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 ...
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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 ...
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Thursday,Sep 29 2005, 08:20:27 PMnew journal posting as of 29th of september 2005
Friday September 23rd 2005 7:05 AM
Well I finally posted some pics up on my website. I got a few updates on the ag game from my dad so I hope that that went well. This weekend is going to be a chill weekend of studying and going to the soccer game on Sunday here in town. I think that it should be pretty fun. Other than that we are about one month through of our three months training that we are going to do. It looked like Houston is being evacuated right now as everyone flees the town. I guess it is typical public reaction, speculating right now, one ...
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Tuesday,Sep 13 2005, 08:50:15 PMGeoff in Bolivia new
Monday Sept 12th 2005 7 am
What a beautiful morning. It rained last night and now the Andes mountains, about 2 miles to the foothills from Marquina, are covered in snow. At least the peaks are. I am going to the museum today and I am sitting in a mini van with 19 people, oh wait 20 if you count the baby. Ha ha a lot different than one soccer mom in a suburban with no one else
1 pm
We just had pizza in the city for lunch. Ymmmmm ...
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