is where the coca, what they make cocaine from, growing region. It is also the region where Evo Morales, the leader of one of the more left political parties and presidential candidate has lots of indigenous support and his strongest base of support in the coca growers. Basically after the mountains the roads became much better. It took us all day, from 6 am , until about 130 to get to Santa Cruz for Lunch. SC has a completely different feel from Coch and any of the other Andean sites like oruro or La Paz. Santa Cruz practically did not exist until the 50’s when roads were started to be built in. It has exploded since the 80’s with oil money and some say coca money. At one point with a new rail connection to brazil it was the fastest growing city in south America. Santa Cruz is thus younger, nearer to the amazons and much less conservative. Mini skirts everywhere. Very like what I imagine brazil to be like, that and the women are beautiful.
Well after a descent lunch in SC we left for Guarayos where we were going to do out business sim. The business simulation went like this. We teach the kids for 3 days on the basics of opening a business, basic accounting, basic market study, product selection, marketing, location and the like and we give them a loan that they have to pay back at the end of the exercise. On Sunday they sell there products and services and then on Monday they pay back the loan with interest.
Well we went though all sorts of business ideas and concepts for a few days and they really enjoyed it. I think the section on accounting, you know the basics like fixed costs, variable costs, unit price, unit cost etc . . . was really great. My favorite part of all of this was when it really clicked in their heads and they got it. We were looking over on groups businesses and they realized that if they have a 30 b loan and sell 30 empanadas at 50 cents a piece they won’t be able to pay their loan. Light bulbs just turned on inside the kids.
So the business sim ended up great and last night willy, marco, the business director and myself ate piranha for dinner. There will be pics soon. That was sweet and the fish was alright. I mean how many people can say they have eaten piranha in the Amazon basin.
Till next time,
Geoff
6th of October 2005 7:41 am
Tech week here we come. Totally excited right now about actually being able to put my knowledge and training into practice. We also got our site descriptions yesterday so now all of the jockeying for position starts.
Tuesday,Oct 4 2005, 10:24:32 PMhowdy all
Monday October 3rd 2005 6 pm
This last week has been really busy one again. We are busy preparing for technical week that is going to be in and near Santa Cruz. We will be doing a business simulation with 17 year old high school students. They get loans and after doing all of the research steps they will work for 2 days in small businesses in their town.
We had a crazy weekend. I woke up at 600 on Saturday to be in Cochabamba or Coch, pronounce Coach, in order to be in time for my 9 am Quechua tutorial. I was totally not in the mood for Quechua lessons and it was really frustrating. Anyway I was at the “optional” tutorial until 11 when I went with Willie to make him buy a phone. In French accent, “I do not need a phone yet” . . . five minutes later “Geoff can I see your phone”
After that we met up with Ashley and Claire and ate in town. At about 1 I went to go get my hair cut with the girls advice. Damn did I look smooth after that, at least more than normal. I got the Guti style haircut. For those of you who don’t know Guti is a real Madrid player or was that had a feux hawk. A small line in the middle. Either way it looked and still looks pretty tight.
At 130 pm we had to go to this hotel to hear about the PC peer support network which is basically what it sounds like. That ended at 4:30 and we went and checked in to our hotel where we were staying in Coch. Anyways I got dressed looking like don juan and all of that and we went to one of the third year volunteers house in the city for a big bbq with all of our group and about 25 other volunteers who came in town for the occasion. We drank a bit, ate hamburgers, and had a great American style early evening. I even bought liquor from a drive through liquor place in Coch called stop and go. Ha ha ha.
Well after a few hours it was time to go out. Yeah we were really excited since we have been in our sites for about a month and haven’t gone out at all. After a month of essentially living in the boondocks everyone is totally ready to “wyle out” (go crazy for my older readers)
So we got to the first bar about 11 and all of us were feeling pretty good. After several hours of fun in the bar and talking with some cool Bolivians and “what not” it was time to hit up the club or discoteca called pimienta verde. How fun was this place. I got their before the others cause I was not in a walking mood at this point of the evening. So me and 3 other volunteers who wanted to take a cab got to pimiento verde at about 1230. . . .so I was dancing etc. . . with this other volunteer Vanessa when to my surprise like forest gump said, something just jumped up and bit me in the but, actually it was more of someone grabbing my butt. So the first time I pretty much ignored it but after the third time I turned around to find the most gorgeous bolivian angel I have ever seen flashing me a great big smile the “the look” So I figure I might as well run with this and see where it goes. Turns out she is a university student and was totally into me. We danced for about a while an hour or so but here comes the funny part. So after I bought her a few drinks one of my good pc friends Claire, shows up . I totally turn and start dancing with Claire, see pics and totally blow off this gorgeous Bolivian girl. She was pissed! Well after a while 4:30 came around and it was time to get back to the hotel. This hot bolivian came up and started asking me what was up why I blew her off etc . . .She offered me her phone number which I told her I didn’t want HA Ha Ha Ha Ha and HA. I kind of feel like a jerk but then I remeberd and think of all the times that girls like her pull that same kind of crap to guys. Oh well all the other pc dudes called me an idiot but I think it was well worth it. I can’t believe how great it is to be gringo here. If you are tall, and gringo you are in with the hot chicks, if you have a few bucks and blue eyes you are freaking Don Juan when you go out.
Well back to the story, so by about 5 we arrive at the hotel by God’s grace alone and crash out. It’s funny how 12 hours of partying can change the original sleeping arrangements of the whole group. No details forthcoming
Well lets just say at 6:30 am and the trip I agreed to go on to some Inca Ruins about for hours from Coch came very quickly. So I took a shower and wobbled myh way down to meet Greve, the tourism director who was waiting with the pc land cruiser for us.
It was pretty much the longest car ride of my life. 4 hours on a cobblestone “highway” that winds and winds and winds, did I mention it was windy. I was so, what I am going to call tired, that the fact that my head was leaning up against the window and rattling like a Mexican maraca didn’t really bother me at all. All of the girls (4 of them) threw up from what they called “carsickness” maybe but maybe 12 hours of drinking and 1 hour of sleep may have had something to do with it. Just a theory though.
The ruins were awesome as the pics demonstrate and the guide we had was great 2. I think I found the cure for being “tired” how bout a 55 degree waterfall amongst inca ruins. It brought me back to life. Well I slept 11 hours last night and woke up today totally refreshed.
I think I am going to sum up this weekend with a family guy quote.
“Peter are you drunk?” “No I am just tired from being up all night drinking!!!!”
Till the next time,
Geoff
Tuesday 27th of September 2005 7:20
I haven’t written in a while for the simple fact that we have been really busy. We are preparing for technical week where we are going to a town near Santa Cruz to help train some people in basic business practices and techniques.
One thing that is exciting me is we are about to enter the season where avocados are cheap. Can anyone say Guacamole? I have gotten used to the food here but can tell that after a while I am really going to crave a big bloody thick NY strip steak and calamari or something like that. You really want to cook meat here to make sure that it is really done.
Tonight we are staying at the training center again to watch movies, one of the girls is going to attempt spaghetti from scratch, have super hot showers, that sort of thing . . .
The weather here is starting to get a bit warmer but that really doesn’t mean much here in cochabamba where the whether is pretty much perfect year round. The people who have lived here all their lives think it is always to hot or to cold. Anytime it varies above 74 or below 60 they complain. Coming from Texas I think that this is really funny.
This past Sat. I went to town and ate sushi at this restaurant at Cochabamba. It was great and best of all I didn’t get sick. Who would have thought that I could get a plate of tuna sashimi hundreds of miles from the ocean in a land locked developing country. Now all I need to find is a dr. Pepper, some wings and more and a miller lite. Maybe one of you can ask wings and more how they make their wing sauce.
In other news I have been a pretty good influence on the monitor, jherri, I have him reading harry potter and I taught him the horns down sign, which he flashes at Ash every time she comes over. Next week we are going to work on yells . . .Whoop!!!
Oh yeah I also taught him how to armpit fart. I figure if they are already getting (excellent) American culture, like Barbie curtains, FUBU hats, hell I even saw a farmer here in marquina wearing a aTm hat the other day. The kid might as well know how to armpit fart.
Another funny part about Bolivia to close this entry. Well as you all have heard alcoholism is a big problem here in Bolivia. Just an example of that is the fact that what we call rubbing alcohol, you know to get nail polish off, clean wounds etc . . . well here it is called alcohol potable, or potable alcohol, if you don’t know what potable means it means drinkable or safe to drink . . . yeah right.
Till next time,
Geoff