Monday,Aug 7 2006, 12:03:43 PMJuly Journal

Thursday, July 06, 2006          7:20 AM          San Antonio de Lomerío

 

            Ah San Antonio. What a crazy, work filled, few days it has been since coming back from Santa Cruz. Sunday the 2^nd 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 Outkast’s “Bomb’s over Baghdad” and Jay-Z’s “H to the Izzo” 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, Andrés 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 Vanessa’s site and woke her up telling her that she was coming to San Antonio, A – to have some fun, B – 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 – Blow some stuff up on the 4^th 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 4^th 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 10^th 11^th and 12^th, baking a cake, and getting things ready for the 4^th of July. That night, with photos as evidence, Chris and I decided to combine our pyrotechnical “genius” 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 mañana, at least I have been assured to such.

 

Geoff

 

Monday, July 17, 2006           7:22 PM                      San Antonio de Lomerío

 

            So it is Mañana now . . . The motor is still broken and we don’t have any electricity. It has now been over a month, since the 15^th of June, since we had power here in San Antonio. Today I powered up my laptop at the mayor’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 Natasha’s site where we had a technical exchange. Two of our Artisans went with me. We basically shared with Natasha’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.

 

1. Make the raw materials bank self sustainable by training the ladies intensively – I am moving up the date when I leave them by themselves by 2 months
2. 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
3. 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

 

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 Mayor’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 don’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 haven’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 isn’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 24^th, I bought some things with the artisans on Monday, went out to Jayson’s site Camiri from Tuesday to Thursday, and then made my way back to Santa Cruz for the wine and cheese festival. Jay’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 Lucio’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 can’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 don’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