Picture this scenario: You've just come home for siesta from a long morning of milking cows and shaking hands. You can already taste the peanut soup that awaits you, but you wisely detour to the bathroom to wash your hands. Alas, nothing comes from the tap but the familiar hollow gurgling sound that means the water has been cut off. How will you cleanse the disease-wielding bacteria from your grubby little fingers before lunch?

Never fear! I proudly present to you... the TIPPY TAP! Ta-DAAAAA! I didn't invent it, but I wish I had. You're probably thinking, "Gee, Sarah, why are you so excited about an empty two-liter bottle? Just recycle it already."

No no, my friends. Always preferable to recycling is reusing, and with a little strategic cutting you can transform this two-liter into the solution to your handwashing grief. The label becomes a convenient mounting string, and the bottom becomes a soap dish! The next time you have water, fill it up and hang it in the bathroom. Loosen the cap and a trickle of water is released. Adjust cap to achieve desired flow. We recommend a gentle trickle for conservation purposes because, let's face it, who knows when the water will come back?

"But, Sarah!" you say. "What about the unsightly puddle your Tippy Tap left on my bathroom floor? What if someone should slip and fall? I'll be sued for sure!" Have no fear, boys and girls. In Bolivia nobody would sue you for that.

But to solve your puddle problem, I now present to you... the GIANT SQUEEGEE! Lovingly and descriptively known as a goma, this device will divert the dangerous puddle to your floor drain (with which every Bolivian bathroom comes equipped), averting the impending crisis. And the goma is multifunctional! This amazing tool, coupled with a rag and a little of your exertion, will mop your floors!

I am about to apply the goma-rag combo to my nasty floor. I committed the horrible error of not sweeping for a week (GASP!!!) and this is what the broom gathered up. I'm considering planting a tree. This mound is the reason every Bolivian housewife wakes up at the crack of dawn and cleans every surface in her house. My host mom goes so far as to sweep the dirt courtyard in a vain attempt to keep the enemy out of her home. If you know me at all you've probably guessed that I do not take part in the futile ritual with such frequency. I try for twice a week, making the giant dirt pile a familiar sight, and I probably goma-mop every two weeks. It will be nice to return to a land where carpeting is a good idea, but I will miss my beloved Tippy Tap.

After an indescribable vacation, I've decided not to describe so much as simply show you my experience. And after this, I want to hear no more complaints that I don't post enough pictures.

To fulfill Steve's final wish before leaving South America, we decided to trek to Machu Picchu, "The Lost City of the Incas." But rather than use the well-trodden Inca Trail, a tip from a fellow volunteer put us on the three-day trek through the Lares Valley. Whereas 500 tourists use the Inca Trail every day, our companions were Peruvian children to whom we gave bread and school supplies as they followed us down the path.Please take note of the wide open spaces and lack of 499 gringos walking up the trail ahead of me. At the top of the waterfalls is our campsite for the first night.

We camped among sheep, llamas, and horses. Over that ridge, masked by the fog, is a beautiful lagoon. And to further to the right...

Our bathroom! Thanks to Susan for the demonstration.

Here's a view of the lagoon from the other side. Our campsite was just over the ridge above the reflection of the mountain peak.

In case you were wondering how we did all this strenuous hiking with camping gear and food and backpacks, here it is. Although we take the road less traveled, like true gringos we still hire people to carry our crap.

The temperature? Cold. Actually we hiked through a very wide range of climates, but the first two nights were FREEZING. Look how much joy Steve is getting from this warm bottle of water in the morning. A lot of what made this trip so special for me was spending one last week with Steve (of the Steve-Winston-Sarah recycling trio). This picture is of a little hike we took together after lunch on the second day and the amazing snowy mountain view shared only by us. That made me happy. You know what else makes me happy? Llamas on the trail! And good food. Our cooks were amazing and prepared for us some of the best food I have eaten in the last two years. They even made us personalized pancakes on the last morning! Finally, after a very comfortable night in a hotel, we reached Machu Picchu as the sun rose over the mountains and gradually illuminated the impressive ruins. Built in the 1400s at an altitude of 8000 feet, its exact function is unknown, though some think it may have served as a royal estate and religious retreat. Most of the structures are built of granite blocks fitted together perfectly without mortar. Special care was given to ensure this exact fit, although none of the blocks are the same size and some have as many as 30 corners. In the religious sectors especially, the joints are so tight that even the thinnest of knife blades cannot be forced between the stones. Another unique thing about Machu Picchu is the integration of the architecture into the landscape. Existing stone formations were used in the construction of buildings, sculptures are carved into the rock, water flows through cisterns and stone channels, and temples hang on steep precipices. Forgotten and deserted for unknown reasons, Machu Picchu was rediscovered in 1911 by Yale professor Hiram Bingham. After clearing off the jungly overgrowth, little else was done to restore the constructions to their splendor. All stones are original, and only the grass roofs have been added. After our tour of the ruins, we climbed the tall peak, Waynu Picchu, in the background of the first ruins picture and got a glorious aerial view of the ruins and surrounding mountains. Then, tired of being tourists, Steve, Susan and I did some exploring of our own. It soon started to rain, scaring the other gringos away and leaving us in relative solitude and with free reign of the truly magestic setting. Not only were we able to soak in the awe and wonder at our own pace, but we also had the chance to spot some wildlife inhabiting the ancient rooms. Okay, so it's not too hard to spot a llama, but this little bugger, the viscacha, is a little bit stealthier. He thinks we think he's a rock. This little marsupial is quick and evasive and inhabited many of the regions on our trek, though I think I saw one of them on the trail. Anyway, if you're going to visit Machu Picchu, I highly recommend ditching your tour guide when you've gotten as much out of him or her as you can. The ruins are worth some personal exploration and meditation, if you're into that. As for me, I continue to meditate on my mouse-removal strategy. Speaking of stealthy rodent-like critters, I returned home to Valle to find that The Mouse had completely ignored my ingenious trap. Back to the drawing board...

The first stop on my vacation was the famous Bolivian mining town of Potosí. Our bus rolled in from Tarija in the wee hours of the morning, we took a quick nap, and we were ready for the mine tour at 9am. Our miner-turned-tour-guide, Juan (pictured to the right with dynamite), brought us first to a small store where we purchased gifts for the miners including coca leaves, 96% alcohol (“puro.” Not 96 proof... 96 percent), and $1.35 sticks of dynamite. Then we got suited up and headed out to Cerro Rico (“Rich Hill”).

The Spaniards, in a successful attempt to increase productivity among the highly-superstitious indigenous workers, placed Tío, a god of the underworld, at the mine entrance. Before each workday, the miners pay their respects to both the statue and the Pachamama (“Mother Earth”). We also honored Tío upon our entrance, offering puro and coca to both of his arms, his giant erect penis (symbolizing fertility), and the ground at his feet (Pachamama) and placing a lit cigarette in his mouth. After we each offered a swig to Pachamama and took one ourselves, we entered the depths of Cerro Rico.

At one time, Potosí was the world’s number one supplier of silver and was more populous than both Paris and London. It is said that, with the products of Cerro Rico, one could build a bridge from Bolivia to Spain out of silver... and a bridge back out of skeletons. During the Spanish colonial period it is estimated that over eight million miners died in these narrow, low passageways.

Unfortunately, though the mines are now run by Bolivian cooperatives, dangerous conditions have not changed much, and the majority of work is still done by hand. The miners use dynamite to consruct the passages but to conserve materials only leave themselves a two-inch fuse. That means they have about twenty seconds to escape explosion through the dark, cramped tunnels. Additionally, no lifts have been installed in the mine, so miners often move between levels by climbing ropes and similarly transport their products by pulling them up in sacks.

Such manual labor requires some serious strength and endurance. For this the miners rely on coca, keeping a wad of leaves pressed in one cheek and drawing from that their only sustenance besides the breakfast they ate before leaving the house in the morning. The coca provides energy while suppressing hunger and helping their bodies cope with the 13,500 foot altitude.

Our tour took place on Friday, also known as “drinking day,” so our gifts of puro were much appreciated, and we even caught a room full of miners on break and shared this rubbing alcohol with them as we chatted about their worries about the falling dollar and its effect on the mining market and therefore their paychecks. Despite economic troubles mining work is relatively lucrative, and the average miner earns from 450 to 600 bolivianos ($60-80) a week depending on productivity, yield, and the miner’s place in the cooperative hierarchy. For this reason, about 60% of the population of Potosí works in the mine, despite serious health risks. While the law now limits the workday to eight hours (though our talks with the miners themselves revealed that this law was not always respected), the average miner is only expected to survive 15 years of work. The most common ailment suffered is silicosis pneumonia, but there is of course the risk of death by injury and other threats like the presence of arsenic in the mines (right).

Juan, still a young man, was clearly in good health, and refused to tell us why he left the mining life until we had left the presence of his former colleagues. Outside the mine he told us that, though his father had been a miner, what every father in Potosí wants for his son is that he become a professional. After a few years of mining, Juan quit to pursue his degree in tourism. Though Juan’s earnings do not match those of his mining friends, his father is extremely proud of him.

I leave you with a picture of me holding lit dynamite. Don't worry. We used a three-minute fuse. Clearly I'm still alive.

On Monday morning, after returning from a weekend in Santa Cruz, I was standing in my kitchen getting ready to leave for the PAN office when I glimpsed a amall, brown movement near the oven. I stayed perfectly still but shifted my gaze to catch The Mouse slowly emerging from his house.

He paused, perhaps contemplating how seriously he should be taking me. I stared him down, wanting to show him who wears the pants in our relationship. I wanted him to react to me in fear, but I remained motionless to see what he would do.

Just because I've been allowing him to peacefully coexist with me does NOT mean he no longer has to cower in fear in my presence. (I'm not a very nice roommate.... but he's not bathroom trained.) The Mouse was clealy getting cheeky. And that was the last straw. But I stayed still, determined to win the stare-down.

When The Mouse finished his leisurely contemplation, he turned and sauntered back under the oven.

You must be kidding me.

I turned my thoughts back to the time in college I googled a humane mouse trap for Nicole's Arch Nemesis Mouse. I gathered the necessary materials -- a cardboard box, office paper, masking tape, and peanut butter -- and MacGyver-ed myself a device to punish The Mouse for his insolence.

Directions:

1 - Roll paper long way into a tight tube.

2 - Tape paper tube closed.

3 - Bend tube 90 degrees about 4" from one end to form an "L" shape.

4 - Tape tube across 90 degree angle to hold "L" shape secure.

5 - Fill long open end of "L" with peanut butter (or other bait).

6 - Use bait-loaded "L" to prop upside-down cardboard box so open end of box faces down, hovering over the long end of the "L" which is also hovering under its box roof, suspending bait within mouse's reach.

7 - Leave the house, but check in every few hours. Mice can chew through cardboard.

As of this morning, The Mouse had not fallen for my tricks. I'm going on vacation and won't be back for two weeks, but damn am I sick of The Mouse. Before leaving the house, I replaced the cardboard box with a ceramic pot, transforming my humane contraption into a death trap. Good luck, Mouse.

Carnaval originated as a celebration of the springtime planting season when families buried and burned offerings to the Pachamama (Mother Earth) in hopes of being blessed with healthy and bountiful harvests. With the imposition of Catholicism, the Carnaval celebration was transplanted to early February to coincide with the beginning of Lent. Now the festivities include the two belief systems, blending indigenous with Catholic.

During the twenty hours of parading, for example, tribal war dances like the Tinku alternate with St. Peter conquering the seven deadly sins. Another example of this assimilation can be seen in the different depictions of the Virgin Mary many regions of Bolivia have adopted. As a means of incorporating Catholicism but not losing rich cultural tradition, statues and images of the Virgin are often superimposed on a more traditional symbol of worship. For example, the Virgin of the mining city Potosí sits atop a mountain so that while paying their respects to the Catholic symbol, Potosinos continue their tradition of honoring the mountain that sustained their society. Another Virgin depicts the indigenous reverence toward nature and the cosmos by sitting atop a crescent moon with stars.

As Carnaval falls during the hottest time of year, the festivities also include water fighting. Cholitas sell spray cans of foam, pre-filled water balloons (8 for 15 cents!), ponchos and beer, and the entire city is a warzone. Unlike the friendly fire in Tarija I've described in previous posts, in Oruro you couldn't step out of a building withough getting soaked. Balloons sailed over the parade route in the spaces between dancing groups, but when those ornate costumes made thier approach, all attention shifted to the complex and lively dancing.

Though over 28,000 dancers and 10,000 accompanying musicians participate in the parading, Carnaval de Oruro still had a very intimate feel. For example, here a perfect stranger shares his beer with a tired dancer, head dress in hand.

After literally hours of snaking through the city, the dancers make their way to the Sanctuaria del Socavon, or "Church of the Mineshaft" (so called due to the miraculous appearance of a mural of the Virgin Mary in Oruro's richest silver mine) for a short ceremony before they rejoin the throngs of spectators outside. Because a few volunteers were dancing with one of the final Tinku groups the first night, and they didn't begin the route until 3 am, we were at the church at sunrise, still cheering them on. We finally dragged ourselves back to the hostel just as the morning cleaning shift began to tackle the garbage-filled parade route, preparing for the dancing to begin again in a few hours.

Carnaval de Oruro was an amazingly diverse and lively cultural experience, and in my opinion has earned its status as one of Mankind's Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by the UNESCO in 2001. It is a must-do if you ever find yourself in Bolivia in February.

The other day a fellow volunteer came in to Tarija dreadfully sick with fever, vomiting and diarrhea. She called the Peace Corps doctor to get her blood test results and was informed that she had both amoebas and a ¨severe¨ bacterial infection. The doctor had her jot down the long, complicated names of three different drugs, and I set off with the list to the nearest pharmacy, leaving her curled up in a ball trying to retain fluids. Considering there is a pharmacy on pretty much every city block, my mission did not take long. I presented the ¨prescription¨ sans doctor´s signature, to the ¨pharmacist,¨ who found the pills, put them in a neat little bag, and printed my receipt. (This was a new-fangled, fancy pharmacy. Usually receipts are handwritten.) The total? 6.50 Bolivianos. Translation: About 81 cents.

***

My host family´s cat just had kittens. Last year at about this time, there were kittens as well. They all disappeared, probably fleeing to escape the torture inflicted on them by Ana and Sofía, but that´s just my theory. Let´s forget about the treatment of Bolivian animals for just one second and appreciate how many cute, furry puppies and kitties I get to see and play with due to the lack of spaying, neutering and housebreaking. Bob Barker might not be pleased, but newborn animals put a smile on my face.

***

It´s almost Carnaval time again, which means the streets are teeming with water balloon-toting, summer vacation-crazed kids. And they are stealthy, let me tell you. You walk down the street, minding your own business, and all of a sudden wetness explodes on the back of your head. You whirl around, but there is noone in sight. To remain dry, one must regard every street corner, every balcony, every open door as a possible threat. Everyone is a suspect. As you round each corner, you find yourself scanning the next block for wet splatter marks on the sidewalks and walls indicating the scenes of previous attacks and areas to be avoided. 'Tis the season to be soaked by strangers when you least expect it.

***

Yesterday I went to the PAN office and found no work to be done except some general harrassment of the alcaldía to buy the materials for a project we´re trying to do. After that I excused myself for the rest of the day. Instead of ¨working,¨ I sat in the plaza with my little friend Paola eating cookies and yogurt. Then I sipped mate and fed the birds with my favorite senior citizen. I ended my rigorous and gruelling day with Ana and Sofía making origami whirley-birds and reading a book. I have the greatest job in the world.

***

Cheap drugs, young animals, the attitude that allows public water balloon attacks, and the joys of being a Peace Corps Volunteer are just a few of the things that make me glad to be back.

Okay, this entry was too sappy. Another one of the things I did yesterday was meet a highly-educated, well-read woman who thinks the number of homosexuals has increased dramatically in the recent past as a direct result of the hormones pumped into our livestock and produce. Don´t worry. If you slather that burger with enough ketchup, you won´t even taste the gay!

Oh, and today a mere acquaintance told me flat-out how fat I had gotten while at home... I have some readjusting to do.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of Sarah Anderson and in no way reflect the views and opinions of the United States Government or the Peace Corps.

There´s a civic strike today. I´m catching some rays while I leisurely write in my notebook. I came into the city last night to have dinner with some friends and found out about the strike after the time taxis stop running to Valle. So now I´m stuck here because cars, buses and tree branches are parked across major roads, impeding the flow of traffic. The country is in a state of unrest related to the installment of a new constitution, but one wouldn´t notice by the streets of Tarija city where citizens joyride on bikes and motorcycles, the only vehicles slender enough to slip between that sideways pickup truck and the curb. Kids play soccer on streets they share with pedestrians who straddle the broken line because they can.

This morning I awoke to explosions. Firecrackers attempt to lure you to a rally in the plaza or are shot for no apparent reason at all. I largely ignore these sudden disruptions of peace and quiet. A plane passes overhead, one of maybe three flights that enters and leaves Tarija on any given day, and this makes me happy. Only in very extreme cases of civic strike and political sketchiness do the airports stop functioning. If today´s strike does not affect flights, it gives me hope that the strike rumored for next Friday will not tamper with the first leg of my journey home.

Do I wish I were in Valle right now? Sort of. Is it because I feel like I´m wasting time here in the city where nothing can be accomplished except the writing of this blog and other vital internet activities? Not really. I´m supposed to be finishing the construction of a latrine, and the alcaldía promises to buy the rest of my materials ¨tomorrow.¨ Tomorrow never comes, and I suspect it won´t arrive in time for construction to be completed before I leave. The half-finished latrine will likely sit until January when I will reiniciate my campaign for ¨tomorrow.¨ If you want to hear a real spiel, ask me about the bricks.

Anyway, it can hardly be said that I´m wasting time. I´m working on my tan, which is very important in American society, whereas the Bolivians tell me how lucky I am to be pasty white. Of course here also simultaneously exist discrimination against darker skinned fellow countrymen and the belief that black people bring good luck. But despite one´s ranking of different shades of brown skin, white is nationally recognized as a good thing. Seven out of ten men on the street agree. One volunteer recently stated, ¨I get worried if I´m walking in public and don´t hear any catcalls. I start compulsively checking myself out in shop windows to figure out what´s wrong.¨ Which brings me to an item that hovers near the top of my list of ¨Things I Look Forward to About Going Home¨: Timid men. The rest of the list is as follows, in no particular order:

-noise ordinances

-Mom and Dad

-ethnic food

-traffic laws

-chocolate that tastes good

-public gayness

-flushing toilet paper

-pretty cars

-price tags

-your face

-friendly dogs

-fidelity

-feminism

-stoves that light themselves

-real Christmas trees

-customary service with a smile

-driving

-my down comforter on cold snowy nights

-carpet

-turn signals

-less proactive beggars

-environmental awareness

-getting smoothly in and out of bed without having to unzip anything

-family holiday gatherings

-water pressure

-skim milk straight out of the fridge

-sidewalks that don´t disappear

-large shoe sizes for women

-toasters

-sarcasm

-music variety

-hot water from the tap

-drinkable water from the tap

-seatbelts

-general good smelliness

I have a medium-lengthed spiel prepared for each of the topics above. I won´t get started now, but feel free to bring them up in the future. I´m sure that after spending some time in the U.S. I´ll have a list of things I miss about Bolivia. I already anticipate a few. I´m sure when I´m stuck in angry traffic in a snowstorm while late for an appointment in a place where I´ll be conscious of the fact that I´m the least tan person in the room, I´ll be daydreaming of beautiful, sunny civic strike days in Tarija serenaded by chanting crowds and firecrackers.

I feel like I haven't slept in weeks. First there were the alcaldía (mayor's office) olympics...

Last year they happened while I was home for Christopher and Sheri's wedding (Belated congratulations on a year, you two!), so when Lourdes dragged me into city hall to put my name on the list for a uniform, I didn't protest too much.

The day we were to leave for Yacuiba, that dusty rodeo town, my new alcalde (mayor) called an inspirational meeting. Remember I told you my mayor was ousted back in May? I was misinformed and never corrected myself. He actually stuck around until about a month ago, despite multiple subsequent efforts to kick him out. Apparently he's a smooth talker. Well, the opposition finally succeeded in October, and this meeting was my first opportunity to meet the new alcalde in person. TALL, jovial, and reminding me of my middle school science teacher, the new Honorable Alcalde Paúl shook my hand warmly while we chatted about what Chicago was like.

Hon. Paúl opened his spiel with a motivational statement about the need for the Uriondo Province to be well-represented at this event, how the alcaldía would pay for transportation to and from Yacuiba, and how all players and supporters would be well-dressed in Uriondo uniforms. Logistics for the trip were worked out in group discussion, and a list was made of those who would be attending -- 38 in all. The perk of free Uriondo memorabilia perked my interest, so I signed up. (Who am I kidding? I just miss team sports.) The bus was to leave from the Valle plaza at 8pm.

I showed up ten minutes late and sat around for a good hour, making small talk with the corner shop owners and speculating on what time we might actually reach Yacuiba. After boarding the bus an hour late, we drove into the city, stopped for another hour to pick up more alcaldía employees (for a grand total of 23, pictured to the left) and the coveted team uniforms, and by the time we left for real it was almost 11. Thankfully that's about two hours past my bedtime, so I slept contentedly the entire twelve hour trip.

Hon. Alcalde Paúl had gotten me all pumped up for some bonding with my female coworkers, saying that it didn't matter if we brought home a trophy as long as we returned more united and productive and ready to work for the advancement of the Uriondo province. Based on that statement, I assumed that one of the main purposes of the trip was to actually play some sports, though not necessarily to play them well, so I packed my tennis shoes and my game face. As I looked around at the group of middle-aged women, I tried to reserve my judgment of their athleticism, knowing that Bolivian women are generally fiesty on the court, despite how they may appear. And even if this particular batch weren't so fierce, we would probably be facing similar squads of unathletic, middle-aged alcaldía employees, and the whole thing would be a barrel of laughs.

While watching our men's team lose in futsal (a basketball court-sized version of soccer) I started asking around about which women would be my teammates. Nobody seemed very enthusiastic. My friend Noemí promised to play, and I assigned her the task of motivating three more women, but she didn't seem to be taking it too seriously: She found one. By game time, I was commanding one of our boys to donate his shoes to a woman whose excuses didn't satisfy me enough to allow her not to play. (And no, ¨I've never played before,¨ is not a satisfactory excuse.) Our ragtag team of four took to the court to face our opponents. All sixteen of them. All my age or younger. All with experience. My team immediately began accusing them of cheating, of stacking their team with girls who couldn't possibly be alcaldía employees, but that didn't help the fact that we were outnumbered and outplayed. At halftime our fifth player showed up and we were able to start scoring. Nevertheless, we lost about 20-2, but really I lost count of the number larger than 2.

After our pathetic futsal loss, it seemed an insurmountable task to try to rally the troops again for our basketball game the next day, so I didn't put too much effort into it. Not to mention one of our five players had injured her hand while playing goalie in the futsal game and seemed to be completely incapacitated. The event immediately shifted focus from competition and athleticism (But who am I kidding to say the focus was there to begin with?) to bonding through shopping and the consumption of alcohol. (See Noemí and Ana pictured to the left drinking beer and Coke. Yes, I said beer and Coke. Together.) I'm not a big shopper, but I still managed to have a good time with the ladies, and I think we accomplished at least one of the goals set forth by our Honorable Alcalde, although I have no idea if there has been a rise in productivity on account of that weekend's binge.

A few days later, I found myself in Buenos Aires, preparing for the marathon. And by ¨preparing¨ I mean eating delicious foods and drinking delicious wines and going out dancing until sunrise. You know, the traditional marathon preparation routine. Thank you to all the well-wishers who sent me encouraging messages. I have to say that although the pain in my legs grew from bad to almost intolerable from mile 13 on, the race as a whole was an amazingly enjoyable experience. Here´s a picture of our pasta dinner the night before the race with Heidi and the Robinsons.It began on the five lane highway overlooking the city and proceeded to wind through lush parks and city blocks with various street performers for entertainment. I got a fantastic tour of the city, though I had no idea what I was looking at, and we finished with a few riverfront miles and a huge park where families were enjoying the perfect weather and playing with their dogs (something you don't see often in Bolivia). Every sight and sound made me smile.

The generosity of Sarah's dad, Mr. Bernie, outfitted me in a bright red shirt with my name written boldly across the chest, so the cheering squads could gleefully scream specifically for me. As promised, the route contained very few and very slight hills, and -- probably due to the race being at sea level -- my lungs and heart felt fantastic the entire time. The presence of only 4500 runners made it a more intimate experience than I imagine other marathons to be, and it gave us the opportunity to bump into other Peace Corps volunteers from Peru and Paraguay. I never thought I'd run 26.2 miles smiling the entire way. Wonderful sideline support was provided by Heidi, who was visiting me, and the Robinsons, who had come down to cheer Sarah on though a last-minute injury prevented her from running the whole race. (She did, however, run the last ten miles with me, helping me finish about 20 minutes sooner than I otherwise would have and very cruelly making me sprint for the finish line. The picture was taken when she joined me.) The weather couldn't have been more perfect. Those factors, complete with a gorgeous setting made the experience not only memorable but wonderfully enjoyable. If you're thinking of running a marathon, I highly recommend Buenos Aires.

So those have been my recent athletic activities. Marathon training made it a bit easier for me to be the only one really enthusiastically playing futsal with my alcaldía, but the experience turned out to be not at all what I expected athletically. Still good, but unanticipated. Now recuperated from my much more serious marathon excursion, my legs are itching to get back on the road while my competitive spirit was only whetted by the olympics. You rugby girls better be ready for a snow scrimmage when I come home in LESS THAN A MONTH!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

It's been a while, and I've done a lot, so I'm just going to flip through my digital camera memory and bring you all up to speed...

First there was rodeo in Yacuiba, a dusty little town on the border of Argentina. It was crowded and um... dusty, and we all bought cowboy hats to be festive (and because the sun was intolerable). From our vantage point on the highest bleacher, Seth, Susan and I watched many young Bolivians get thrown from bucking broncos. I only have video footage of that though, so you're missing out. Please notice in the picture of Seth and me the lack of guard rail at our backs. We could have plummeted to our deaths. Anyway, here's a picture of some traditional dancers to get your minds off of that nasty thought. Due to the arena being so packed with people, not only did Susan, Seth, and I have to elbow our way through the crowd and step on little children to get to these nosebleed seats, but I didn't even enter one of the days and so missed (so I'm told) a performance involving the burial of a duck up to its neck in the dirt and the smacking around of said duck. But I did almost see a cock fight! Again, too many people. I even crawled up the arena apparatus and tried to peek through a slit between the tarp and the top of the seating. No luck. On to other things...

When we got back to Tarija, Steve, Winston, and I did a two day series of presentations with every class in the elementary school just to further pump them up about recycling and introduce a new recyclable product: paper! Yay for expansion.

Then two moths died side-by-side on my floor. So I took a picture. Having a fumigated house has its weird points. Things just show up dead, and you never even knew they were there to begin with. You should see this spider corpse in my bathroom. HUGE.... and hairy.

I dabbled in cooking with broccoli. Sofía and Ana were helping me wash my vegetables, and Sofía needed to pose as a little green bride with my boquet of broccoli. This is not a good picture of Sofía: She's much much cuter. Anyway, the washing did not rid my broccoli of the aphids, so I ended up with broccoli-aphid soup. It became too taxing to pick all the little floating bodies out, so I just thickened the soup and tried to appreciate the extra protein. What doesn't kill you...Then it was my birthday! Thank you for all the well-wishes, you well-wishers, you. I spent the day horseback riding and eating delicious foods with two of my favorite volunteers, Sarah and Stephanie. It was an all-around very good birthday.I have a new roommate! He's an excellent acrobat and shares my love of fresh, ripe tomatoes. I can't decide whether or not I will let him keep staying with me rent-free. It doesn't really seem fair. But get this: I decided to just give him the rest of this tomato, and I set in on the floor next to my oven (aka. his front door). He didn't even touch it! Instead, I woke up in the middle of the night and stumbled into the kitchen for a glass of water and found him shimmying down my shelfing unit from his usual pilfering grounds and running RIGHT PAST the tomato (So I know he saw it)! Mouse, there IS such a thing as a free lunch! Forget what that high school economics teacher told you! If this mouse is really that untrusting, it will probably prove difficult to capture him if and when the time comes.And here's what I did today! Yay for convenient and great hiking! This hike was a tribute to Nicole Bruskewitz on her birthday. Check it out, Brusk! It's not an altar or a shrine! It's just a rock! A non-denominational rock!In case the pretty pictures didn't satisfy you and you didn't appreciate the inside jokes, the next blog entry has already been written and will be published after I make you wait sufficiently.And as always, the opinions expressed in this blog are those of Sarah Anderson and do not reflect the opinions of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

What did you do Friday night? I was a pilgrim. This was Dan´s brilliant idea for cheap entertainment and... you know... a cultural experience. He, Susan, Winston, and I set out from Tarija city at five pm with only a vague idea of the road but confident that there would be abundant help along the way. That being the first night of the month during which Tarijeños walk in the name of the Virgin of Chaguaya, there actually weren´t many people on the road, but at the first questionable fork in the road we encountered Manuel, a PE teacher who had made the journey seven times before. He had invited his PE classes to come with him, and not a single student showed up. Not that I would have accepted such an invitation from my gym teacher, but that was warning number two to turn around.

Warning number one was an omen from earlier in the day. Dan has a necklace with a St. Christopher pendant. Well, St. Chris decided to mysteriously remove himself from his post that morning. No signs of breakage. Just a pendant detached from its chain. To me, a firm believer in jinxing and the like, this seemed like an obvious sign for someone who was about to embark on a very very long journey and might need some saintly protection.

By the first town, Tolamosa, three hours down the road, Dan menioned a pain in the arch of one foot. No big deal. He would be fine. After a quick dinner of sandwiches and bananas, we set out again. By now our party had grown to eight, with the addition of two men from La Paz about an hour before Tolamosa and another we picked up in town. Three hours later at the halfway point, Pampa Redonda, Dan removed his shoe to reveal a monster blister developing on one foot as the result of compensation for the arch pain in the other. Manuel offered him a bandage, and Dan tried to rig up an arch support system using an extra sock. This story is not meant to be all about Dan, but throughout the trip I was pretty grateful that his pains seemed to be greater than mine. It kept everything in perspective and kept me from feeling too sorry for myself. By Pampa Redonda, I was convinced by a blister on my big toe that my shoes were too small. Similar acts of compensation, combined with general shoe tightness enhanced by the extra pair of socks worn to prevent said blisters led to the formation of more blisters that now adorn my feet. If anyone has advice about healing larger-than-life blisters quickly, please share: I have to get back to my running. I know Mom´s needle tunneling trick, but I´ve always been curious about the drainage versus non-drainage debate. Maybe I´ll research when I finish writing this. Shortly after Pampa Redonda, the moon went down. It was one of those ¨God´s toenail¨ moons, but it was still amazing what a difference it made in visibility. The path was a fairly wide, sometimes-dirt-sometimes-gravel-sometimes-sand-sometimes-rock road, so it was distinguishable from the surrounding pitch black, making it necessary to switch on the flashlight only for particularly sketchy parts and stepping stones in streams. Had it not been for the ever-increasing muscle and blister pains, it would have been a lovely walk. Imagine valleys populated by towns of a couple hundred people placed three hours apart. Imagine a gigantic Milky Way sky, fringed with mountainous silhouettes. There is nothing like being in the middle of nowhere with a great view of the cosmos to make you feel tiny and insignificant but so fortunate to have a place on this beautiful planet. When the road conditions didn´t require constant foot vigilance, my eyes were on the heavens or the vast, silent darkness surrounding us. Mostly I kept them on the sky though, because pitch blackness doesn´t provide much entertainment and so that I could rub in Susan´s face every shooting star she missed by keeping her eyes on the ground. I´m probably lucky I didn´t sprain an ankle on a rock with how much I ignored my steps. And so went the night with me obnoxiously pointing out every shooting star, Dan providing occasional pain status updates that put me in my place, and all of us sharing stories and occasional, inevitable ponderings about the universe, our place in it, and why the hell anyone would ever want to walk for twelve hours on end. As the journey progressed, ponderings of the latter type became more and more frequent. At a largely practically deserted, makeshift, 2 am rest stop, Dan had had enough. An old woman tending a simmering pot of something on a fire spoke of an encouraging hour and a half to Juntas and an hour and a half from Juntas to Chaguaya. For someone in intense pain, news like that is hard to react to. For one, you´ve already walked nine hours, so what´s another three? But when every step is a dreaded chore, the promise of thousands more of them is, well, just plain awful. Every single step is too painful to bear. Taking thoussads more of them means thousands of individual conscious decisions and efforts towards self-inflicted pain. It seems rather stupid. Dan decided to stay at the rest stop until morning when there would surely be a car to take him home. No, the old woman informed us. There would be no cars until Juntas, and even there he would have to wait until morning. The most fitting word to describe the period between that rest stop and Juntas is ¨torture.¨ There were pains I had never felt before even after the most gruelling rugby games. Dan, who decided an hour and a half more that night would be better than the same walk in the morning, fell into limping stride with me. But as our leader with one of the flashlights quickened his pace, and the space between the light and I expanded, I chose light over Dan and left him with Arturo, the younger man from La Paz. At that point the group was as follows: Susan, Winston, our flashlight-toting guide, and I formed the first party; Dan and Arturo fell farther and farther behind us in the dark; and Manuel and the older La Paz guy, also with flashlight, brought up the rear. I spent the entire walk to Juntas silently cursing the man with the light who seemed to be continually quickening his pace and making my life a living hell. At least he gave me something to think about: Which is better, a shorter, more painful hike or a longer more comfortable walk I could have if I slowed down? Considering that the slower walking would also be painful, I continually made the decision to stay with the flashlight. After only forty-five minutes, the lights of Juntas appeared on the our right, and the road forked into the tiny, silent town. We found no simmering pots of something but a couple chairs and a pile of rocks for sitting. Since it had been excrutiatingly painful to force my legs back into a walk after the rest stop, I chose to keep pacing. After all, we would only be waiting ten minutes or so until the rest of the group arrived. Manuel and Old La Paz Guy arrived soon. Where were Dan and Arturo? Old Guy shouted his friend´s name into the darkness. No reply. We speculated. Manuel and Old Guy swore they hadn´t passed anyone. We who had been in the first group swore nobody had passed us. We all knew Dan was in a lot of pain, but if he had stopped to rest Manuel and Old Guy would have seen them. It was suggested that maybe Dan changed his mind and went back to the rest stop, but again someone would have passed him, or he would have told us. And then what about Arturo? There were only two plausible options: Something happened to both Dan and Arturo without either the front or rear groups noticing, or they ingnored the lights of Juntas and continued straight. Considering that we had reached Juntas in half the time the old lady predicted, and it seemed unlikely that both of them could have fallen off a cliff, the latter option seemed more probable. What would happen if they kept going straight? They would hit Chocloca... in a few more hours. Manuel, who seemed to have limitless energy, went out to search for them while the rest of us built a fire. Did I mention it was freezing outside? While we were walking it felt like a beautiful, perfect night. But once we stopped, the cold ate through us, and we all huddled around the fire for warmth. Good thing Juntas is in a wooded area and it hasn´t rained in months, making the fire easy to build and feed. After about half an hour, Manuel returned. Alone. The speculation began again. All of the aforementioned possibilities were again brought up and, one by one, ruled out until we arrived at the same conclusion that they must be on the road to Chocloca. Neither of them knew the road, so if they didn´t realize they were lost why would they turn around? Manuel went out again to look. We remained huddled, asking every pilgrim we saw if they had any information. After two hours of waiting, one lone pilgrim came down the road and reported that he had seen our friends. He had been more lost than they and was on his was back from Chocloca to Juntas when they stumbled across each other asking for directions. At that point Dan couldn´t walk another step on his blistered feet, and he decided to stop right there and wait for morning, then only a couple encouraging hours away. Arturo, not knowing what to do, stayed with Dan. The other lost boy continued back toward Juntas, came across Manuel, and Munuel subsequently found Dan and Arturo. What a relief! Dan, for the the final time that night, refused to take another step, and we found a family in Juntas to take him in until we could return with a taxi. Dan spent the next few hours awake on a chair while the family slept on the floor in a corner of the one room house. He was so grateful to be indoors. I, after forcing my stiff joints into motion again, cursed every step between Juntas and Chaguaya. Winston, grateful to be on the road again with so little road left, started skipping. I wanted to break his legs. The old lady had overestimated the time to Juntas and underestimated to Chaguaya. During those last two hours, I felt so much blind anger and hatred that I surprised myself. I was angry at the rest of my group for constantly quickening their pace, which I am sure was just an illusion. I won´t list the things I hated during those hours because there were so many, and yet at the same time I knew I didn´t hate anything at all. I put myself in the sutuation. I chose to do this stupid pilgrimage. I wouldn´t have given up even if I had had a choice, yet I was angered that I didn´t, which made no sense to me. I was angry with everything and nothing, and looking back on it kind of disturbs me. I´ll leave the self-evaluation and soul searching to myself and move on. We arrived in Chaguaya exactly at sunrise, so getting a picture of that blessed church in the distance would have meant a lot of camera adjustments and... um... stopping, which I clearly wasn´t willing to do. But we were greeted by smoking fires and steaming pots of breakfast and what would be lunch. The church was 300 years old but renovated in the 80s, which was weird. I would have been happier with something that was still ancient, but I suppose it wouldn´t have been big enough to accommodate the unbelievable amount of people that will be doing that pilgrimage during the next month to this town where the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared multiple times hundreds of years ago. The town pretty much is the church. Or the church is the town. Whatever. For the next month, Chaguaya is the place to be. So we left, paid a taxi an exorbitant amount to go back on that horrible road (Usually they go back to the city by another paved route.) to collect our friend Dan and take us back to Tarija. Seventy kilometer, all-night pilgrimage? Done. Check. I can say I did it. Am I glad I did it? Yes. I would habve been curious forever if I hadn´t . Or I would have forgotten it was ever an option. Would I do it again? Not any time soon. I could go with Manuel when he does it again next weekend, but there´s this thing with my feet...

One Year Meds...

After the poking and prodding was through; after the urine, blood and stool samples had been thoroughly analyzed; and after my first fluoride treatment in a long, long time; I sat down with the Peace Corps Medical Officer and went over my chart.

¨Everyting look good, Sarita, pero it look like you have da giardia.¨

¨Yeah, I figured I must have something by now.¨

¨So we are going going to give you da medicine dat you take for one day onl--¨

¨Actually I was thinking maybe I could just keep the giardia. I mean, I´m just going to get it again, and it isn´t bothering me at all.¨

¨Sarita, dat is nut a good idea, and I will tell you why. If you do nut get rid of da giardia ahorita and you get it again, it will make you much more sick da second time. So just take dese pills tomorrow after lunch and you will be fine. But you must remember nut to drink alcole for twenty-four hours after taking dese pills.¨

¨Okay fine.¨ I had no intention of taking the meds until a) I got back to Tarija, b) I started to actually feel like I had giardia, or c) next year when I was coming home.

Jinx.

The next night I was at a going away/birthday party for some volunteers, and I had to leave early. My giardia friend must have overheard what the doctor said and invited a friend over... or just decided to stop acting like a wuss. Let´s just say I didn´t get any sleep that night. Another volunteer lent me an anti-nausea pill the next morning so I could keep my giardia pills down, and I felt better almost immediately.

During our review of my medical state, the doctor had also made a comment about how at least when you get diarrhea you can lose weight. I don´t think that was intended as an insult or piece of advice (though now I see that she was double-jinxing me), but it began an investigation into how much weight I have gained since arriving in country. Is it bad that I may have stopped caring?

Bolivians are always commenting on how fat or thin you look. One former volunteer loved to recall one morning in her site when she went in to work at the mayor´s office. She greeted a group of coworkers on the ground floor who immediately began a discussion about how she could have gotten so thin. Was she eating? She must not be eating. Or maybe she was sick. How could she be so thin?

She ascended to the top floor feeling... well... good, she supposed, but she was immediately bombarded by questions abuot how fat she had gotten.

Being called ¨fat,¨ however, is not necessarily a bad thing. Obviously with stories the like one above, which many of us have, it´s hard to trust a certain Bolivian people while they are commenting about your personal appearance. It´s easier to believe they are just making conversation. In the States, it is practically against the law and just plain ¨not very nice¨ to call someone fat, but here it´s just a simple observation. I am the gorda. Goo goo g' joob.

When I stepped off the plane in Tarija, ten pounds heavier but now giardia free, the city was at a standstill. There were no cars on the streets, and the surrounding roads had been blockaded. Peace Corps advised us to stay in the city, stock up on food and water for the week, and call the office every morning for an update on the situation.

The ¨situation¨ was that the prefect of Tarija was demanding from the national government a sum of 43 million Bolivianos (divide that by 8 to get the dollar amount. I´m too lazy) from an ¨emergency fund¨ for improvement projects having something to do with El Niño. They were also wanting to start a program in which each family in Tarija will receive 2000 Bolivianos for community improvement projects. There was also something about a gas line being built and the usual threats of declaring independence. The blockades, civic strikes and marches lasted about two weeks. I arrived in the middle of it, and it was all resolved within the week.

And then it was Independence Day! In true Independence Day fashion, I went to a parade and had a picnic. And this wasn´t just any old small town parade. Let me explain. While preparing to march in the parade in Valle de Concepción to celebrate the anniversary of our little province, I asked Lourdes about the exact parade route. She made a broad, sweeping motion that included the entire town and told me just as much: that the parade would be up and down every street in town. Ha! The parade was ONE side of ONE block. We began on one side of the plaza, marched the length of the street between the mayor´s office and the plaza, and ended on the other side of the plaza. That one stretch of street is conveniently painted with dashed lines to keep paraders from drifting too far astray during the 30 meter march. Straight lines are hard. The picture is of Lourdes and I lining up on the pre-parade side of the plaza. Carlos is cut off. Sorry, Carlos.

Anyway, this Independence Day city parade was the real deal and consisted of government employees and vendors of everything from fruit to used American clothing. There were even two fire trucks! It was maybe eight blocks long and maybe three hours long. We left after two of them to have our picnic. After a while, one group of fruit-selling cholitas starts to look like all the rest, despite their clearly distinct outfits. I stupidly took all my pictures of the Independence Day parade on the internal memory of my camera, so there they will stay until I come home and have the appropriate technology to get them out of there. Were I able to extract these pictures and post them, you would see many many cholitas in different colored combinations of blouses and skirts. You would also see a group of men who work in some sector of agriculture dressed in entirely denim outfits. We´ll just say there were some courageous fashion choices made. Before I end this disjointed blog entry, I would like to thank all you U.S. tax payers for my new, first pair of glasses: another product of One Year Meds. I hadn´t even realized that the world wasn´t completely clear until I decided to check, just for the fun of it, because my health insurance is so good. They only cost you guys $50. Don´t sweat it.

Since beginning to train for this Buenos Aires Marathon, I´ve been experimenting with running at different times of day, examining the advantages and disadvantages of each, and trying to find the perfect hour. Factors to consider are: sunlight , warmth, wind, dogs and traffic. The sun comes up at around 7 and sets at around 6:15 right now. Although morning would be my ideal time to run since I could get it out of the way and there would be no risk of it being pushed out of my schedule by something that ¨just comes up¨ in the afternoon, it is FREEZING in the morning. It is winter, after all. Once the sun is up for a bit, everything warms up, making noon the next most ideal time. Remember that the wind picks up in the valley in the early afternoon every day, severely dropping the temperature and making it rather unpleasant to run. (Imagine running uphill against a strong wind.) Dogs. The dogs are kind of a wildcard. Unpredictable. Sometimes nice and sometimes mean. Sometimes they just lay there and watch you jog by, and other times they ferociously chase after you. Good rules of thumb are: Carry a good throwing rock, and stay on your toes. What else? Oh yeah. Traffic. When running in the morning or afternoon, one runs the risk of being passed by multiple trucks full of men on their way to or from work. These men will shout things and whistle. However, they are harmless and more of an annoyance than anything. Considering all these factors, noon seems like the best time to run. Sunny, warm, not windy, no men.

I gave the noon hour a try last week, and I couldn´t have been happier with the results. The weather was beautiful, and I didn´t get barked or honked at once. Not once. So I excitedly told Winston (who is now also training for the marathon) the next morning of my discovery. ¨Winston! I found the perfect time of day to go running! Noon! Everyone´s eating lunch, it´s warm out, and apparently all the dogs are lazy. I didn´t get barked at once!¨

Jinx.

The next day I tried the noon hour again. Everything started out fine. It was actually hot out, so that was kind of uncomfortable but still much better than freezing. I waved to my usual spectators, admired the beautiful scenery, and was generally enjoying myself until about 15 minutes in. At that point, a big, ferocious, black dog pounced at me, startling me over to the other side of the road. I raised my rock in defense (Sometimes you just have to fake like you´re going to throw it, and the dog will back off.) but it did no good. He just kept chasing me. When he was a few feet away and I was seriously scared, I let my rock fly.... and missed. So I gave in and stopped my slow, non-threatening jog. He kept barking and snarling but stopped advancing long enough for me to pick up another rock and fake throw it again. Once I was a safe distance away, I resumed running. Things quieted down for another 5 minutes until another dog began barking. By this time I had wisened up, so I began walking immediately upon seeing the dog, and he let me pass without a chase. However, his barking aroused the two dogs at the next house. When I saw them, I thought, ¨Screw this,¨ and just turned around and began my journey home, again walking past the last dog.

Thankfully, the scary black dog did not make another appearance, and I was able to calm down and get my heart rate back down to its normal jogging tempo. The rest of the run seemed to be going fine, and I found myself at the top of my biggest hill, looking down on the nice, easy last leg of the route. The road at this point is cut into a larger hill and has high walls of eroding dirt on either side. A boy about halfway down the hill in front of me was throwing rocks up towards one of the walls. ¨Interesting,¨ I thought. ¨Maybe he´s throwing them at some unfortunate, unsuspecting buddy on top of the hill.¨ He kept throwing. When I was about ten meters from the boy, he suddenly took off running, glancing up over his shoulder every so often. ¨He must have hit whoever he was aiming for, and now they´re coming to kick his a#%,¨ I thought. Then I looked up and saw the pissed off guy. And by ¨guy¨ I mean ¨about a thousand guys,¨ and by ¨guys¨ I really mean ¨angry bees.¨ They arose in a cloud from a hole in the eroding wall and just hovered there for a second, surveying the scene and trying to find the culprit. Since the real culprit had taken off down the hill a few seconds ago, who do you think became the next most likely bad guy as she calmly, slowly, and non-threateningly jogged by?

¨Oh sh#%!¨

As I sprinted past the stupid boy with a swarm of angry bees on my tail, I shouted a, ¨Gracias, amigo!¨ I hope he sensed my sarcasm, but he might have been too STUPID to get it.

I approached the bridge that crossed the river and remembered things I had heard/read/seen where people getting chased by swarms of angry bees have plunged into bodies of water to evade their pursuers. Apparently bees can´t swim. Sadly, neither can I in the six inch depth of my little river. So I kept up my sprint.

By halfway across the bridge I could hear only one bee behind me. I swatted at him as he divebombed my head. I tried evasive maneuvering, zigzagging across the bridge. I must have looked like an idiot. He just wouldn´t leave me alone. I resigned myself to getting stung. ¨There´s nothing you can do about it, Sarah. Just accept it. The persistent little jerk is going to sting you, and then the jerk is going to die.¨ (Replace ¨jerk¨ with a much more powerful word, and answer me this: Do bees know they´re going to die when they sting someone?) Then with one final, well-placed swat, he disappeared.

I did it! I outran a swarm of bees without getting stung once! I walked the rest of the way home, very on-edge. Every large, flying insect made my heart race. The vaguely buzz-like sound of the velcro of my knee brace rubbing against my pant leg scared the crap out of me. But I made it home, safe and sound.

In conclusion, I can´t be too harsh on the stupid boy after just ranting about how kids should be allowed to do dangerous things. He lives in the country. He´s on winter vacation. He was probably bored. And at least now I know where the bees live... and that there is no good time of day to go running.

This picture has nothing to do with anything. Just thought some of you might like to see me. This is Luki, the host family dog, and me in my kitchen.

And now for the blog...

Mom used to take us to this park in St. Paul called ¨Treasure Island.¨ We would chase each other around, performing daring stunts on the high, wooden playground in order to escape capture, and she would read a book, glancing up regularly to make sure we weren´t doing anything too dangerous.

She trusted us out there. We were all well-balanced, athletic kids, and we could handle the stunts we were pulling, so she modified her style of parenting, letting us do things normal parents would never allow -- disregarding classic chapters in the book How to Raise Your Child the ¨Right¨ Way.

Children in Bolivia play with knives. Not like weapons. My host uncle during training gave his 5-year-old son a large knife and a stick of cane sugar, and the kid went at it -- not very gracefully or with coordination. I got worried, so I took over as if I, as an ¨adult,¨ could do better. I nearly sliced myself four times.

Children in Bolivia eat dirt. They do. I´ve seen it. I used to sample the soil a couple times while making mud pies and soups, and I think I turned out all the healthier for it. Much like I think I have avoided being hit by Bolivian cars numerous times by using my playground acrobatics. Everythign is so sterile in the US. It´s like we´re living in fear of nature. I´m not saying we shouldn´t cover our mouths when we cough, wash our hands before we eat, or leave chemicals on the bottom shelf for our children to chug, but I don´t think a spoonful of dirt every once in a while will kill us.

Ana and Sofía are constantly making mud meals. They sift through the soil and only use the finest dirt for their ice cream creations. I tell them their rice looks delicious, slurp the air above their soup, and fondly reminisce about my younger years.

¨One Year Meds¨ is coming up in two weeks. Peace Corps will reunite my group for the first time in nine months in Cochabamba, and we will be poked and prodded and searched for amoebas and giardia. I´m pretty sure I´ve been living with at least giardia, if not a parasite, for quite a while now. We´ve learned each other´s tricks and, aside from a few flare-ups, we now live in harmony. If the Peace Corps doctors find my friend, I´m going to try to ¨just say no¨ to the drugs that will kill it. I mean, it´ll just come back, and then we´ll either have to get used to each other again or I´ll have to keep attacking it and ridding myself of it over and over, suffering all the while. It´s in everyone´s best interest that I be allowed to keep it.

Despite my recent rant about eating dirt, I do believe it is in Bolivian children´s best interest to learn to wash their hands regularly. Remember the wise and popular saying, ¨Don´t sh*# where you eat.¨ Now change that to, ¨Don´t eat where the unfenced and untethered family pig sh*#s.¨ If Bolivian children´s mud pie ingredients didn´t have to share cupboard space with the pig´s toilet, I might encourage them to have a spoonful of dirt too. But as it is, I embarked on another handwashing campign on Thursday and Friday with the señoras of the PAN centers.

In the ¨Primer Taller de Capacitación a Educadoras, Manipuladoras y Autoridades de la Comunidad¨ Carlos, Lourdes, Ana and I embarked on a mission to train all the PAN techers and cooks in one fell swoop. We brought in a doctor, a nutritionist, and an expert on early childhood development. We reviewed the procedures for filling out boring but necessary paperwork. We taught them to use the weights and heights of their children to measure their overall health and growth progress. We played educational games. We played not-so-educational games. We put them up in the hostel in Valle (cleverly named ¨Valle D´Vino.¨ Get it?). We fed them and tried to bond them together into a community of señoras united toward the same noble purpose of nurturing and educating the under-6-year-olds in our care. We spread messages of love, cleanliness, nutrition, education, and properly-completed paperwork to the far reaches of the valley.

Were the messages received and processed? Will PAN children wash their hands before eating nutritious meals? Will I no longer have to toil for hours over senseless scribbles on forms that are missing key information? Time will tell. Until then, I will keep thanking Mom for my agility in dodging pedestrian-unfriendly Tarijan traffic, and I will thank goodness Ana and Sofía don´t share the yard with a pig.

I bought a new sponge. You know, the yellow ones with about half an inch of the dense, scratchy, green stuff on one side: The good kind. I find myself with a new zest for dishwashing. I've never minded washing dishes before. Goodness no. But the high I get now... The power trip from scraping off tough grime with ease. It flees screaming from the dense, scratchy, green stuff of death. Life is better with a good sponge.

My best friend from high school came to visit. She brought color to my life in the form of freshly cut flowers and singing in the kitchen. We made a box, entirely out of reused materials, for the raising of worms who will eat my organic waste. We were duped by a street vendor in La Paz, but his product really was amazing and magical from the right angle, and we walked away laughing with not one, not two, but THREE of said stupendous product. We made friends with a kid (the furry animal kind) who butted Nicole in the crotch while trying to nurse as I pointed and laughed. Karma caught up to me later when I sat on an invisible cactus at the dried-up pond we discovered. We climbed to the very top of the waterfalls and higher, realized we had thirty minutes until sunset, and tried to scramble back down the mountain while battling distractions such as praying mantis sex (I wanted to see her eat him!) and an unopened package of chocolate cookies perched atop a cactus leaf (There just wasn't time to ponder that one before stuffing them in our bag). We saw Jupiter and four of its 63 moons, Saturn and its rings, a black nebula (with the naked eye!) and the triple-star system Alpha Centauri at the free observatory outside my town (one of our greater discoveries). We read Mom's letters and laughed aloud at the "golls" and "goshes." We survived Gas Crisis 2007, which was much like Water Crisis 2007 but more personal. (Fortunately, my personal Gas Crisis 2007 preceded the actual gas crisis going on right now with hundreds of people waiting in lines with their gas tanks for hours and hours.) Thanks to Nicole, I am now infatuated with the wonders of freshly baked bread. She also gave me a sharp kitchen knife and cutting boards. Do you realize that I had adapted to holding vegges in my hand while slicing with a blunt knife? And you pretty much have to cut towards yourself, as Dad taught me never to do. It's all fun and games until someone loses a finger; and in that sense, a sharp knife and a cutting board can make such a difference.

(Volunteers and their Bolivian counterparts at Katie Gordon's workshop in Cochabamba.)

It seems like a lot of playing, but I've probably done more work in the last two-something months than in the rest of my service. Remember the HIV/AIDS workshop to which I asked you to donate? Well, I went to that with two Bolivian profesoras. Upon returning to Valle, we gave a small presentation to a group of parents and teachers, just to give them the opportunity to tell us not to preach the wonders of condoms to their kids. There were no objections, so we replicated the workshop in my high school with four different classes: Three were made up of 13- and 14-year-olds and the other was the graduating class. On the first day, the two profes and I presented a brief overview of (1) what HIV/AIDS is, (2) how the virus is transmitted, (3) how transmission is prevented, (4) the social factors that encourage transmission and (5) human rights issues associated with the virus. We also discussed worldwide and local statistics of people living with HIV in order to stimulate interest and prove that it is a real issue in Bolivia. After the overview, we divided each class into five groups and gave each group photocopies of information related to one of the five topics mentioned above. We instructed them to plan a ten minute presentation of their topic that would serve to inform their classmates of this topic which, by that point, we could all agree was very important. The idea, of course, was that by presenting and "teaching" the information themselves, the students would gain a greater undertanding of HIV/AIDS and the information would linger in their little minds a little longer than it might otherwise. After greatly stressing our desire for them to be creative with their presentations and use tactics such as skits, games, mock interviews, something OTHER than oral reports, we dismissed them for the weekend, adding that we (the profes) would each be available during their preparation time to answer any questions and provide suggestions.

I will spare you the gruesome details and simply say that the younger kids were very disappointing, and I returned home the day of their presentations in such a depressed and dejected state that not even my new sponge could cheer me up. The graduating class, however, did exceptionally well. There were skits and condom demonstrations and intelligent questions and conversation! By the end of it all, it was clear to the profes and I that to present this information most effectively in the future we would have to find a better target group. The problem is that between what would be the equivalent of Freshman year and Senior year of high school the class size dwindles to about a third of what it began as. Therefore, a little thought will have to be put towards what age group we should present to in order to achieve maximal comprehension of the topic as well as maximal audience size.

In addition to the HIV/AIDS workshops, I've been educating PAN centers in super-rural communities about the wonders of handwashing with soap. I invited two volunteers from Cochabamba to help me do puppet shows and present a very simplified version of germ theory to the cooks, teachers, and parents. The puppet shows, of course, were a hit with both adults and kids, which was the idea. Even if the tiny children didn't get the message they would still be visually stimulated by the puppets, and the adults would receive the information in an entertaining way. I felt like a soap salesperson doing the germ spiel, but hopefully I got the point across. At the end, we gave each center a bunch of little hotel soaps that they promised to use, and we went on our merry way. I'm currently working on convincing Carlos to convince the central PAN office in Tarija to add soap to the monthly supplies each center receives. Until I achieve that feat, any soap donations would be greatly appreciated.

The reading club continues. I've had a few new members in the last months, and I've convinced one particularly ambitious girl to begin reading her first chapter book! I remember my first chapter book, "The Bears Upstairs", and what a gratifying feeling it gave me to finish it. It may even have been more gratifying than my new sponge. Just imagine.

Until next time, which promises to come sooner than this time did, I wish each of you the appreciation of one of life's simple pleasures. Whether it be an old friend or a new sponge, there's always something to smile about.

[And if you ever get the chance to play host(ess) to Nicole, she makes delicious bread and does a killer impression of an avocado.]

Updates.

The bloqueo from the last entry was resolved at 5Am the next day. The cause was that a hotshot Tarija politician had promised one community a few projects and never delivered. This was a big deal because to realize projects, local men are employed and paid for their construction labor. So, in effect, this hotshot politician owed said community a lot of money. The bloqueo was resolved when he agreed (again) to do the projects.

The water situation in Valle de Concepción is much improved. They finished the project in which they tore up every road in town and installed pipes underground. For the last few days water has come out of the tap every time I wanted it to -- morning, afternoon and evening -- AND it came out CLEAR! It still only comes in one temperature, and there is only enough pressure to send it up through my shower head during the wee hours of the morning, but what a luxury to have it all the time!

I know there is no excuse for neglecting my biweekly blogging responsibilities, but last week I neglected my biweekly blogging responsibilities because I was in La Paz meeting my first visitor and high school partner in crime, Nicole. I sat down to write a blog the day she arrived, but I was so excited I couldn´t put together a coherent thought. It´s better I didn´t write anything. Trust me.

Now that I´ve calmed down I can tell you that the bus ride there was torturous. I bought my ticket a few days in advance and so was able to claim one of the cool seats in front with a panoramic view. On the way out of town Marina, my nextseat neighbor, and I made friends, and as we crossed the mountains north of the city she pointed out the new road to La Paz being constructed in the distance. It looked as if it will cut multiple hours off our travel time, and we were both very excited about it and kept commenting on how pretty and straight it was. Oh I can´t wait.

One of the best parts of having the front, panoramic view seat while taking the old road over the mountains is that the front seats are placed a good distance in front of the front wheels of the bus. It took me a while to figure out that the sensation that I was about the fall off a cliff every time we made a hairpin turn was no cause for alarm. Sure it looked like I was suspended over the edge, but all four wheels of the bus were firmly on the road at all times, and I learned to trust and respect my driver and his amazing skills.

The drive was pretty uneventful. My lack of leg room, lack of window that closed completely, and lack of blanket kept me uncomfortable, shivering and silently cursing the two aisles of snoozing, well-prepared and short-legged Bolivians behind me. Marina was cozy under two blankets with her little legs completely outstretched and propped comfortably on the rail in front of us.

As the sun rose over the mountains that perpetually line the Bolivian horizon, we stopped in Oruro, a city about five hours from La Paz, and the bus broke down. After about twenty minutes of making tinkering noises below, the driver emerged into the passenger section and asked if anyone had any lip balm. Marina did. He reemerged a few minutes later, returned the lip balm, and started the bus. It proceeded to break down on the hour for the next five hours, but he never requested more lip balm, so I assume other problems were to blame and the lip balm had served its purpose. A good rule of thumb for travelling in Bolivia is to always leave a day early: You never know what might impede you. I made it to the city later that day, and the Saturday night surprised Nicole at the airport. I´m so good at surprises.

We spent the next week wandering around La Paz. Bored with the city by Tuesday, we caught a bus to Lake Titicaca -- beautiful, sparkling, sprawling Lake Titicaca with its ¨palacios de trucha¨ (millions of restaurants that each called themselves ¨trout palaces¨), amazingly cheap hostels ($2 per person per night), and countless tourists from everywhere except the United States. Not true. We spent some time on a boat with a family of Minnesotans (and a Bolivian wearing a Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt!). The dad was extremely affectionate towards his kids and sucked Pringles cheese off their faces. Those might have been the only estadounidenses we encountered.

After hiking uphill for hours at high altitude, birdwatching, sleeping in a ¨crack house¨ (for only $1.25!), ruining our diets with fried things and cookies, not washing our hands after using public bathrooms, searching for our documentary-maker friends in all the wrong places, getting ¨Gringo-priced¨, admiring La Paz cholita attire but not seeing them wrestle (Does the WWE have matches on Easter Sunday?), learning about Bill Gates´ role in the Second Coming of God, marveling at the Milky Way from a Titicaca dock, and having locals convert their homes into restaurants at our whims, we again parted ways (so soon?!?!?!) to meet up again in Cochabamba. I had work to do in Tarija. She had jungle to explore. We will be together again on Tuesday, barring bus breakdowns.

Back in Tarija this last week, the Calamuchita professors surprised Winston, Steve and me with 31 kilograms(!) of collected plastic recyclables and much enthusiasm to begin a program in their school. The Chocloca professors forgot we were meeting to collect their plastic. Such is life. We scheduled a program planning meeting in Calamuchita this coming Wednesday and rescheduled the collection meeting for Chocloca. Winston and Steve will (hopefully) collect Valle´s plastic on Tuesday. The nice thing about working in a group of three is that tomorrow I can leave for meetings in Cochabamba and trust that progress will still be made on the recycling front in my absence.

I can´t upload photos for some reason. I´ll add them later.

I hope this finds you all well and happy.

Love,

Sarah

As I lie here in my mosquito net, wondering who is winning in the NCAA tournament, I also reflect on the events of the last two days and the wonder that is the Bolivian bloqueo. And by ¨wonder¨ I do mean wonder, along with many other not-traditionally-wonderful things.

I awoke yesterday at the break of dawn, fired up. The day had finally arrived: We were to give our first recycling talk to the teachers of Winston´s elementary school in Calamuchita. If all went well and we convinced the teachers of the brilliance and usefulness of recycling, this day could mark the beginning of a sustainable project and give meaning to my service. (That last part was added for effect.) My cell phone rang.

¨Sarah?¨

¨Yeah?¨

¨It´s Winston. Ummm... Is your school open?¨

¨I assume so, Winston. Why?¨

¨Because there´s a huge civic strike and they´re bloqueoing between Tarija and Valle.¨

¨Oh.... Huh. I´ll go check and call you back.¨

I threw some clothes on, walked down the road to my school, and reported back to Winston. ¨Yeah I´ve got kids and I´ve got taxis that look like they´re headed to the city. See what you can do about getting here.¨ He arrived about an hour later.

¨Yeah they had just cut down some trees and thrown them in the road. I just got out of the cab, walked across and caught another one on the other side.¨

¨Any idea what they´re bloqueoing about?¨

¨Nope.¨

When Steve arrived we went over our presentation and struck out for Calamuchita but ran into Lourdes and Ana (my work partners) in the Valle plaza. They advised us not to go.

¨Oh right,¨ agreed Winston. ¨Most of Calamuchita´s profes live in Tarija and probably didn´t try to cross the bloqueo. Nobody´s going to be there.¨

Luckily for us, Lourdes and Ana were also on their way to Calamuchita and invited us to share their contracted taxi. The director of the Calamuchita elementary school was very apologetic about his teachers fallaring. (fallar - a great Spanish word meaning to fail or not follow through. Learn it. I don´t think I´ll be able to stop using it when I´m back in the English-speaking world.) We said it was okay and that we hadn´t expected his teachers to come all the way from the city, crossing bloqueos, for our hour-long talk -- especially if they wouldn´t put in the same effort to teach their classes. We had come to reschedule anyway and set the new date for this coming Tuesday at 9am. (The talk in Valle is scheduled for noon the same day.) We walked back out to the road just in time to see Ana and Lourdes zipping by in the taxi on their way back to Valle. Drat. Usually there is public transportation that runs most of the way from Calamuchita to Valle, but during bloqueos there is no such luck. At least it was a beautiful day for a walk.

I´ve never actually seen a bloqueo. It is against Peace Corps rules to go near them due to the typically drunken state of the protesters. Can you think of anything better to do as you sit by some trees you have felled across a road than drink? I did strategically avoid one once in Santa Cruz. When my cab came across a long line of semi trucks with their drivers swinging lazily on hammocks tied to the underbellies of their vehicles waiting for the bloqueo to lift my driver heroically found a side road. We followed the overgrown road through tropical brush, paying farmers to open their gates so we could pass through their property and, after about an hour of seemingly aimless detouring, found ourselves on the other side, triumphant. The bloqueo itself, however, I never saw.

Today I had big plans to verify which teachers I´d be bringing to Katie Gordon´s HIV/AIDS workshop in Cochabamba in a few weeks. When I got to the school I learned from the director that one teacher had backed out, and because of the bloqueos nobody else was at school today to invite. She asked for my patience until Monday. Monday?!?!?!?! Katie wanted to send out the invitations today. I asked her if she remembered about our recycling talk scheduled for Tuesday. Blank look. She then turned to the four teachers left in the entire school and asked them to spread the word. Great.

Then I tried to go to the PAN office to see if I could get anything productive done there, thinking that maybe Lourdes and Ana would be working during today´s bloqueo as they had been yesterday. Nobody was there. I sat down, organized some things, twiddled my thumbs, and then Monica, a girl from my reading club, showed up with her little sister Marioli. We played Yengha (Jenga -- Yes we have Jenga lying around the office.) until lunch time. Monica was making some very structurally unwise choices when we began, but I think by the end I had taught her something about physics. Can I put that in my trimesterly work report?

After lunch I had reading club, which was wonderful except that I was missing one girl who apparently had been punched by Monica after reading club on Tuesday when I left them playing in the park. Her mom told me about the incident yesterday, and my reaction probably wasn´t what she was expecting. I did have a talk with Monica though, during Yengha. Though she pretended not to know what incident I was referring to, I think she got my point: I´m always watching....

Despite my big plans to go into the city tonight to watch some Sweet Sixteen action on cable, I find myself sitting here in my mosquito net, after a fairly unproductive day, writing to you. Why? Bloqueos.

Thank you, bloqueos, for this blog.

ps - I wrote this blog yesterday. After receiving many unclear and inconclusive reports from Bolivians concerning the reasons why I had to miss the NCAA tournament, the Peace Corps finally sent me this information about the happenings in Tarija:

"Today, March 23, at 12:30 pm, we are activating the EAP [Emergency Action Plan] for all Volunteers located in sites corresponding to the Tarija regional office. Campesinos [country people] have set up blockades on all roads connecting the City of Tarija with rural areas and are demanding that the Prefectura [local government] be more responsive to their needs. Tear gas has been used by the police but no injuries have been reported. This afternoon a meeting has been scheduled to discuss the situation, and we are hopeful that all will be resolved.

All Volunteers in Tarija City, you are on standfast EAP phase [meaning don´t move]. Do not go near the main plaza or any area where people are marching.

All other Volunteers in sites corresponding to the Tarija Regional office, you are on alert EAP phase [meaning be aware that there is a situation, don´t move, and listen to the radio for updates].

All Volunteers corresponding to the Tarija regional office be sure that you have sufficient food and water, and please call the Cochabamba office or 800-10-5009 between 9:30 AM and 10:30 am tomorrow for an update on the situation."

Don´t worry. Valle de Concepción is its usual, tranquil self. I have sufficient food and water. I´m about to buy a sandwich made of fried things and sit in the quiet plaza. No danger here.

Love,

Sarah

How to throw a Bolivian grape harvest festival

DAY ONE

Step 1 - Decorations!

Make creative plastic cutouts corresponding to the theme of your festival. In our case grapes for stringing across the streets and plazas proved to be quite fitting. The woman in pink wrapping the finished grapes around a piece of cardboard is one of my work partners, Ana. Lourdes, another work partner, and Calixta are cutting more grapes and leaves for me to happily staple to the string.

Step 2 - Get your friends to help!

Lourdes may have mistakenly informed me, and I may have communicated the lie to Winston, that the festival was to begin at 11am. When Winston arrived, it wasn´t time to party but rather time to clean up the smaller plaza where the opening ceremony was to be held. Much of the ¨cleaning¨ involved pulling weeds. Lourdes cleverly roped Winston in by saying we needed his manly muscles to conquer the really tough weeds. I should have reminded him to lift with his legs.

Step 3 - Take a break to watch others work

Head over to the fairgrounds, also known as the soccer field, to see what the men have been up to while you were pulling weeds. Take note that the stalls for food and wine vendors have been set up. Watch the men put the bleachers in place. (Carlos, my third work partner, is in the yellow, directing.) When asked to stop standing around watching and do some work, whinily protest that you´ve just cleaned the entire little plaza by yourselves and this is deservedly your break time. Besides, it´s really hot out to be doing so much work. To prove that you´re on a legitimate break, go visit a friend´s stall to sample some grape chicha. (Remember the corn chicha from training? This grape stuff is better.) Lourdes is on the left drinking chicha, and my new, sarcastic friend, Noami, is holding the pitcher on the right.

Side note: I learned during my interview with the Inspector General from Washington, DC the day after the festival that it is against Peace Corps Bolivia rules for volunteers to consume chicha. I laughed and told him I had consumed about six liters of it over the weekend. It was a confidential interview.

Step 4 - Prepare for opening ceremony

Preparations include ensuring that the little plaza is properly strung with plastic cutout grapes, setting up and testing stereo equipment for amplifying the mayor´s speech to all 20 people who will attend, setting up an ample selection of local wines for tasting once all speeches have been said, and talking the Gringa into a see-who´s-tallest competition with the grape-toting statue inhabiting the plaza.Step 5 - Let the festivities begin!Make some speeches, taste some wine, and make your way over to the festival grounds to party the night away with local music and more wine and chicha.

DAY TWO Step 1 - Wake up early to water the street in your nightgown. Step 2 - Finish decoratingStart making giant, fake bunches of grapes to decorate the stage. There´s Lourdes again on the right. Olga, our clean water lady, with whom I plan to have a few choice words, is on the left; and Rebeca, my former host mom, is in the background.

Pose proudly with your bunch of grapes.

Step 3 - Check out the vendors and their waresDiscover the Taste of Chicago-esque presence of... dun dun dunnnn! .... hot, candied grapes ON A STICK!!!! Don´t even try to resist buying some. Take note that the hotness of the grapes combined with the crunch of the candy coating distract you from the fact that you should still spit out the seeds. I have planted a grape vine in my stomach. Hopefully US customs will let it slide. (If you ever get sick of my jokes, don´t tell me.)Step 4 - Bring out the emceesHead back over to the stage, and have your emcees starts sound testing and inviting all present to make their way to the stage to begin the party for the day. Notice the stage with its fresh background paint job depicting the famous local bodega and a proud Tarijan stomping grapes. Also proudly take note of your own handiwork strung from the roof. Ooooooh. Aaaaaaah.Step 5 - Make sure all government officials and important people are in place.Step 6 - Start the party!Put your local mayor (in reddish) on display with local dancers. Follow that act with an endless lineup of popular bands, and you´ve got yourself a hoppin´ Bolivian grape harvest festival.Step 7 - Admire your work

And now for something completely off topic. Almost as important as supporting the local wine-producing community is supporting your Peace Corps volunteers. Perhaps some of you have been itching to contribute. Well, your chance is coming up. A friend of mine here in Bolivia, Katie Gordon of California, is working with an organization in Cochabamba that promotes education about HIV/AIDS in Bolivia. She is working on a project to train Bolivian school teachers on how to put on HIV/AIDS workshops in their schools. I will be attending her capacitation workshop in April with three of the teachers from my local school. In about a week, her project will be posted on the Peace Corps website, and anyone and everyone will be free to donate. I will let you know when it is posted, but in case any of you are curious the website is http://www.peacecorps.gov/. On the left side of the screen, click on ¨Donate Now¨. In the middle of the screen, you will see an option for ¨Volunteer Projects¨, and after that you search for Bolivia in the list of countries and K. Gordon´s project. It is highly recommended that you contibute using your credit card since personal checks can take up to two months to process. (They have to check for Anthrax. I wish I were kidding.)Again, I will let you know when Katie tells me the project has been posted.Thanks for reading!Remember that the opinions expressed in this blog are those of Sarah Anderson and do not reflect the opinions of the United States Government or Peace Corps. Please do not reproduce or advertise this blog, unless you´re my mom making copies for grandmas and sisters. Thank you.

After quite a few difficulties and delays, I finally moved into my new house! The Peace Corps gives us a nice chunk of change to furnish our houses when we first move to our sites. I was lucky to be moving into Monica´s old room, so I didn´t need to buy anything then and was free to spend the money on a plane ticket to Santa Cruz -- the first leg of my journey home for Christopher´s wedding. Well, moving out of Monica´s room meant losing all of Monica´s stuff. Thankfully, the new house came fully furnished, including a full tank of gas and two five-year-old girls -- the ¨rats¨. Things started out well. Sofía and Ana invited themselves in and found my toy llama (pictured on the left). One of the goals of my Peace Corps service has since become teaching them that said toy is not a sheep or a horse but indeed an entirely different species of animal.

We´re still working on it.

I gave them my attention for a good two hours as they greatly hindered my unpacking process, but eventually I had to leave. Despite my efforts to explain that I lived there now and would be back that night, the two of them became instant devil-children and began threatening to break my keys or throw them over the wall of our shared courtyard. I was holding the keys, so I knew they would have to pry them out of my cold, dead fingers to accomplish such a threat (although maybe I shouldn´t put it past them), but I was still a little freaked out. I almost literally had to push them out the door.

They haven´t threatened me since then, but it is always difficult to get them to leave the house when I can´t play anymore. They´re actually pretty cute and fun up until that inevitable moment. Sofía (the one with the cheeks) is usually nice, and Ana seems to be the instigator of the devilishness. This morning as I prepared for Davíd from the Peace Corps office to come fumigate and kill my giant spiders, I listened to a good half hour of temper tantrums as the girls protested going to kindergarten. To my surprise, Sofía was the one who got her way and stayed home. As she and I stood outside my house while Davíd did his thing, I tried and tried to convince her that kindergarten was fun. I could not understand why she would want to be away from her partner in crime, especially when I wouldn´t be around to harrass either, but she was determined to stay at home and do absolutely nothing all day long. We´ll try again on Monday. For the first few days after I moved in there was no water in Valle de Concepción. The situation was getting pretty ridiculous, and I was contemplating retreating to the city to borrow a hostel shower when, gracias a Dios, I began to notice women with buckets making their way to the plaza. A truck full of river water had arrived, and everyone in town showed up with every container they could get their hands on to bring this murky water to their houses. I have to admit, it was kind of a fun experience and gave me a real sense of community. I myself made three trips with the huge paint bucket I found had been provided with the new house and spent the rest of the day boiling and filtering water with every pot I owned. I had to check on the filter every hour or so to toothbrush off the grime so the water could pass through, but it was so worth it to have drinking water again. I even took a break for a celebratory brown water bucket bath. The water is back now and running clear for the first time in a while... but it also hasn´t rained in a while, and I´m sure the murk will return when it does. Okay. Time to go. Future blog entries will include a tour of my new house and maybe all of Valle de Concepción and a report on Carnaval and the wine festival to be hosted by my site this weekend.

Last week, the mayor of my town was kicked out of office. He didn´t even make it a year, which is not unusual for a Bolivian politician, but the unusual thing is that it doesn´t seem to be his fault. Apparently, two members of his staff recently became intimately involved causing certain members of my community to deem them unfit to perform their jobs. In order to oust said couple from their government positions, the community members elected to oust the entire staff. What this means for me is that I lose my entire mayor´s office that I was just getting to know and like. It was full of young, energetic people who I really enjoyed, and now it will be refilled with unknowns. I also lose Carlos, my favorite work partner, because he was a full-time government employee; and I lose half of Lourdes, who was partially employed by the local government and partially employed by an organization in Tarija. She will try to seek full employment with the Tarijan organization, but who knows if she will be successful? At least I still have Ana.

This is how it works here. If we don´t like the mayor we kick him out. When we kick him out we also kick out everyone he brought with him when he was hired. Carlos knew everything there was to know about PAN, he worked well as a facilitator, he had established good relationships with both the central PAN office in Tarija and the cooks and educators who worked in his PAN centers. Now he has to leave, and he will be replaced by someone with no experience and no knowledge of the organization whatsoever. This person will have to learn to do the job that Carlos was already doing well until the mayor who hired him or her gets booted and the whole cycle repeats. The entire country works like this. No wonder we´re a little behind in our development.

In other news, in case you haven´t heard, Evo has declared out of spite that United States citizens must now apply for visas to visit Bolivia. The good news is that he hasn´t decided how he will implement his brilliant plan yet. He has two options: the pre-pay plan and the instant gratification plan. The pre-pay plan is for you non-procrastinators and involves you sending in a bunch of paperwork and a fat check months before travelling and waiting to receive your visa in the mail. The instant gratification plan would mean that you could get all the way to the Bolivian airport before having to pay a fee to get your ¨visa¨ to enter the country. I vote for instant gratification. Evo will be meeting with Congress in April to decide which route to take, and the brilliant visa plan will be implemented in May. So, if you were planning on vacationing in lovely Bolivia (which I highly recommend), get in and get out before May or pay.

In more personal news, I am having kind of a severe allergic reaction to something. Two nights ago, my palms started to itch and my hands began to swell up. I woke up yesterday morning with normal hands but a breakout of hives all over my body, and by the time I made it to the hospital my feet were pulling the same routine my hands had done the night before. The doctor gave me a shot in the arm and a shot in the rump, and all symptoms magically disappeared. He prescribed five pills for the next five days and told me not to eat anything with preservatives in it.... meaning nothing. I didn´t exactly follow his advice, and here I am today with more hives. The problem is that Bolivian food doesn´t come as thoroughly labeled as American food, so you don´t always know exactly what you´re putting in your body. Besides, this whole ¨natural food¨ diet interferes with my usual philosophy of ¨if it looks good, eat it.¨ Will power, Sarah. Will power. If my hands and feet swell up again, I´ll go back to the doctor.

Hope your lives are political upheaval- and outbreak-free.

The opinions expressed in this blog are the opinions of Sarah Anderson and do not reflect those of the United States Government or the Peace Corps.

We have entered the rainy season. Last Tuesday it rained for 19 hours straight and then again on Wednesday, ruining my plans to help Winston paint the internet cafe he just created. Luckily there was lots of office work to do for PAN. The PAN centers are closed for summer vacation, but the facilitators and their trusty volunteer are still taking up office space doing fun things such as inventory and... inventory. I am taking this opportunity to teach my two female work partners basic computer skills. Lourdes has leaned to type the letters asdfghjklñ in the last week and a half, and Ana Rosa is quickly catching up while Lourdes curses her unruly thumb and the k key for being difficult to press. Ana doesn´t seem to have any qualms with specific keys or fingers but plugs along quietly and patiently. I showed Carlos the program we are using, but I think his manly pride kept him from giving it a real chance while I was watching. He spends by far the most time on the computer, typing official letters and solicitations and documentation to be signed and stamped for every toy or kilo of rice we distribute to the centers. I can only hope he´s sneaking typing lessons behind my back. Soon I will add Microsoft Word and Excel instuction into the mix.

But yes, the rainy season. My host mom (Mom? Maybe more of an aunt) Rebeca just painted her roof with sealant that was supposed to prevent leaking, but the roof still leaks, peeling the ceiling paint in my room and dripping into the bathroom and hallway. The water also turns the pathetic trickle outside of town into a raging river for about a day and the streets into mud. This mud becomes a large part of everyday life. Despite numerous efforts to keep it out, the light brown muck still hitches a ride on the bottoms of shoes and stows away in water pipes. Yesteday I showered in brown water. Tomorrow I fear I will be washing my clothes in it. I did feel cleaner after the shower than before, and I hope my clothes will look it.

I´ll be moving to a new house February first. Though the toilet will still flush brown, I believe it will be a step up. Spacious with a kitchen and bathroom to myself, my house shares a courtyard with the home of a nice family. The only downfall, aside from losing my perfect-for-stargazing roof at Rebeca´s, is that the daughter of the nice family is, as Lourdes put it, ¨a rat.¨ I´ll soon discover exactly what the rattiness entails (pun intended).

It has begun to rain again. A woman informed me through a witty little rhyme the other day that it will soon get much worse: ¨Enero poco, febrero loco.¨ Translation: I will be showering in mud for at least another month.

Hey all,

I looked up the word biweekly on dictionary.com, and this is what I found:

bi·week·ly [bahy-week-lee]

–adjective

1. occurring every two weeks.

2. occurring twice a week; semiweekly.

–noun

3. a periodical issued every other week.

–adverb

4. every two weeks.

5. twice a week.

In case any of you were going by definition #2 or #5 and thought I was completely nuts, I assure you that (aside from this week) I will be managing my blog like a biweekly periodical.

Thanks for all the feedback so far! I love how writing a blog inspires you people to email me. To the people who have commented directly on my blog page, I would like to apologize for how long it takes me to get back to you. You understand how hard it is to go through my gmail account and find your addresses. It might be five whole clicks, and that is four whole clicks more difficult than replying to an email. In conclusion, replies travel faster via email, but if my response time does not bother you, please continue commenting directly on my blog. I love to hear from you either way.

You know how sometimes, after long absences from a good friend -- say, since October -- when you run into them again you find yourself at a loss for words? Despite what million events took place in their absence, despite the anecdote per day that you could relate had you been communicating daily, you resort to catching them up on the boring basics. After all, you can´t talk about real stuff until you´ve covered the background information.

What has happened between October and now? Thanksgiving happened. As you may know, there were no Pilgrims in Bolivia. To celebrate, I joined the group of 60 or so Santa Cruz volunteers at a nice (though salamander- and HUGE centipede-ridden) hotel overlooking a vast expanse of nature preserve and spent all day in the pool getting sunburned through my SPF 50.

Things happened before Thanksgiving, now that I think about it. B42 had in-service training (IST) back in the homeland, Cochabamba, where we reunited for the first time since being shipped off to our sites to begin service. Each of us presented an oral report of the status of things in our sites. Mine may have enigmatically hinted that my site doesn´t appear to need me very much while also giving the impression that I am working and have plans for future work. My boss thought it was good.

After IST, I took my first long bus ride to my friend Naya´s site halfway between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. Maybe the worst eight hours of my life, I spent the trip clenching desperately to keep the increasingly-threatening explosive diarrhea in my body not my pants. When we stopped at the halfway point, I found the bathroom to be a hole in the ground of about 2-inch diameter and surprised myself by expertly directing the majority of the explosion into the hole. Beginner´s luck.

After learning about libraries in Naya´s site we bussed it again to Samaipata, a small, cute, tourist town halfway to Santa Cruz. We played at waterfalls, saw ancient Incan ruins, and hiked a small mountain. Then we continued on to Buena Vista with its swimming pool, blazing sun, and US government-provided turkey.

Sometimes the mindless small talk consumes the entire temporal window you had available, and you excuse yourself from the conversation and walk away with a distressing taste in your mouth. That, my friends, is the taste of nonfulfillment. It tastes like friendship slipping away into abbreviated, Christmas-letter-update oblivion -- and I think that tastes like chuño.

After Thanksgiving, I returned to Valle de Concepción with the goal of devoting more of my time to the PAN office and less of it to finding excuses not to go to the PAN office. After all, my diagnostic report had (kind of) mentioned that Valle on the whole doesn´t really need me, whereas PAN actually requested me. It seemed only fair, and I think we´re on the road to making some really progress in that dusty little office.

Upon my return to Tarija, I noticed another change: Christmas decorations! Little, fake Christmas trees with lights that blinked in time with the annoying squeak of a popular carol; rope lights wrapped around the palm trees in the plaza, randomly and tackily blinking; buildings hung with garlands dusted with fake snow in a climate that never sees any. Weird. While confused by the lack of cold and powdery, white stuff, I thought back to the brief time I spent in a Chicagoland mall when I was home for my brother´s wedding (at the end of SEPTEMBER) and was horrified by the Christmas tree display set up outside one department store that shall remain nameless. Thank you, Bolivia, for not being as Christmas-crazy as the United States.

Naya´s family came to visit her for the holidays, and they decided to spend Christmas week in none other than the beautiful, tranquil, perfect-for-quality-family-time Tarija. Together we discovered the amazing waterfalls just outside of town, ate at nearly every sidewalk cafe, and enjoyed the good company of the tightly-knit Tarija volunteer family. As homesickness had begun to hit me kind of hard a couple days before Christmas, it was nice to have the familiarity of an American family around.

A couple days after Christmas, Susan and I packed our bags for a Santa Cruz New Year. After 5 taxis, 1 truck, 1 seedy hostel, 4 buses 4 passport stamps, and 32 hours, we made it to that huge, sweaty city via Argentina. ¨Why the Argentina route?¨ you ask? Get out a map. Follow the directions below.

1. Find Tarija city.2. Find Yacuiba.3. Examine distance between Tarija and Yacuiba.4. Find Orán, Argentina.5. Examine distance from Tarija to Orán to Yacuiba.6. Compare distances in step 3 and step 5.7. Imagine both routes taking 12 hours. That´s because the more direct-looking route crosses some mountains... on a one-lane, unpaved road. 8. Imagine two buses encountering each other on said road on the edge of a cliff and having to maneuver around each other. Can you imagine that sometimes one of them falls? 9. Make the smart choice, the Argentinian choice, over paved roads, over flat land.(Dad, before you put the atlas away, I´ll give you our exact route: Tarija south to almost Bermejo where we crossed the border into Aguas Blancas, Argentina. Then to Orán, then to Pocitos where we crossed back into Bolivia at Yacuiba. Yacuiba to Santa Cruz. Back in reverse order. The route where we may have fallen off a cliff would have been Tarija to Yacuiba to Santa Cruz.)

Needless to say it was a long, strange trip. Argentinian police are pretty strict and paranoid and insisted on poking through my dirty clothes and smelling my shampoo bottles four times on the way back. They must hate their jobs.

While it is possible to save the endangered relationship, the process takes conscious effort, though the strategy is impressively simple: Talk more. Communicate often enough that updates are practically unnecessary and can´t dominate conversation: That base will already be there, and you will now be free to delve into other topics. Issues, maybe. Funny, had-to-be-there types of stories that will maintain their humor because of the reestablished inimacy of the relationship between story teller and tellee.

In national news, Tarija and the rest of our like-minded side of the country is still experiencing some upheaval about the whole autonomía thing. Additionally, apparently Evo had threatened to change the 2/3 congressional voting requirement for passing a law to only 50%, making it very easy for him to get passed virtually any law he wanted. He can´t get anything past us of ¨the Orient¨ though, and the immediate response was much hunger striking and horn-honking automobile parades followed by a huge rally that I was not allowed to attend. My favorite part of the whole charade was the sign I took a picture of. You can translate yourself.

Aside from travelling, getting sunburned, celebrating holidays, attending (but not participating in) autonomía rallies, and spending quality time in the office and with my reading club, I´ve been able to catch up on my pleasure reading for the first time since elementary school. I shit you not. I highly recommend The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Highly. Great character development. Great plot. Interesting philosophical ideas. I´ve also been researching where I might want to go to medical school. So far, there´s the obvious Johns Hopkins, along with a smattering of Chicago schools. I try to look outside of Chicago, but every school I research loses some appeal when I realize it´s not in Chicago. Apparently I´m biased.

My New Year´s resolution to you (keeping in mind that I haven´t kept a single New Year´s resolution in my entire life and didn´t even bother to make any during college) is to wash the chuño from our mouths with Dove ice cream bars (mmm...). I promise biweekly blogs. Woah. I know. But want you to be a part of my life. This is for our own good. See you in two weeks.

It´s been too long hasn´t it? It has.

The Integrated Education Tech Specialist (a third year volunteer who assists my boss) came to visit the new Tarija volunteers a couple weeks ago and took some really nice pictures, so I will share those with you and pray that you think twice about disowning me.

My site was her first stop, and she arrived in the middle of the reading club I have every Tuesday and Thursday at two o´clock and immediately began taking pictures.... without my knowledge. Yes, that means none of these pictures are staged, except some of the ones of the kids: They are absolutely fascinated by digital cameras. As a related side note, I let a girl Elva from my reading club borrow my camera yesterday to take pictures of a fair for the 25 PAN centers in my area, and she disappeared into the crowd with it. Though I haven´t seen her since, I am far less worried than I probably should be. Should I be? I can´t seem to make myself worry about it. Perhaps a palm branch broom is currently brushing up the smashed remains of the one valuable, expensive thing I brought to this country. Perhaps Elva will arrive at reading club on Tuesday with an offering of battery-dead, memory-erased, now-useless-to-her metal box. Perhaps, in our town of 1000 people, Elva will manage to avoid me for the next two years and I will never see the little box again. I think this nonchalant attitude will get me far in Bolivia. Anyway, here´s my reading club.

We meet at the park and take over these two, huge, cement tables. We sing songs in Spanish and English, like ¨Head, Shoulder, Knees and Toes.¨ We read for about an hour. We check books in and out. Each kid has their own card that I keep on file in a little box, listing every book they´ve ever borrowed from the previous volunteer Monica´s extensive collection, whether or not they returned it on time and in what condition it was retured, and whether or not they completed the assignment that comes with each borrowed book. When a child checks out a book in English, of which I have an abundance, he or she is instructed to return a week later having found three words in the English text that look like Spanish words. For Spanish books, he or she must tell me what the book was about. I have recently added chapter books in Spanish like The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter to the collection. It´s cheaper to buy these without illustrations, so my assignment for those books is to choose a chapter and draw a picture of what happened in that chapter. I feel like Mrs. Freed. Soon I might have them find words they didn´t know and write the definitions. Ooh that´s a good idea. That way I can learn too.

Paola, the girl with me on the left, is my favorite. I´m probably not supposed to have favorites, but I´m not too naive to believe that all teachers (and most parents) do. Paola is one of my next door neighbors. Her seven-year-old, ever-present smile would follow me everywhere if she didn´t have school and parents and a bedtime. My favorite thing about my favorite girl is the way she walks -- or rather, gets from place to place: She never walks. She´s a jumper. She leaps and bounds and spins and skips and falls a lot and gets back up to jump again. Recently, she has discovered that she can minimize her time on the ground by holding my hand wherever we go. I imagine we´re quite a sight: Me with my long, even strides attached at the hand to this tiny, bounding bundle of energy.

Here´s my favorite picture. Every day at about 3 pm, the wind picks up in Valle de Concepción and can sometimes change the temperature by a good 10 or 15 degrees, morphing the day from ¨shorts weather¨ to ¨hoodie weather¨ and causing the kids who came jacketless to reading club to huddle together for warmth rather than run home to grab more clothes. Paola was resourceful and used my folder full of stickers (prizes for attendance, good treatment of books, and helping me with class) as a windbreaker.

That reminds me: Some of you have asked if there is anything I need that you could send. Stickers. These kids go crazy over stickers. And I don´t know where you can find children´s books in Spanish in the US, but those would also be very much appreciated. Stuffing the empty spaces in the boxes with American chocolate is also a nice gesture. =)

I went to visit Susan at her site last week. It is flippin´ beautiful in a different way than Valle de Concepción. Practically on the Argentinian border, it´s a little bit hotter and more forested down in La Mamora. Susan and I are sitting on a bench outside the elementary school in which she teaches computer classes to teachers every morning and plays basketball with students every afternoon. The mountains in the background are Argentina.

Susan had been talking up her Gringa friend who could also play basketball since she arrived at her site and started playing against the big-talking student teachers. During recess that day we were challenged to a game and won hands-down, 31 to 20ish. The rematch was to 11 and involved a lot more fouling and a lot more arguments about the definition of a foul. They play by slightly different rules here as far as fouling goes, and by the time we had lost that 11 point game, Susan and I had sworn to ourselves to get NBA or NCAA basketball game tapes sent down to enlighten those boys about how much contact is too much and how it is possible to foul the person not in possession of the ball.

I´m throwing this last picture in to show you my boss, Wendy. She is just as nice and awesome as she looks here, entertaining Bolivian children with her fancy camera. I also wanted to mention how cool my job is. I read books with little kids (so far. I swear I´ll do more soon.) and basketball playing can be listed on my trimesterly report as a work-related activity because it encourages physical fitness, health, and self-esteem. Visiting with neighbors is sharing of United States culture, one of the three main goals of Peace Corps, and if you visit me at my site we will be introducing more cultural exchange to their lives and I won´t have to take vacation time. Think about it. You´d be doing Bolivia a favor.

Final Days of TrainingMy last few weeks in Cochabamba were spent going on a few field trips with my Spanish class and getting ready to say goodbye to all the wonderful people I had gotten to know over the last three months. During one such field trip, we paid a visit to the giant Jesus Christ statue that overlooks the city. The Cristo is quite a spectacle. He is literally visible from anywhere in the city -- a constant presence with his outstretched arms, watching over us all. Comforting? I enjoy the fact that you can climb up inside him and look out through his armpits. Too bad he was all locked up during our visit.Of course my favorite part was the view of the entire city from the top of the Cristo´s hill. We also visited the home and gardens of Simón I. Patiño in the city of Cochabamba. Simón owned a mine back in the day and hence became a very very wealthy man. Since his death, his family has transformed his home and property into a cultural center. I would be more knowledgeable about this, except that our tour guide mumbled, was very unenthusiastic, and spoke very quickly. I couldn´t give her the concentration that would have been necessary to follow her tour because I was too busy thinking about how much I wished she would just smile. Just once. I think she would have looked like a pregnant, Bolivian Tanya Bruskewitz. (I apologize to those of you who don´t know Tanya. You´re missing out.)After Simón´s house, we visited a natural history museum. I took a couple pictures there with a couple people in mind. Grandma A, this one´s for you: Bolivian hummingbirds! (They´re even found in Tarija!)And, Mom, I couldn´t resist showing you the type of rodent I might encounter down here in Tarija: the carachupa. Isn´t he a cutie?Okay, that´s all for field trips. Next we had a going away/thank you party for all the host families of all the trainees. As a special treat for the families (and the rest of us), the three girls in Basic Sanitation dressed up as Cholitas, traditional Bolivian country women. The Integrated Education girls and boys donned our own festive outfits and performed a traditional Bolivian dance. Actually, there were two dances. First, the queca, which is probably the most popular party dance. We had a little queca competition, and in three rounds determined which trainees were the best queca dancers in the group. Bryan and I didn´t even make it to the second round, but I blame the fact that we learned the dance in our Spanish classes, and different teachers were apparently teaching different versions. We had no time to practice and get our versions straight. Either that or I´m a horrible dancer. The second dance, performed exclusively by Integrated Ed as a gift to the families, was much better, though I have no photographic proof since I accidentally forgot to give my camera back to Cyntia to take pictures. Basically, it involved a lot of booty shaking and hat waving, and for the grand finale we invited all our families out to dance with us. By the way, that´s the way the hats are supposed to look. It is Bolivian style to wear these little black hats that are way too small perched atop the head.As another going away party of sorts, the host moms of Susan and I prepared a Bolivian delicacy for our final lunch in Illataco: guinea pig. The picture on the left is of my host mom, Doña María Luisa, smiling proudly with a fried-up guinea pig head, also smiling and proudly perched atop the body from which it has been severed... or the body of his former buddy. I would try to be less vulgar, but I don´t think I have it in me. I also don´t have a whole lot to say about eating guinea pig. It´s not bad. Their little bodies are a bit slimy and don´t have much flavor. It also takes a lot of effort to get the meat off their bones. Doña María Luisa took great joy from showing me how to eat the brain (pictured on the right). Oh yes. I ate guinea pig brain. It has the consistency of butter and also lacks flavor. I couldn´t help thinking back to my days in the Juraska Lab, where I spent innumerable hours with rat brains. Could these guinea pigs lives have been better spent furthering scientific research rather than feeding my (growing) belly? Probably not. There seems to be a shortage of microscopes and sterile technique in Bolivia.So anyway, next came the swear-in ceremony. I apologize for not having any pictures. It was a very nice event, with speeches from the Peace Corps Country Director, a representative from the Embassy, a representative from our own group, a horrible rendition of the Bolivian national anthem (We ran through it three times a few days before the event. Nobody really knew the melody, but we tried.), a slightly less horrible rendition of the United States national anthem (nobody can hit those high notes), a recitation of some oath to the US government (Just kidding. It was very meaningful.), and a presentation of certificates and sites. What made the ceremony even more meaningful was the presence of nearly all of our training and language instructors and current Volunteers who went out of their way to be at the event. I, of course, teared up (I´m such a wuss) at a few points during the ceremony, as it was very touching and powerful. After the ceremony, the fresh, newly-born Peace Corps Volunteers ate an incredible dinner at a very schnazzy restaurant in Cochabamba, during which waiters constantly came around offering us different, sizzling cuts of meat on skewers. I don´t even know what I was eating most of the time, but wow was it good.Oh yeah. The dinner and subsequent party had a rock star theme. I have no idea what I was supposed to be. We just explored the used clothes section of the cancha (remember the gigantic outdoor market from one of the first blog entries?) and tried to make me look as ridiculous as possible... with an '80s theme? Within the next couple days, we gradually parted ways, travelling to our respective regional cities and sites. We will meet again in three months to share the progress we have made in our site diagnostics, the projects we have begun to undertake, and of course to receive more language instruction. Needless to say, it was difficult to say goodbye. We have become like a family in the past three months, learning nearly everything about one another... down to the quality and frequency of bowel movements. I can´t wait to see them again and hear about the crazy diseases they have contracted in my absence.

TarijaI can´t seem to get away from Susan and Sarah R: Sarah and I were roommates in Miami, then the three of us were neighbors in Illataco, and now we are the three new volunteers assigned to Tarija. Here are Susan and Sarah about to eat a delicious lunch at a cafe in the city near one of the three beautiful plazas. Have I mentioned that Tarija is beautiful? It´s basically a little, yuppy city. It is always clean: They actually have readily-accessible garbage cans on the streets and take pride in their goal of being the cleanest city in Bolivia. Another advantage to living in Tarija is that the dogs are less plentiful, far nicer, and usually wearing sweaters. El Día de San Roque, the ¨Day of the Dog¨ was last week, and the people of Tarija dressed all the dogs up in fancy collars. This may be solely a Tarijan holiday. I can imagine such an event in Cochabamba could only result in pain, blood, and lots of rabies shots.I have now been in the city of Tarija for almost a month! Wow. Due to some technical difficulties, I spent most of the first week in a hostel in the city but finally moved my luggage into my new room in the veterinarian´s house that Wednesday. The biggest room in which I have ever lived, it is in the interior of the building, causing me to be shielded from a great deal of disturbances such as 6am trufi horns and late-night drunkards. However, due to the room´s placement I am also denied a window to the great outdoors. My fantastic, mountainous view from the roof will have to suffice: Frustrations arose during the first couple weeks as I began to feel less and less productive. Beginning as a nice vacation from the packed schedule I had during training, my free time in the city of Tarija before settling into my site soon became a nuisance. Bolivian Independence Day was the Sunday after I moved my things into the new house, and the Bolivians took a four day weekend for it. Rumor has it that they carefully planned the parading to take place entirely on that Friday so that they could have the rest of the weekend to drink and party without having to bother with any more formalities. I´ll give them credit for being clever with their partying. Coming back to my point, however, this meant that there was no work for me to do in the closed PAN office on Friday and Monday. In hindsight, I should not have gone horse-hunting with Sarah on Thursday and should have checked in to the PAN office. Instead I spent most of the day contemplating which horse Sarah might buy from this spectacular German woman who lives outside Tarija. (One´s bicycle allowance of $200 can also be put toward the purchase of a horse for use in transporting oneself around one´s site and to the outlying communities in which one might work. In some cases, horses are the only effective means of transportation, due to road or lack-of-road conditions.) In short, I had a great time, and Sarah got to test drive two horses as our cab driver impatiently drove away.However, on Friday I learned about the four day weekend and my inability to meet with my work partners in the PAN office. This clearly added to my frustrations, but I did see many a parade on the streets of Tarija. That´s always fun. I swear there are at least three parades a week here. Most of the time I have no idea why. So... Tuesday I was going to go to work, but I had to be in the Peace Corps office in Tarija in the morning to arrange a trip to Santa Cruz to take care of some things. Those arrangements took all day, thanks to the siesta that does in fact exist in Bolivia. The office reopened after the siesta at 2:30 or 3pm, just in time for me to miss my first-ever reading club in Valle de Concepción. I had attended one with Monica, the Volunteer that I am replacing, during my site visit in training (club pictured to the right, singing ¨Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes¨); and when I arrived at the veterinarian´s house the cute kids next door made me promise to hold a meeting on Tuesday. How could I resist not only their adorableness but the opportunity to DO SOMETHING? So, though I had planned to both go to the PAN office to start my primary project AND have a reading club meeting, which will be one of my secondary projects, I ended up missing PAN in the morning and having to call Rebeca, the veterinarian, during siesta to ask her to please apologetically turn away the children that were about to show up on her doorstep. After spending the rest of that week in Santa Cruz and enduring more guilt and feelings of uselessness due to STILL not having accomplished anything, I ran into some Volunteers in Tarija city who asked me to join them in a recycling project they are beginning. Steve and Winston are from B41, the group that arrived here four months before mine, and their sites are the two closest to mine, with Valle de Concepción in between. Because my site also houses the mayor´s office, where we would soon be spending countless hours planning said project and trying to get said mayor to foot his half of the bill, how could I refuse their invitation? And since we had a meeting with the mayor on Monday, of course I couldn´t go to PAN. I know it sounds like I was procrastinating, and if that´s what you´re thinking you might be right, but you also might not have any concept of the incredible Bolivian need to recycle. I will demonstrate, and you will be convinced.To your left, you will see Valle de Concepción´s version of a landfill. Notice the lack of order, the garbage haphazardly strewn about over the landscape, the pigs rummaging through the filth. Also notice how the majority of the garbage is plastic and therefore, hopefully, recyclable. Notice something else, if you will: Doesn´t there seem to be surprisingly little garbage located in this landfill, considering that no recycling program exists as of yet and this landfill serves a population of at least 1000 people? I theorize that the missing trash has met one of four possible fates. In order of greatest to least likelihood, said trash has either been (1)burned and is now polluting the air and Bolivian lungs; (2)thrown on the ground and is now polluting the earth and endangering the lives of free-roaming, free-grazing livestock; (3)thrown in a river and is now polluting the water; or (4)reused as a flower pot or toothbrush holder in a Peace Corps-influenced school. I am excessively excited about the potential for this recycling program to take off and make a real difference here. Of course the deeper we delve into all aspects of starting such a program, the more obstacles we encounter; but so far we have not run into anything so discouraging as to make us lose hope. The site of plastics littering the streets and schoolyards and the smell of toxic chemicals in the air keep our hopes alive.