Friday,Jun 30 2006, 02:34:38 PMJune Journal

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 didn’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 didn’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 don’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 it’s sustainability and long term success.

 

Friday the 23^rd 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. “Hi Dr. Mauricio, uh can you send a vehicle to come and take me to the hospital, it turns out I have 3^rd degree burns on my feet, oh how did it happen, well you see I decided to walk over red hot coals in my site . . .”

 

        Well after some reflection I decided to take the necessary steps and I did it. I walked, ok let’s go with skipped rapidely across the hot coals. My feet didn’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 10^th through 12^th, back to Santa Cruz for the wine and cheese festival, and then I will be teaching some accounting to some hotel owners at Shannon’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