An update finally…

We got back for tech week just in time for Good Friday and Easter. Since a huge population of South AmericaS are Catholics they take their religious holidays pretty seriously. A majority of people say that they are Catholics but they never go to church or do anything remotely religious except those all important holidays. At one resturtant we ate at, there was a picture of the last supper and directly under it was a topless women posing for a tool advertisment… ironic? On Good Friday I was eating breakfast and and talking to my host sister about Good Friday meant to them and she was explaining how they eat 12 plates of food, one for each of Jesus’ disiples. As I was enjoying my meat (a rarity for breakfast)and bread she then she told me that they don’t eat meat (except fish) on this day.I then asked her why was I eating meat, she then told me that I was not Bolivian… I think she meant to say Catholic. Now the funny part about all this is that I have had meat probably three times for breakfast since I have been here, and they happen to feed it to me on a day when they don’t eat meat. Well, their loss is my gain… meat for breakfast!

For tech week we went to the department of Santa Cruz and it was absolutely beautiful. Just in the trip to Santa Cruz the diversity of Bolivia is stunning. From mountian tops to jungles, you can’t ask for much more… expect better roads. Only about five percent of the roads in Bolivia are paved so it makes for a long bumpy ride. We returned Thursday at 10 at night and we left at 8 in the morning. The kicker is the trip was only about 200 miles.

There are several reasons why most of the roads are not paved reason one… there are a ton of landslides that are constantly taking out the road, and then it can take days for them to fix it. Tip number one to help fix the Bolivian economy… improve the infrastructure. The is a problem because the goverment does not have a lot of money mainly because no one regulates the collection of taxes. Basically there is no type of IRS. I am not sure about business taxes but for personal taxes there is no way to record your purchases anywhere especially the local market. The only place where they have any sort of recording is at somewhere advanced like a supermarket where they have computers, but the problem here is only the rich people can afford to go there. The goverment gives everyone a number and then they type it in when you buy something at the supermarket. Then you are supposed to pay your taxes every year like a good citizen. How many of you would pay your taxes if no one was there to regulate it? As you can see there is a huge problem with the tax system in Bolivia and therefore I have to endure 14 hour bus rides that should take 3-4 hours. On the bright side this gives me more time to enjoy the scenery. On Monday I will find out where I am going to be living for the next two years. I have been reading the site descriptions for the last week but it is sort of hard to judge a site based on a page of information. We vistied some of our sites over tech week and even though they were all in the same department they were all so very different. Our trainers and the head agriculture boss make the final decision based on a variety of factors but one thing I do know where ever I go it will be hot. I just hope it does not get too hot, my gringo skin can only take so much. Since I only have about a month left I should probably tell you a bit about my host family. My host mom Bertha is a traditional Bolivian woman also known as a “cholita”. She is a housewife but she does a lot of work in the fields and she is pretty much in charge of the household like most women in Bolivia. My host dad is gone about 90% of the time. He works in Santa Cruz where he can earn a lot more as a driver. He only comes home for holidays and the kid’s birthdays. He has also spent a year in Spain so they could build their house. The family owes one car an old school Toyota Corrola hatchback… a real beater. It has been modified from a right hand driver to a left hand driver. All the guages are on the passenger side but it really does not matter because they don’t work anyway. Then on the drivers side you have the steering wheel and pedals… it is a real beauty. The Toyota Corrola hatchback is probably the most popular car on the road in Bolivia. Since Bolivia is a natural gas rich country many of the cars and trucks run on natural gas. Since my family has quite a bit of land by this I mean about 3 acres they have people help them work the fields. Now these people are extremely poor. They have about three people that help them at different times and all there them are interesting to say the least. One of the guys only has one eye and a couple teeth and I can barely understand a word he says when he talks to me. The other guy is pretty friendly but has some sort of jaw problem so he jaw is way off to the other side. The last is a Chinese guy that they call “Chino”. Basically that is like using the persons nationality as his name. So if you had a Mexican working for you you would call him Mexican instead of his real name… a tad racist don’t you think. The interesting part about this is the guy will not ever talk to me or look at me. If he sees me in the street he will either cross the road or he will stop and turn his head in the other direction when I get close. It is pretty bizarre. Grab your map of Bolivia (just use map quest or google earth) and get ready to see where I will be headed for the next two years.

Last Monday we had our site anoucements. I got my first choice but there were others who were upset to say the least. Yours truly is headed to a little community called Muyurina in the department of Santa Cruz. It is not a typical Peace Corps site. When most people think of Peace Corps, they think of little huts or adobe buildings with thatched roofs. I definitly think that I am cut out for that but I think this site has a lot to offer me. The reason that it is an atypical Peace Corps site is because it is a fairly urban site. The community itself is only 1,000 people but it is 500 kilometers from a city of 85,000 people called Montero. I will actually be living in Montero. A city of 85,000 people in Bolivia is extermely different then in the states. It is so spread out and three story buildings are pretty rare to see. There are several cool things about it. One you can see sloths in the main plaza… Bolivia is big on plazas. Also it is only 45 minutes from the city of Santa Cruz, one of Bolivia’s largest city with over a million people. I don’t think this will take away from my experience, but only enrich it. After all I am still doing development work in a third world country, I will just have a more comfortable living then most volunteers. Not to mention an internet cafe is only five minutes away, now it is just a matter of writing a blog entry in a timely manner. I left Sunday to spend a week a my site to get a feel for what I will be doing and to meet my Bolivian counterpart. I will mainly be working with the “Instituto Superior Agropecuario” which is an agriculture university. Right now I am in the middle of my site visit. The current volunteer named Jeffery and I visted the university on my first day on Tuesday and met a majority of the important people there. He will be leaving about a week before I get here. He introduced me to my new host family that I will have and showed me around Montero. He did some great work at Muyurina I can hope to continue and expand on what he did. The university is not like American universities, for one it is a technical school and there are only 100 or so students but along with the university there is also a high school and grade school so there are quite a few people running around all the time. The students at the university spend the first part of the day in the classroom and then after lunch there do their hands on work. The philosophy at Muyurina is “Aprendemos Haciendo” We learn doing. There achieve this on 400 hectors with all kinds of projects ranging from worm production to goats and everything inbetween. The cool thing about it too is they make money from all this stuff. The students have the oppurtunity to learn about the various animals and then when they are raised they sell them. With the milk that the dairy cows produce they transform it into various products such as ice cream and yogurt at their lab and then sell it. Muyurina is a good fit for me because there are plenty of oppurtunities to expand as well as the improve the management and collaberation between the different entities at the university. On an ending note one thing about Santa Cruz is that it is flipping hot and humid down here. They say that you get used to it after a while…I sure hope so.