I walked as usual into the central area to catch a micro to the guardaria. I knew that the main buses weren´t running through the country, but after buying a cheese empanada and waiting way longer than usual, I realized that the the micros weren´t running either. No one knows much anything about it, but there´s some sort of bus strike in all of Bolivia right now. No worries - not violent at all, just making life complicated for everybody. I ended up taking a taxi up to the guardaria, which took a while because nobody knew where it was and none of the roads nearby have names.
When I finally got there, I just about walked out because it seemed like there was nothing I could do whatsoever. It was late but the kids weren´t split into their age groups yet. Most of the older kids were sitting at the table fairly quietly doing nothing, aside from a few of the trouble makers, and all of the little guys raced around the room, climbed on the chairs and tables, and crawled all over the place. I wanted to start my C lesson with the older kids and tried to get the little ones over into their room, but to no avail. The room was complete chaos with hair pulling, punching and hitting, screaming, and kids on top of all the furniture. The teachers sat in the corner talking amongst themselves and I went up to them and asked if they could help take the little ones into the other room so that I could work with the older ones. I´m fairly certain I said it in clear Spanish and also gestured to the little guys on the table, and they said they would help. But what did they do... they got up and walked outside to consider chatting and laughing. At that point, I almost just gave up and left for the day, but it wasn´t the kids fault at all so I made myself stay. I let a couple of the better behaved little ones stay at the table, and picked up a few of the others and plopped them into a room with toys. Some of the rascal older boys were racing around, but I just tuned them out because there was no way to get all of my kids to sit still with the teachers being oh so helpful. I started with my review of B and went into C, and the kids who were sitting at the table did a good job of paying attention and calling out the names of the images I had printed. Even a little girl who is barely three joined in with the others in calling out the names of things and that they started with C. There continued to be chaos all around us, but the more focused kids are very good at tuning that out. Handed out papers and they all got to work coloring and gluing. The little glue bottles I had bought last week had mostly disappeared already, so I went around with a big tub of paste and put dabs on their papers once they told me what the picture was and what letter it started with. I also had a bunch of face (cara in spanish) stickers and put those on the table, which they loved. The faces were of all different colors and emotions and to my surprise, the kids actually described each of the faces outloud before sticking it on their paper. Randomly in the middle of the activity while the kids at the table were clearly engaged, the teachers came in, made everyone sit down on the floor against the wall, and gave them oranges. Um, ever think to wait for snacktime until they are done with the activity since they are actually focused on something for once instead of running wildly? But luckily, most of the kids liked the project so much that they quickly finished their oranges and came back to take their places. I got them all to write their names on their papers, or at least trace over the letters that I wrote - we´ve been doing that at the end of each day´s project and some of them seem to be getting better at that. The teachers continued to be of absolutely no use - I looked in on the room of one and two year olds and they were just playing by themselves, no teacher in sight. The room was open to the main area I was in with the older kids, but still, quite unbelievable. There was such constant noise that I ignored most of it, but occasionally went over to break up one fight or another. I got the girls to help me clean up the project and put away the chairs and tables, and the older boys went off into the room usually meant for the three to four year olds and actually sat calmly to do puzzles, very odd. Since Nicky was sick, I was the only volunteer there and there was no way I was taking my usual group of crazies outside, so I took just five girls with me who happened to be nearby - three of my older girls and two younger ones. Gave them my usual lecture that they needed to listen while we were outside, and they did a good job actually holding hands and singing a song the entire time we walked over to the yard. After we were outside for a bit, another girl and boy from the oldest group came out - I was not excited to see Miguel outside because he was the most troublesome last week. But being outside with just girls seemed to keep away his rascalness and everyone behaved. Getting them to go back inside was the usual ordeal with most of them thinking it was funny to run away rather than get into line, but we eventually made it inside, washed up, and went to lunch. Apparently the guardaria had gotten a big gift from somebody of a bunch of children´s dishes including patterned bowls, plates, cups, and little forks and spoons. They were all incredibly excited about it, but it seemed a weird gift, as there are other things that they could have used much more. They already had enough plastic dishes for everyone and although they were adult sized and the spoons were a bit big for the kids´ mouths, they sufficed just fine. I think money could have been much better invested in more books, supplies, training for the teachers, etc. rather than just a more appropriate set of something they already had!
Because of the lack of micros, I was going to leave early to be on time for lunch with Isabel, but when I told the teachers, they said to wait half an hour because they were baking me something. Of course that turned into nearly an hour, but it was really, really sweet of them and completely unexpected, as I hadn´t seen them do anything for the other volunteers that left a few weeks ago. They made me a big circular cake and wrote ´safe travels ilana´ on it and thanked me a ton for working with the kids. There was a whole separate cake in the oven for the kids and they said the whole cake was for me - I ate one slice and ended up giving the rest to a homeless guy who always begs on a corner that I pass. While I was waiting for the cake to finish, I just sat in the lunchroom and played with the kids and broke up some fights. I stayed longer than I have in the past, to the point where they are completely done with lunch and clean up, and as expected, they just had the kids running around like crazy as usual with nothing to do but wrestle and fight each other in a small space. Would have been a nice time to have my camera and get the kids focused on that and get some good shots, ugh! I wish I could have made more of an impact on center when I was there - I know that the kids who participated enjoyed the activities I did with them and liked having me around, but I don´t think I was able to make any changes that will last. I tried talking quite a bit with the teachers about different ideas and things to do with the kids and they happily agreed to it all, but from what I´ve seen, it all went in one ear and out the other. Well, I tried...
Eventually left and tried to catch a taxi back to the center, but all the taxis that passed were full because that was the only form of transportation available today. Eventually caught a collectivo (shared taxi) with a couple of others and was way overcharged for the short ride. Got to lunch just before the place closed and gobbled down my food as they were turning off the lights and shutting down for the day. Missed Isabel, but I might see her tonight at Fox since she has classes while I´m there.
Then it was time to find out about the road block situation. I asked around and can´t get any clear information about what´s happening. A lot of the roads around the country are blocked off and even taxis can´t leave Sucre today - they don´t know yet about tomorrow. One tourist agency I asked told me to come back in a few hours, which I will do, and also ask a bunch more until I find somebody who can tell me something. I was planning on taking a 6:30am bus to Potosi tomorrow morning and had a pretty tight schedule for the next week, culminating in a plane flight that I have booked from a place I don´t know if I´ll even have time anymore to make it to! Fingers crossed that the roads open tomorrow, otherwise I have lots of rearranging to do.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Tarabuco
Yesterday while I was at a museum in the middle of taking pictures, my camera broke. Again. With the same problem of the lens refusing to open or if it eventually opened, refusing to close. It took me a long time on a Saturday evening to find a repair shop that was open, but eventually dropped off the camera and was told I wouldn’t get it back till Monday night. It’s so ridiculously expensive compared to everything else here, and this is the second time I have to get the same problem fixed. Getting the zipper on my backpack repaired cost 15Bs (just over 2 bucks), whereas getting the camera fixed cost 400Bs the first time and 350Bs this time (over 100 USD total!). Which is a huge, huge amount of money here that would cover about 3 weeks in a hostel, etc – so I don’t really get why the electronics repair store gets so much money compared to anywhere else around. But beyond the money, the worst thing about not having my camera for two days is missing pictures of two important things – the Sunday market that I went to today and most importantly, my kids, who I’ve hardly taken any pictures of and won’t be able to anymore! The other girl at my house is leaving tonight and the other volunteer with the kids has a broken camera as well (as do way too many other tourists around here, there’s probably so much dust in the air that it messes with the lenses). Oh the joys of broken and malfunctioning things.
Yesterday morning, made on the brunch on the terrace with Sofie (Belgium) who is living at my house and two people she knew from London and Australia. It was a nice sunny morning and we have a good view of the city from the terrace. We had a delicious little feast of eggs, cheese, tomato, and avocado on baguettes, banana and dulce de leche sandwiches, chopped up mangos and papayas, and coffee/tea.
This morning, I went with the same group to Tarabuco. We took a “tourist bus” aka a normal micro filled with tourists an hour and a half away to the Sunday market. We winded around countless curves through the dry valley. In the distance were endless hillsides, mostly brown but with patches of green, scattered with brush, cacti, and oddly, eucalyptus trees. We were dropped off at the edge of the market and I was surprised at how calm it was, but that was just the edge. After stopping for coffee/juice at a little café where it took the owner the longest time to even acknowledge that we were there, we started strolling around the market. I wish I could have had my camera, but I did steal all of Sofie’s market pictures and a few of the kids, since she spent a couple days at the guardaria finishing up a mural that some other volunteers had started.
Did lots of bargaining, the best technique being asserting your lowest price and walking away when they decline, just to be called right back and get it at that price. There was one funny incident where I was looking at a piece of fabric that had 55 on it in masking tape and the owner of the stall told me that it was cheap and only cost 80Bs. I said 55, he said no, 80, and I showed him the tape and he got embarrassed and said fine, 55. I didn’t end up buying it, this was just at the beginning when I was gauging out prices, but it was an amusing way to start the morning and to show just how high the prices they start with would be. There were some very open areas where it was easy to walk slowly and browse, and other areas where there was a constant push from behind and I kept checking to make sure my backpack was closed, eventually moving it to the front. There were stalls of assorted imported shoes and clothes, laundry soaps, electronics, offerings to Pachamama (mother earth), and the usual array of miscellaneous everything. Beyond just experiencing the bustling market environment, I was there for the artisan goods - stall upon stall of brightly colored woven hats, scarves, blankets and fabrics, sweaters, and some jewelry, though much less of that than I expected. I still have some things that I am going to wait to buy because I don’t want to lug my extra bag around just yet, so I’ll have to do more searching in shops around Santa Cruz before I leave, but I did stock up on some things today. It was definitely very touristy, as I had heard and expected, and the locals there were much less friendly than any I have encouraged elsewhere. There were incredibly pushy women who would shove bracelets into our faces or place them onto our wrists even when we repeatedly said no thank you, and they would continue to follow us around and do all they could to get the bracelets at our eye level. I’m much more likely to buy from people who aren’t forcing things in front of me! As we walked deeper into the market, it actually got a bit less touristy to my surprise, with no more textiles and simply random everything else that locals were buying, and further in yet was the food market, similar to the Mercado Central in Sucre. No idea why, but there was a dead flamingo hanging on the wall outside one of the stalls. Wonderful! On the way back to the bus, I bought a papa relleno (a filled potato, this time with egg) from two girls who stared at me with huge eyes. And of course, couldn’t go without an ice cream, which they sell constantly in Chuquisaca area (the department of Bolivia that Sucre is in).
Back in town, it was immediately affirmed that it was Sunday – the world was completely shut down. The supermarket and the occasional restaurant and internet café were open, but nothing was happening anywhere. The usual colorful central market was closed, tarps covering most of the outside stalls. All of the storefronts had their metal doors pulled down, and the streets lacked their typical constant flow of cars and honking of horns. Even in the central plaza, only the pigeons and dogs remained to play, the normal crowds of people, snack vendors, and juice squeezers all inside for the day. A few weeks ago, there were quite a lot of people at the children’s park, but aside from being there, not too many people seem to venture out on Sunday afternoons.
Yesterday morning, made on the brunch on the terrace with Sofie (Belgium) who is living at my house and two people she knew from London and Australia. It was a nice sunny morning and we have a good view of the city from the terrace. We had a delicious little feast of eggs, cheese, tomato, and avocado on baguettes, banana and dulce de leche sandwiches, chopped up mangos and papayas, and coffee/tea.
This morning, I went with the same group to Tarabuco. We took a “tourist bus” aka a normal micro filled with tourists an hour and a half away to the Sunday market. We winded around countless curves through the dry valley. In the distance were endless hillsides, mostly brown but with patches of green, scattered with brush, cacti, and oddly, eucalyptus trees. We were dropped off at the edge of the market and I was surprised at how calm it was, but that was just the edge. After stopping for coffee/juice at a little café where it took the owner the longest time to even acknowledge that we were there, we started strolling around the market. I wish I could have had my camera, but I did steal all of Sofie’s market pictures and a few of the kids, since she spent a couple days at the guardaria finishing up a mural that some other volunteers had started.
Did lots of bargaining, the best technique being asserting your lowest price and walking away when they decline, just to be called right back and get it at that price. There was one funny incident where I was looking at a piece of fabric that had 55 on it in masking tape and the owner of the stall told me that it was cheap and only cost 80Bs. I said 55, he said no, 80, and I showed him the tape and he got embarrassed and said fine, 55. I didn’t end up buying it, this was just at the beginning when I was gauging out prices, but it was an amusing way to start the morning and to show just how high the prices they start with would be. There were some very open areas where it was easy to walk slowly and browse, and other areas where there was a constant push from behind and I kept checking to make sure my backpack was closed, eventually moving it to the front. There were stalls of assorted imported shoes and clothes, laundry soaps, electronics, offerings to Pachamama (mother earth), and the usual array of miscellaneous everything. Beyond just experiencing the bustling market environment, I was there for the artisan goods - stall upon stall of brightly colored woven hats, scarves, blankets and fabrics, sweaters, and some jewelry, though much less of that than I expected. I still have some things that I am going to wait to buy because I don’t want to lug my extra bag around just yet, so I’ll have to do more searching in shops around Santa Cruz before I leave, but I did stock up on some things today. It was definitely very touristy, as I had heard and expected, and the locals there were much less friendly than any I have encouraged elsewhere. There were incredibly pushy women who would shove bracelets into our faces or place them onto our wrists even when we repeatedly said no thank you, and they would continue to follow us around and do all they could to get the bracelets at our eye level. I’m much more likely to buy from people who aren’t forcing things in front of me! As we walked deeper into the market, it actually got a bit less touristy to my surprise, with no more textiles and simply random everything else that locals were buying, and further in yet was the food market, similar to the Mercado Central in Sucre. No idea why, but there was a dead flamingo hanging on the wall outside one of the stalls. Wonderful! On the way back to the bus, I bought a papa relleno (a filled potato, this time with egg) from two girls who stared at me with huge eyes. And of course, couldn’t go without an ice cream, which they sell constantly in Chuquisaca area (the department of Bolivia that Sucre is in).
Back in town, it was immediately affirmed that it was Sunday – the world was completely shut down. The supermarket and the occasional restaurant and internet café were open, but nothing was happening anywhere. The usual colorful central market was closed, tarps covering most of the outside stalls. All of the storefronts had their metal doors pulled down, and the streets lacked their typical constant flow of cars and honking of horns. Even in the central plaza, only the pigeons and dogs remained to play, the normal crowds of people, snack vendors, and juice squeezers all inside for the day. A few weeks ago, there were quite a lot of people at the children’s park, but aside from being there, not too many people seem to venture out on Sunday afternoons.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Tidbits Around Sucre
6/10 3pm
My A lesson the other day went amazingly well, I was really surprised. Most of the kids readily said A when I asked them what letter a picture of their paper started with, and they really enjoyed gluing everything to the paper. A few of the younger ones in the group had a hard time focusing on the task and mostly just played with the glue, but most of the kids seemed to understand and like what we were doing. The oldest girl, Maria Elba, glued down one of each picture and then went to the window using other cut outs of these pictures to trace them – she’s only six, but they were near perfect tracing jobs. A few of the others caught onto this as well and did some tracing, and all the kids stayed at the table for about an hour, which was really, really surprising but awesome. We’ve made it a routine to go outside after snack and there are usually quite a few squabbles outside and tons of disobedience, but that day, they somehow all played together nicely and calmly. No fights, no children trying to climb over the fence and escape, no crazy screaming, no refusal when it was time to go back inside. Quite the odd morning, a complete reversal of the usual. I had hoped that the next day would be similar but nope, it was in the air to be wild again! I started the B lesson with a review of A and the older ones in group were able to remember words we had used the day before as well as other A words, and got engaged in B as well. But many of them (aka the boys) decided to be complete rascals and thought it was more fun to run around the room screaming and attack each other. They have at least a small amount of respect for the teacher and will stop doing something bad if she yells at them – probably from the threat of being smacked – but the kids had no respect for Nicky or I. Using our presence as an opportunity to escape to who knows where, the teacher disappeared and we were left with a bunch of misbehaving wild children. Two of the boys in particular kept grabbing pencils and drumming them on the table as they screamed – the scene was ridiculous and deafening, but the somehow tuned this out girls stayed at the table with their gluing and coloring, showing us their work every once in a while for reassurance. I’m perfectly fine teaching the lessons, but given that the kids won’t respect us, it would be nice if the teacher stayed around to at least attempt to maintain order! She disappeared the entire morning, and when it was time for us to get the kids to wash their hands and walk to lunch, it was just Nicky and me there to accomplish this very difficult task. Chaos ensued and we couldn’t hear our own screams over theirs, nor did silence work as they maniacally ran around attacking each other and making as much noise as they could. Fun stuff.
I was going to do C today, but the teacher who usually has the middle group wasn’t there and it would have been one teacher left with about 20 one to three year olds. Not happening. So the older ones went on a walk all morning and I stayed in with the little guys. Did some coloring with the older of the group, as well as a bit of passing a ball around the circle and singing some songs. They were so much more well behaved than the older kids, except for two of the older in the group who later in the morning got really rowdy and thought it was hilarious to not listen. Tackling each other was more fun. There are no rules here at all about keeping your hands to yourself, inside voices, sharing, etc – anything goes, and scolding is very inconsistent. There was one baby girl, about one and a half, who was sitting there crying hysterically. Today was her second or third day and she was petrified to be away from her mom, but they did nothing whatsoever to comfort her. Their theory was that in another day or two, she would just adjust and be perfectly fine. I held her for a long time and she eventually stopped crying, but she would start again every time I left her side, so she spent the morning with me and the three year olds. I got her engaged in a bit in our activities and there was about an hour where she didn’t cry, which was awesome. When she later started crying randomly and I sat her in my lap, the teacher told me to leave her there to cry because otherwise she wouldn’t get accustomed. I said something about how the transition to being there should be gradual and done with the comfort of an adult, she wouldn’t just suddenly be happy after several days of crying in the corner. When Aileen stopped crying and picked up a crayon, the teacher seemed to see my point, hopefully it sticks. On and off there have been pedagogy students coming to evaluate the kids and today was their last today, so they brought a cake. We sat down the kids and let them dig their fingers into sticky slices of cake – though I had to hand feed Aileen hers – and then took the little guys to lunch. With bellies full of cake, getting their lunches into them was an ordeal and they preferred to run around like crazy instead of sitting nicely like usual in their chairs. Then all the older kids came in and were completely insane, having just been given candy as well and eaten all of that before lunch. Who knows what the teachers were thinking there! It was again a picture of complete chaos and given that the teachers did nothing about it but laugh, there was really nothing I could do but let it be. The transition to primary school for these kids will be interesting and probably pretty harsh!
The other day after lunch, I helped Isabel with a project for her English class, and it was such a nice relief from the challenge of my night students. I just helped with a bit of pronunciation and translating some difficult phrases as well as getting a general understanding of her reading assignment. Everything clicked the first time I said it and it was just such a change from my English classes. This week, the first class has only had one girl coming every day, so I’ve been giving her private lessons on wherever she wants help, but it’s still frustrating that even the present tense of the verb to be has yet to sink in. In the second class, we did a bunch of grammar review the last couple days. The 12 year old is really good at long sentences and understanding what’s going on, whereas the guy in his 20s has a ridiculously hard time and although he can often translate things from Spanish to English, getting any grammar into him is pretty impossible and stalls up the class for the others. They have a test tonight, so that will be interesting to see the results of.
Yesterday afternoon I took a micro to La Glorietta, a castle a few km outside of Sucre. Started off with a little history intro about the castle and its inhabitants by the museum guide, but only caught bits of it because he spoke quickly in Spanish to the group of us and I had no background to begin with on what to expect to hear. There was hardly any furniture in the castle; it was in a museum elsewhere and may be moved there eventually, but the architecture was really interesting. Very intricate ceilings, tall windows and doors, expansive mirrors, spiral staircases, stained glass, and multiple towers. I walked up the stairs of the central tower, tightly round and round and round the central column, having no idea how much further it was. The only light inside came from the circular windows on the edge of the narrow tower every couple of turns. Dizzily made my way to the outlook at the top, where I could look down onto the rest of the little castle as well as far out into the hillside.
On the ride back, I decided to stay on the micro and head to the Mercado Campesino on the opposite end of the city. It’s a huge outdoor market with absolutely everything there. I wanted to see the traditional food market, so stayed on the bus past the massive electronics and clothes sections, but then the bus wound up towards the terminal and I got off because I had gone too far. It was getting late, so I wandered a bit and then took a micro back to the center, never finding the food market, but still having an interesting experience of watching the city pass by.
The other night, went with the girls from last weekend to a café for happy hour desserts – two for one. Unfortunately it meant two of the same thing, but with four of us, we still each got half a slice of really good chocolate cake and half a filled crepe. Yum! But that was pretty much dinner that night, it was so much food. Another time, went out with some other Fox volunteers after English classes and ended up joining with a pretty big group of foreigners with a Sucre meet-up of Couch Surfers. Tonight, some of us are going after classes to a vegetarian restaurant that is supposed to be really good. I have this weekend to spend around Sucre and then Monday is my last day with my kids and students. Then it´s on to the next legs of my trip with a mining town, the massive salt desert, a wild west-like land, and then a month in the jungle.
My A lesson the other day went amazingly well, I was really surprised. Most of the kids readily said A when I asked them what letter a picture of their paper started with, and they really enjoyed gluing everything to the paper. A few of the younger ones in the group had a hard time focusing on the task and mostly just played with the glue, but most of the kids seemed to understand and like what we were doing. The oldest girl, Maria Elba, glued down one of each picture and then went to the window using other cut outs of these pictures to trace them – she’s only six, but they were near perfect tracing jobs. A few of the others caught onto this as well and did some tracing, and all the kids stayed at the table for about an hour, which was really, really surprising but awesome. We’ve made it a routine to go outside after snack and there are usually quite a few squabbles outside and tons of disobedience, but that day, they somehow all played together nicely and calmly. No fights, no children trying to climb over the fence and escape, no crazy screaming, no refusal when it was time to go back inside. Quite the odd morning, a complete reversal of the usual. I had hoped that the next day would be similar but nope, it was in the air to be wild again! I started the B lesson with a review of A and the older ones in group were able to remember words we had used the day before as well as other A words, and got engaged in B as well. But many of them (aka the boys) decided to be complete rascals and thought it was more fun to run around the room screaming and attack each other. They have at least a small amount of respect for the teacher and will stop doing something bad if she yells at them – probably from the threat of being smacked – but the kids had no respect for Nicky or I. Using our presence as an opportunity to escape to who knows where, the teacher disappeared and we were left with a bunch of misbehaving wild children. Two of the boys in particular kept grabbing pencils and drumming them on the table as they screamed – the scene was ridiculous and deafening, but the somehow tuned this out girls stayed at the table with their gluing and coloring, showing us their work every once in a while for reassurance. I’m perfectly fine teaching the lessons, but given that the kids won’t respect us, it would be nice if the teacher stayed around to at least attempt to maintain order! She disappeared the entire morning, and when it was time for us to get the kids to wash their hands and walk to lunch, it was just Nicky and me there to accomplish this very difficult task. Chaos ensued and we couldn’t hear our own screams over theirs, nor did silence work as they maniacally ran around attacking each other and making as much noise as they could. Fun stuff.
I was going to do C today, but the teacher who usually has the middle group wasn’t there and it would have been one teacher left with about 20 one to three year olds. Not happening. So the older ones went on a walk all morning and I stayed in with the little guys. Did some coloring with the older of the group, as well as a bit of passing a ball around the circle and singing some songs. They were so much more well behaved than the older kids, except for two of the older in the group who later in the morning got really rowdy and thought it was hilarious to not listen. Tackling each other was more fun. There are no rules here at all about keeping your hands to yourself, inside voices, sharing, etc – anything goes, and scolding is very inconsistent. There was one baby girl, about one and a half, who was sitting there crying hysterically. Today was her second or third day and she was petrified to be away from her mom, but they did nothing whatsoever to comfort her. Their theory was that in another day or two, she would just adjust and be perfectly fine. I held her for a long time and she eventually stopped crying, but she would start again every time I left her side, so she spent the morning with me and the three year olds. I got her engaged in a bit in our activities and there was about an hour where she didn’t cry, which was awesome. When she later started crying randomly and I sat her in my lap, the teacher told me to leave her there to cry because otherwise she wouldn’t get accustomed. I said something about how the transition to being there should be gradual and done with the comfort of an adult, she wouldn’t just suddenly be happy after several days of crying in the corner. When Aileen stopped crying and picked up a crayon, the teacher seemed to see my point, hopefully it sticks. On and off there have been pedagogy students coming to evaluate the kids and today was their last today, so they brought a cake. We sat down the kids and let them dig their fingers into sticky slices of cake – though I had to hand feed Aileen hers – and then took the little guys to lunch. With bellies full of cake, getting their lunches into them was an ordeal and they preferred to run around like crazy instead of sitting nicely like usual in their chairs. Then all the older kids came in and were completely insane, having just been given candy as well and eaten all of that before lunch. Who knows what the teachers were thinking there! It was again a picture of complete chaos and given that the teachers did nothing about it but laugh, there was really nothing I could do but let it be. The transition to primary school for these kids will be interesting and probably pretty harsh!
The other day after lunch, I helped Isabel with a project for her English class, and it was such a nice relief from the challenge of my night students. I just helped with a bit of pronunciation and translating some difficult phrases as well as getting a general understanding of her reading assignment. Everything clicked the first time I said it and it was just such a change from my English classes. This week, the first class has only had one girl coming every day, so I’ve been giving her private lessons on wherever she wants help, but it’s still frustrating that even the present tense of the verb to be has yet to sink in. In the second class, we did a bunch of grammar review the last couple days. The 12 year old is really good at long sentences and understanding what’s going on, whereas the guy in his 20s has a ridiculously hard time and although he can often translate things from Spanish to English, getting any grammar into him is pretty impossible and stalls up the class for the others. They have a test tonight, so that will be interesting to see the results of.
Yesterday afternoon I took a micro to La Glorietta, a castle a few km outside of Sucre. Started off with a little history intro about the castle and its inhabitants by the museum guide, but only caught bits of it because he spoke quickly in Spanish to the group of us and I had no background to begin with on what to expect to hear. There was hardly any furniture in the castle; it was in a museum elsewhere and may be moved there eventually, but the architecture was really interesting. Very intricate ceilings, tall windows and doors, expansive mirrors, spiral staircases, stained glass, and multiple towers. I walked up the stairs of the central tower, tightly round and round and round the central column, having no idea how much further it was. The only light inside came from the circular windows on the edge of the narrow tower every couple of turns. Dizzily made my way to the outlook at the top, where I could look down onto the rest of the little castle as well as far out into the hillside.
On the ride back, I decided to stay on the micro and head to the Mercado Campesino on the opposite end of the city. It’s a huge outdoor market with absolutely everything there. I wanted to see the traditional food market, so stayed on the bus past the massive electronics and clothes sections, but then the bus wound up towards the terminal and I got off because I had gone too far. It was getting late, so I wandered a bit and then took a micro back to the center, never finding the food market, but still having an interesting experience of watching the city pass by.
The other night, went with the girls from last weekend to a café for happy hour desserts – two for one. Unfortunately it meant two of the same thing, but with four of us, we still each got half a slice of really good chocolate cake and half a filled crepe. Yum! But that was pretty much dinner that night, it was so much food. Another time, went out with some other Fox volunteers after English classes and ended up joining with a pretty big group of foreigners with a Sucre meet-up of Couch Surfers. Tonight, some of us are going after classes to a vegetarian restaurant that is supposed to be really good. I have this weekend to spend around Sucre and then Monday is my last day with my kids and students. Then it´s on to the next legs of my trip with a mining town, the massive salt desert, a wild west-like land, and then a month in the jungle.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Such A Different World
6/7/11 9:45pm
Yesterday at the vet was a very interesting experience. There wasn’t anything going on for the first couple hours, so I showed them the Pacific Petcare website and they were fascinated by the pictures of the hospital and fancy equipment. We were all just dawdling around and the vet student, Vicente, was playing around on his guitar. He was attempting to sing Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours in English, but had all the words jumbled together and funny. So we found the lyrics online as well as a Spanish translation so that he could understand the song – though a lot of the translation was really off because it took things too literally, so I attempted to translate the actual meaning for him. We spent a long time going through the beginning of the lyrics and working on the pronunciation.
Eventually, we had a couple patients, the last of whom was what made it such an fascinating evening. It was teacher’s day and there were no English classes, so I stayed at the clinic till almost nine. Around 6:45, an eleven-year-old Irish Setter named Leo arrived for a procedure – it was scheduled so late because the older doctor needs to be present for any procedures and he is out in the countryside all day. He gave a Ketamine cocktail both IV and IM to a point where Leo was pretty out but still moving around a bit. No sort of monitoring was done at all, not even with stethoscopes, which was a bit scary with an older dog and no labwork to ensure that anesthesia was even safe. When Leo arrived, it was clear that the procedure was to remove a huge growth on his eyelid, so I was confused when they first turned their attention to his ears once he was out. I thought maybe they were removing papillomas from the ears, but it turned out he just had an ear infection. They called it very severe and spent a really long time cleaning it out and applying topical antibiotics and steroids, though nothing oral or topical was sent home. One of the surprising things about this infection was how assertive they were that it was such an awful infection – it was clearly infected, but there wasn’t much inflammation and I’ve cleaned countless ears with much, much worse debris – maybe the different weather, different standards, etc. The older doctor did most of the cleaning, and the vet doing his residency sort of thing was allowed to help at times (as compared to the US where it was always us techs who did the cleaning). They wore masks as they cleaned the ears, but took them off for the growth removal part of the procedure, which was really odd. We kept flipping Leo back and forth as they would clean one ear, then the other, and then go back to the first. It took much, much longer than a similar ear infection would have taken to clean in the US with the solution that we used. I was mostly just weirded out, though, that they were doing all this while he was under anesthesia – it would be so much safer and cost effective to do it while he was awake. I asked about this and they said that they always treat ear infections with the pet under anesthesia because it causes too much suffering to do it while they are awake. That was definitely an interesting perspective and yes, it’s definitely not a pleasant experience for them, except for the occasional dog who appreciates getting that awful itch scratched. But if we were to tell owners in the US that we needed to sedate or anesthetize their pet for an ear infection (minus the occasional dog with major aggression or anxiety issues), hell would probably break loose over the money, risk, and plain idea of doing that. It’s a very different way of thinking about and doing things in the veterinary world, not doing much anything at all aside from shots while the pet is awake – though they do reuse a needle multiple times on the same pet, which must hurt like crazy from how dull it is. So a very different line is drawn in terms of what is acceptable to inflict on our pets. Yet at the same time, there are countless street dogs in awful condition who won’t get an ear infection or even broken leg taken care of no matter what, and the dogs with owners who can’t afford to take them to the vet. I asked what would happen if a dog came in with an ear infection but the owner couldn’t afford to pay for the anesthesia, and they seemed appalled that I would suggest cleaning ears while the dog was awake. I tried asking several times, but never got a straight answer, so not quite sure what happens there - if they give in and do it without anesthesia, deal with the money loss and treat the animal as they usually would, or refuse to treat the animal in the name of not causing suffering, though of course still leaving the pet in misery with a bad infection. Very thought provoking to see the huge differences in vet med between here and California, not only based around finances and equipment but also around morals and recommended procedures and care. The complete lack of spays and neuters here is a whole other issue, with not having the money to do the surgery, though that really not making sense in the long run with the resulting massive overpopulation and pregnancy complications. It was definitely a good experience with the vet, very different from what I’ve seen and done in both Peru and California. But it was way too exhausting to go every day straight through from 8 to 8, so I’m not going to be going anymore while I’m here in Sucre. Finally had time today to do my laundry!
My kids were challenges today as usual. I tried to work with the older ones on learning to write their names, and a few of them did a good job and stayed focused, but most just sat there and refused to write a thing, flat out ignoring me when I encouraged them. I had bought letter stickers and a few of them got really into telling me the letters of their names so that I would give them stickers, and then trying to do it over and over again to get more stickers, but the others were uninterested or didn’t know the letters in their names at all. At a certain point, I had to just give up and let some of them scribble on their papers because there was no way they were going to pay me any attention. Tomorrow will be quite the test. I’m going to try and start going through the alphabet to teach it to them in a more engaging way than writing each letter a million times to fill up a paper and that’s that. I googled around this afternoon and printed out black and white images of things starting with the letter A in Spanish, as well as a bunch of upper and lower case As. It cost a bunch to print and photocopy these, but it seems like Fox will let me do it for either free or really cheap. So if the kids respond to the activity tomorrow, then I’ll keep on going through the alphabet, but if not, I don’t know what else to do with them. I bought a bunch of mini glue bottles and hopefully I can get them to sit around the table tomorrow morning, talk about things that start with the letter A, and then glue my cut out images and items on paper and color them. Fingers crossed!
And on to the last part of each of my days, teaching English. Yet another huge area where things are drastically different. I do my best to go through the lessons in an engaging way and get things to stick in their heads, but it just isn’t working. First off, the book and the general structure of the course are pretty awful. They are creating robots rather than people who can have conversations. They attempt to learn to follow generic model sentences and speak only in those, when they are able to even do that. When I try to transition into more conversational ways of saying things or do anything outside of a strict model sentence, they are completely lost. I don’t know if I had an especially amazing book and teacher when I was learning Spanish, but it was so, so much easier to move from rigid structure into more creative and open writing and speaking. It’s pretty much impossible to get them to move away from the molds or even understand anything that is said without being in a certain structure. They don’t have an understanding of what conjugations or infinitives or any grammatical things are, and are just dazed when I try to explain using examples from Spanish. I know that when I first started French it was hard getting used to the different grammatical concepts, but at least they were taught! In the book that’s used in this course and apparently used internationally as well, there are mostly themed chapters on what to robotically say in x situation. There are the interspersed grammar bits about possessive pronouns or how to use ‘to be’ or ‘to have’, but there’s really no solid grammar, nothing on creating sentences, subject-verb agreement, using the present tense, the basic things that have always been presented in my language classes. Doesn’t help that the teacher’s English isn’t great and I’m constantly correcting the grammar of the things she says to the class! I guess languages do come fairly easily to me, but I still have a difficult time seeing how hard it is for them, for example, to see that when something is plural in Spanish, it is usually plural in English – even direct translations where the structure is the same are often too challenging. One of the biggest problems is that they are just being fed phrases and memorizing them, but not understanding at all the workings of the language. Also, their education system is clearly not very strong so it’s hard to teach a new language when they don’t have a very solid grounding in doing basic book exercises in general.
The first class today had just one student again, though a different one this time, and she is apparently taking a basic English class through her university and wanted help with that. She has to write a skit in English with three others in her class and written about half a page so far. I explained all of her grammatical mistakes, and then we worked on writing more. Normally, in a skit, you would follow a theme, make it a conversation with a flow. Whether your native language or a brand new language, it seems common sense to have topics relate to each other and not just have choppy unrelated sentences. Especially when you have a personal translator to help change what you are thinking from your native language to a foreign language. But the skit went a bit like this – people greeted each other and asked where they were from, all good. Then it went on to whether they ate fish, how many brothers they had, and if they liked football. All completely disconnected and not part of the same conversation. She pretty much just came up with random sentences in Spanish and had me translate them to English, though I tried to get her to figure out the translations herself. I can’t grasp why someone, especially in a college setting, would have such difficulty stringing sentences together into a coherent conversation in their own language. All she had to do was input the Spanish into the Elana translation engine and there would be a skit that made sense in English! In my very beginning French and Spanish classes, we often had to do skits and they were hard without knowing many tenses or words, so they were sometimes very simple, but they at least followed a common theme and all the sentences fit together to make it a rational piece. I don’t mean in any way to bash the intelligence or culture of the people here and I hope it doesn´t seem that way; I’m just a bit bewildered over how different thing are, from learning and teaching styles to the way my kids’ and students’ minds seem to work in general.
Yesterday at the vet was a very interesting experience. There wasn’t anything going on for the first couple hours, so I showed them the Pacific Petcare website and they were fascinated by the pictures of the hospital and fancy equipment. We were all just dawdling around and the vet student, Vicente, was playing around on his guitar. He was attempting to sing Jason Mraz’s I’m Yours in English, but had all the words jumbled together and funny. So we found the lyrics online as well as a Spanish translation so that he could understand the song – though a lot of the translation was really off because it took things too literally, so I attempted to translate the actual meaning for him. We spent a long time going through the beginning of the lyrics and working on the pronunciation.
Eventually, we had a couple patients, the last of whom was what made it such an fascinating evening. It was teacher’s day and there were no English classes, so I stayed at the clinic till almost nine. Around 6:45, an eleven-year-old Irish Setter named Leo arrived for a procedure – it was scheduled so late because the older doctor needs to be present for any procedures and he is out in the countryside all day. He gave a Ketamine cocktail both IV and IM to a point where Leo was pretty out but still moving around a bit. No sort of monitoring was done at all, not even with stethoscopes, which was a bit scary with an older dog and no labwork to ensure that anesthesia was even safe. When Leo arrived, it was clear that the procedure was to remove a huge growth on his eyelid, so I was confused when they first turned their attention to his ears once he was out. I thought maybe they were removing papillomas from the ears, but it turned out he just had an ear infection. They called it very severe and spent a really long time cleaning it out and applying topical antibiotics and steroids, though nothing oral or topical was sent home. One of the surprising things about this infection was how assertive they were that it was such an awful infection – it was clearly infected, but there wasn’t much inflammation and I’ve cleaned countless ears with much, much worse debris – maybe the different weather, different standards, etc. The older doctor did most of the cleaning, and the vet doing his residency sort of thing was allowed to help at times (as compared to the US where it was always us techs who did the cleaning). They wore masks as they cleaned the ears, but took them off for the growth removal part of the procedure, which was really odd. We kept flipping Leo back and forth as they would clean one ear, then the other, and then go back to the first. It took much, much longer than a similar ear infection would have taken to clean in the US with the solution that we used. I was mostly just weirded out, though, that they were doing all this while he was under anesthesia – it would be so much safer and cost effective to do it while he was awake. I asked about this and they said that they always treat ear infections with the pet under anesthesia because it causes too much suffering to do it while they are awake. That was definitely an interesting perspective and yes, it’s definitely not a pleasant experience for them, except for the occasional dog who appreciates getting that awful itch scratched. But if we were to tell owners in the US that we needed to sedate or anesthetize their pet for an ear infection (minus the occasional dog with major aggression or anxiety issues), hell would probably break loose over the money, risk, and plain idea of doing that. It’s a very different way of thinking about and doing things in the veterinary world, not doing much anything at all aside from shots while the pet is awake – though they do reuse a needle multiple times on the same pet, which must hurt like crazy from how dull it is. So a very different line is drawn in terms of what is acceptable to inflict on our pets. Yet at the same time, there are countless street dogs in awful condition who won’t get an ear infection or even broken leg taken care of no matter what, and the dogs with owners who can’t afford to take them to the vet. I asked what would happen if a dog came in with an ear infection but the owner couldn’t afford to pay for the anesthesia, and they seemed appalled that I would suggest cleaning ears while the dog was awake. I tried asking several times, but never got a straight answer, so not quite sure what happens there - if they give in and do it without anesthesia, deal with the money loss and treat the animal as they usually would, or refuse to treat the animal in the name of not causing suffering, though of course still leaving the pet in misery with a bad infection. Very thought provoking to see the huge differences in vet med between here and California, not only based around finances and equipment but also around morals and recommended procedures and care. The complete lack of spays and neuters here is a whole other issue, with not having the money to do the surgery, though that really not making sense in the long run with the resulting massive overpopulation and pregnancy complications. It was definitely a good experience with the vet, very different from what I’ve seen and done in both Peru and California. But it was way too exhausting to go every day straight through from 8 to 8, so I’m not going to be going anymore while I’m here in Sucre. Finally had time today to do my laundry!
My kids were challenges today as usual. I tried to work with the older ones on learning to write their names, and a few of them did a good job and stayed focused, but most just sat there and refused to write a thing, flat out ignoring me when I encouraged them. I had bought letter stickers and a few of them got really into telling me the letters of their names so that I would give them stickers, and then trying to do it over and over again to get more stickers, but the others were uninterested or didn’t know the letters in their names at all. At a certain point, I had to just give up and let some of them scribble on their papers because there was no way they were going to pay me any attention. Tomorrow will be quite the test. I’m going to try and start going through the alphabet to teach it to them in a more engaging way than writing each letter a million times to fill up a paper and that’s that. I googled around this afternoon and printed out black and white images of things starting with the letter A in Spanish, as well as a bunch of upper and lower case As. It cost a bunch to print and photocopy these, but it seems like Fox will let me do it for either free or really cheap. So if the kids respond to the activity tomorrow, then I’ll keep on going through the alphabet, but if not, I don’t know what else to do with them. I bought a bunch of mini glue bottles and hopefully I can get them to sit around the table tomorrow morning, talk about things that start with the letter A, and then glue my cut out images and items on paper and color them. Fingers crossed!
And on to the last part of each of my days, teaching English. Yet another huge area where things are drastically different. I do my best to go through the lessons in an engaging way and get things to stick in their heads, but it just isn’t working. First off, the book and the general structure of the course are pretty awful. They are creating robots rather than people who can have conversations. They attempt to learn to follow generic model sentences and speak only in those, when they are able to even do that. When I try to transition into more conversational ways of saying things or do anything outside of a strict model sentence, they are completely lost. I don’t know if I had an especially amazing book and teacher when I was learning Spanish, but it was so, so much easier to move from rigid structure into more creative and open writing and speaking. It’s pretty much impossible to get them to move away from the molds or even understand anything that is said without being in a certain structure. They don’t have an understanding of what conjugations or infinitives or any grammatical things are, and are just dazed when I try to explain using examples from Spanish. I know that when I first started French it was hard getting used to the different grammatical concepts, but at least they were taught! In the book that’s used in this course and apparently used internationally as well, there are mostly themed chapters on what to robotically say in x situation. There are the interspersed grammar bits about possessive pronouns or how to use ‘to be’ or ‘to have’, but there’s really no solid grammar, nothing on creating sentences, subject-verb agreement, using the present tense, the basic things that have always been presented in my language classes. Doesn’t help that the teacher’s English isn’t great and I’m constantly correcting the grammar of the things she says to the class! I guess languages do come fairly easily to me, but I still have a difficult time seeing how hard it is for them, for example, to see that when something is plural in Spanish, it is usually plural in English – even direct translations where the structure is the same are often too challenging. One of the biggest problems is that they are just being fed phrases and memorizing them, but not understanding at all the workings of the language. Also, their education system is clearly not very strong so it’s hard to teach a new language when they don’t have a very solid grounding in doing basic book exercises in general.
The first class today had just one student again, though a different one this time, and she is apparently taking a basic English class through her university and wanted help with that. She has to write a skit in English with three others in her class and written about half a page so far. I explained all of her grammatical mistakes, and then we worked on writing more. Normally, in a skit, you would follow a theme, make it a conversation with a flow. Whether your native language or a brand new language, it seems common sense to have topics relate to each other and not just have choppy unrelated sentences. Especially when you have a personal translator to help change what you are thinking from your native language to a foreign language. But the skit went a bit like this – people greeted each other and asked where they were from, all good. Then it went on to whether they ate fish, how many brothers they had, and if they liked football. All completely disconnected and not part of the same conversation. She pretty much just came up with random sentences in Spanish and had me translate them to English, though I tried to get her to figure out the translations herself. I can’t grasp why someone, especially in a college setting, would have such difficulty stringing sentences together into a coherent conversation in their own language. All she had to do was input the Spanish into the Elana translation engine and there would be a skit that made sense in English! In my very beginning French and Spanish classes, we often had to do skits and they were hard without knowing many tenses or words, so they were sometimes very simple, but they at least followed a common theme and all the sentences fit together to make it a rational piece. I don’t mean in any way to bash the intelligence or culture of the people here and I hope it doesn´t seem that way; I’m just a bit bewildered over how different thing are, from learning and teaching styles to the way my kids’ and students’ minds seem to work in general.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Cordilleras de Las Fraises
6/6/11
11:10am
Well, it’s been quite a weekend. I was supposed to get up at 5am on Saturday. Apparently Jorge knocked on my door and I said I was awake, but I have no recollection of that. He came back at 5:40 and I popped out of bed. Luckily I had everything ready, so we took a taxi to the center and met the rest of the group. There were two French couples and three other single female travelers in addition to a few Bolivians who came along. The twelve of us piled into two taxis for an hour’s ride up into the Cordilleras to Chataquila. Half asleep, we looked at the stone chapel for the Virgen de Chataquila before we started descending down the trail. It was freezing cold and foggy, so we couldn’t see much besides the trail for a while and had to bundle up like crazy. Bit by bit, we could see more of our surroundings as the rolling hills in the distance came into view until finally an amazing world appeared under the blue sky.
We were walking on the Inca Trail (obviously not the famous Machu Picchu trail) as we descended lower and lower into the crater. Much of the earth was dark red and at one point I fell and it looked as if my hand was streaked with blood, but it was just sand, which is probably used as body paint by locals. Parts of the path appeared cobbled and as we went round and round down this long winding pre-Hispanic road, I felt like I was in the Wizard of Oz… follow the red stone road, follow the red stone road. As the landscape changed, there was blue earth as well and the ground on which we walked alternated between red, brown, white, yellow, and blue sand and stones. I kept thinking we had reached the bottom, but it was just around another curve and deeper still into the crater. I wanted to look around me the entire time, but some of the paths upon which we walked were really unstable – either shaky pebbles and rocks to navigate over, or a narrow path to follow on the edge of a ridge. There were two particular parts throughout the day where we walked on a very narrow path in the middle of a cliff with steep walls above and below us and the sand beneath our feet constantly feeling like it was going to slip down into the abyss far below. But we all survived. We stopped at several lookout points along the way to take in the vast landscape that was so different than anything else I’d seen in Bolivia or elsewhere. It’s amazing how much different natural landscapes this tiny country has, and I still have quite a few more to see in the coming months. There’s no good way to describe the surroundings, and as usual, pictures can do better but still not well enough. After 6km of hiking mostly downhill, we passed through the tiny town of Chaucana There was a little schoolhouse up on the hill that apparently kids from all over the region attend – most have to walk 5 to 10km each way to get to school. This was very hard to imagine anyone doing as we grappled with the steep and difficult paths. Jorge was leading and walking ridiculously fast, rarely stopping for breaks and going too fast for much time to take pictures and take in the surroundings, but several of us stopped once in a while anyway and had to practically run to catch up – he was often too far into the distance to even get the attention of, which is completely wrong for someone leading the group. Turns out he wasn’t originally supposed to be the guide, but I’ll get into that rant later. He raced through this amazingly picturesque lake-like portion of the river filled with large stones and I had to stop there for a minute.
We continued to walk along the ridges with the river running below us. All around us was to Crater of Maragua, with brightly colored and layered walls. The area is also called Ombligo de Chiquisaca (the belly button of Chiquisaca, the name of this region of Bolivia). There were several waterfalls along the way and the walls curved in strange and dizzying ways. It almost was if I was in a round glass fishbowl, standing upright but at a diagonal on an inside wall, looking at the edges warping around me. The ridges and layers in the walls were mostly straight but each wall was on its own plane, so it was quite the interesting and surreal site.
We stopped for lunch in the shade by a swaying bridge and rested there for a bit, much to the relief of my very painful and blistering feet. The sides of the river by the bridge were covered in large stones, many with a distinct but natural color of yellow, blue, or red. As we continued on, we had to cross bits of the river as well as walk through some murky paths, stepping carefully on the small unstable stones and hoping they wouldn’t tip us into the smelly, wet ground beneath us.
Of course after descending so far into the crater, the only way forward was up the other side. Luckily most of the path was in the shade and there was a nice wind, but it was still a really challenging hike for everyone and my feet were really not enjoying themselves. As we made our way back up into the hills, we passed by the occasional house, home to a single family with their surrounding farmland, completely isolated with the nearest house far off into the distance. With the closest roads still kilometers away and the paths so difficult to walk, I have no idea how the people who live here get their supplies other than what they can produce themselves, which certainly isn’t everything that they need. At one house, we got a whole story about how the women have lots of children so that they have hands to work the land, the kids have important jobs from a very young age, and they have little money and a very difficult lifestyle. It was interesting to hear and to meet part of the family, but they wanted to sell us these cloth that are used as belts for traditional clothing (and would have little to no use for us) for a ridiculously high price, more money than any of us were even carrying – it would have been much more reasonable if they were selling little woven bracelets or something simple of the sort. We passed by many cornfields and by some girls out with their grazing cows. We finally finished the steep part of the journey, but it was still quite a bit of trekking along through the flatland before we reached the pueblo of Maragua. We bought water from a family home because the only market in town was only open two hours each morning and two in the afternoon. We then walked over to the top of a waterfall and a view deep down into the crater and river below. On the way back through the garbage-filled streams on the edge of town, we passed two pigs tied to a fence, one with a rope so short that there was a constant strain on his neck, poor thing. A guy motioned to us from up on the hill and ran down to us. His son had gotten an awful gash in his finger from moving large stones which shattered and they had no medical supplies or even knowledge of what to do. Jorge cleaned it up and wrapped it using his first aid kit and I gave them the bandages I had in my backpack to keep it covered over the next couple days. Realized later that my feet could have benefited from them, but my feet survived and his finger was in much worse shape. We thought that we had arrived at our site for the night, but we continued to walk through the gorgeous countryside for another hour until we reached the town of Irupampa and settled into our room. There were eight beds in the large room in the kitchen, and I ended up with a top bunk but at least the mattress was decent, much better than the hay-filled mattress on the bunk below! The two couples stayed in a smaller cabin across the path. We had tea, collapsed on the beds, and hung out for several hours until dinner. Throughout the trip, I spent time mostly with Nicky (England), Esther (Spain), and Lea (Germany), and we spoke mostly Spanish, through Nicky and I would take the occasional break for English when we didn’t want to think or had something more complicated to say. Three of us were vegetarian and had fried eggs rather than meat with our meal, which was a nice huge bowl of a sort of vegetable paella. The bathroom around the back of the cabin was pretty ridiculous – there was actually a toilet seat, which was nice, but it was a sand toilet – there were strangely two holes inside it, and after you went, you sprinkled a scoop of sand on top and that was that. Definitely preferred the natural bathroom next door! The stars were gorgeous but it was freezing cold and we were exhausted, so we all fell into bed after dinner.
We got up at 5:30 for a small and disappointing breakfast of hot coffee with a single piece of slightly stale bread. It was still dark outside for a bit, so we watched the stars disappear and light come up into the sky before we began our journey. Sunday’s walk was much less intense and in a very different landscape, as we were out in the hills rather than deep in a crater. There was a stark color contrast in the distance, with bright green flora against the deep red earth. We definitely felt tiny as we walked through the vast countryside with dark sand dunes alongside us. We were relieved when we got to the pueblo of Quila Quila much earlier than we anticipated, and sat down outside the little shop to rest for a bit and drink cold sodas. We hiked up into the hillside to see rock paintings – we reached one large rock with several drawings of people and animals, and most of us were too tired and daunted by the huge hill above to continue further up as if we didn’t even know if there was more ahead, so we rested there. The Bolivians and Lea continued up the huge hill and apparently saw a few other large rocks with cool paintings, but with sore legs and feet, I was fine just resting on the mountain with breathtaking surroundings.
When the others came back down, we descended back to Quila Quila, where we ate the lunches that we had packed – my cucumbers, tomatoes, and cheese had somehow still stayed cold in my backpack next to my water – and waited for the truck back to Sucre. It was supposed to come at 12:30, but rumbled into town at 1:15. We tried to get on, but it was stuffed to the brim.
We were told there be another truck (the only other for the day) in two hours, so we had no choice but to wait. Two hours laying around and talking in the gazebo in the central plaza, which held little else besides a slide and a statue, went by quickly enough and we went back to the side of the road a bit past 3 to wait for the truck. But then it was four o’clock, and then five and we all got really antsy and tired and wanted to be back in Sucre for good food and hot showers. The town was completely desolate, except for the occasional local walking over to the store to buy something (its only offerings were bread, crackers, cookies, drinks, and coca leaves – I refuse to eat any bread today, I’m so sick of it!) The streets were empty aside from the sporadic pig or donkey that wandered by, and later the sheeps, goats, and cows that were herded home after their day in the field. We were joined at times by several dogs, one another little guy with Corgi-like legs who was well-taken care of and didn’t even want food that we offered but just wanted to be pet. There was another bigger female who was very skittish and in awful condition and unlike most of the dogs here who will gently take food from your hand, she would quickly grab it, and would scarf down anything that we put on the ground in an instant.
As it got later and colder and we had no idea if the truck was even going to come, we all got pretty frustrated and annoyed with Jorge. Because there were a bunch of us, it wouldn’t have cost a ton to get a two taxis or a micro, but he kept saying that he wouldn’t do that and that this was the Bolivian experience, the eternal waiting, the uncertainty, the being hours or even a day late to something. Yes, that is the Bolivian experience, it’s what the locals go through every day, we understood that, and I’ve definitely had my intense bits of cultural immersion like the six hour bumpy bus ride smashed in an aisle on the bus. But in this case, we were paying much, much more than the locals and should not have had to have that experience. If we paid ten times less than we did, fine, but given the amount that we were paying, it was completely wrong to make us wait in a desolate town for what eventually amounted to six hours. The price was obviously not high by US standards, but given what we got – no real guide (apparently there was supposed to be a guide, but he recently broke his leg, so Jorge attempted to guide and knew the route but that was it, nothing about the landscape or history or cool things to look for along the way). Combined with the tiny breakfast and unreliable transportation, we were all pretty angry about it.
Around 5:30, they got hold of somebody in the next town over who said that the bus was waiting there because there was a meeting. I later found out that the bus driver had to attend the meeting, so that meant the bus was delayed for hours and hours. They said it would arrive in about 30 minutes. Around 6:30, some locals said they heard the toot of the bus as it announced its presence through the countryside, but we didn’t believe it until we heard it ourselves 20 minutes later. Finally around 7, the truck rolled into town and we climbed up the ladder into the truck bed, which had quite a few people but enough room for us to sit down. We all had to sit close together, but that was fine because it kept us warm in the cold windy night air. I sat down on a sack of something and leaned my legs against something soft and warm, which turned out to be a ram who was lying down calmly against the wall – at first, we didn’t know if he was even alive, he was so still. But once we started moving, he decided to stand up in a way that my legs ended up under him. It was fine at first, a nice warm blanket and quite the odd happening, but he backed into me and half sat down so that a huge amount of weight was on my legs and feet. He then decided that my feet would be good foot rests for his own, so I had some nice hooves on top of my shoes for a bit. I pushed him off but he kept backing into me more, and I eventually managed to pull out my legs from under him and rest them against him. After a while, he was smashing me again, so I spread my legs out entirely on top of him so that I was pretty much sitting on him but trying to keep most of my weight on the sack. Felt really bad for him, but he was too heavy to have sitting on me the entire time! As people got off, he eventually moved to the side enough that he could have his own space… though I was pretty cold after that! It was supposed to be a two hour ride but took almost three and a half. It was quite the bumpy ride as we all balanced against each other on the winding dirt roads that rolled up and down through the countryside. I talked a bit with a local sitting next to me, which was really interesting but also quite frustrating as he talked about some of the sights that we had been close to but not seen. Looking up at the sky was amazing, a vast expanse of endless stars and the moon above us, the only other illumination for miles coming from our head lights. I stood for the last half hour or so of the ride, looking at the city lights as we approached and watching all of the dogs announce our presence as we passed through towns on our way back to civilization.
Around 10:30, we finally arrived in Sucre, exhausted but starving, having only snacked on cookies and bread since our 12pm lunch. I debated between going home to granola and yogurt so that I could go the kids in the morning, but decided to go out to eat with the others and sleep in. I went with Nicky and Esther to a restaurant bar that was still open and we got huge dinners – my plate had two spicy stuffed potatoes, a spiced quinoa, and a Russian salad with an apple base; I downed the whole thing. Too tired to walk 15 minutes uphill home, I took a taxi home at midnight intended to crash into bed. Turns out I made the right decision in going to eat instead of going home to try and get some sleep – the house next door was having a massive party with singing and blasting music that was deafeaning even with my door shut. Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t get to sleep until they finally stopped a bit after two, so it was very good to not have to get up early to go to the kids.
In the morning, I did the obvious thing to do after a weekend of intense hiking. With really sore legs, it of course makes perfect sense to climb up the steepest streets in the city to the highest lookout point,, the Recoleta. So that’s what I did. (Did it today because I won’t have time during daylight the rest of my time here.) So that was a really fun walk, but it was an awesome view of the city from the top. I sat at Café Mirador with a banana café and typed up most of this saga, and then descended back to earth for lunch. Today is yet another holiday, teacher’s day, so there are no classes at Fox tonight, but I’m going to stock up on food at the market and then go to the vet for a few hours. Tomorrow, I’m meeting Nicky along the bus route and taking her to the guardaria with me to work with the kids. It’ll be really nice to have another volunteer since right now I’m the only one, and that way I can get some lessons going – I want to go through the alphabet one letter a day with the older ones, doing more than their usual repetitive writing the letters over and over and that’s it – and have her keep going with that once I’m gone so that there is some structure and continuity in place.
11:10am
Well, it’s been quite a weekend. I was supposed to get up at 5am on Saturday. Apparently Jorge knocked on my door and I said I was awake, but I have no recollection of that. He came back at 5:40 and I popped out of bed. Luckily I had everything ready, so we took a taxi to the center and met the rest of the group. There were two French couples and three other single female travelers in addition to a few Bolivians who came along. The twelve of us piled into two taxis for an hour’s ride up into the Cordilleras to Chataquila. Half asleep, we looked at the stone chapel for the Virgen de Chataquila before we started descending down the trail. It was freezing cold and foggy, so we couldn’t see much besides the trail for a while and had to bundle up like crazy. Bit by bit, we could see more of our surroundings as the rolling hills in the distance came into view until finally an amazing world appeared under the blue sky.
We were walking on the Inca Trail (obviously not the famous Machu Picchu trail) as we descended lower and lower into the crater. Much of the earth was dark red and at one point I fell and it looked as if my hand was streaked with blood, but it was just sand, which is probably used as body paint by locals. Parts of the path appeared cobbled and as we went round and round down this long winding pre-Hispanic road, I felt like I was in the Wizard of Oz… follow the red stone road, follow the red stone road. As the landscape changed, there was blue earth as well and the ground on which we walked alternated between red, brown, white, yellow, and blue sand and stones. I kept thinking we had reached the bottom, but it was just around another curve and deeper still into the crater. I wanted to look around me the entire time, but some of the paths upon which we walked were really unstable – either shaky pebbles and rocks to navigate over, or a narrow path to follow on the edge of a ridge. There were two particular parts throughout the day where we walked on a very narrow path in the middle of a cliff with steep walls above and below us and the sand beneath our feet constantly feeling like it was going to slip down into the abyss far below. But we all survived. We stopped at several lookout points along the way to take in the vast landscape that was so different than anything else I’d seen in Bolivia or elsewhere. It’s amazing how much different natural landscapes this tiny country has, and I still have quite a few more to see in the coming months. There’s no good way to describe the surroundings, and as usual, pictures can do better but still not well enough. After 6km of hiking mostly downhill, we passed through the tiny town of Chaucana There was a little schoolhouse up on the hill that apparently kids from all over the region attend – most have to walk 5 to 10km each way to get to school. This was very hard to imagine anyone doing as we grappled with the steep and difficult paths. Jorge was leading and walking ridiculously fast, rarely stopping for breaks and going too fast for much time to take pictures and take in the surroundings, but several of us stopped once in a while anyway and had to practically run to catch up – he was often too far into the distance to even get the attention of, which is completely wrong for someone leading the group. Turns out he wasn’t originally supposed to be the guide, but I’ll get into that rant later. He raced through this amazingly picturesque lake-like portion of the river filled with large stones and I had to stop there for a minute.
We continued to walk along the ridges with the river running below us. All around us was to Crater of Maragua, with brightly colored and layered walls. The area is also called Ombligo de Chiquisaca (the belly button of Chiquisaca, the name of this region of Bolivia). There were several waterfalls along the way and the walls curved in strange and dizzying ways. It almost was if I was in a round glass fishbowl, standing upright but at a diagonal on an inside wall, looking at the edges warping around me. The ridges and layers in the walls were mostly straight but each wall was on its own plane, so it was quite the interesting and surreal site.
We stopped for lunch in the shade by a swaying bridge and rested there for a bit, much to the relief of my very painful and blistering feet. The sides of the river by the bridge were covered in large stones, many with a distinct but natural color of yellow, blue, or red. As we continued on, we had to cross bits of the river as well as walk through some murky paths, stepping carefully on the small unstable stones and hoping they wouldn’t tip us into the smelly, wet ground beneath us.
Of course after descending so far into the crater, the only way forward was up the other side. Luckily most of the path was in the shade and there was a nice wind, but it was still a really challenging hike for everyone and my feet were really not enjoying themselves. As we made our way back up into the hills, we passed by the occasional house, home to a single family with their surrounding farmland, completely isolated with the nearest house far off into the distance. With the closest roads still kilometers away and the paths so difficult to walk, I have no idea how the people who live here get their supplies other than what they can produce themselves, which certainly isn’t everything that they need. At one house, we got a whole story about how the women have lots of children so that they have hands to work the land, the kids have important jobs from a very young age, and they have little money and a very difficult lifestyle. It was interesting to hear and to meet part of the family, but they wanted to sell us these cloth that are used as belts for traditional clothing (and would have little to no use for us) for a ridiculously high price, more money than any of us were even carrying – it would have been much more reasonable if they were selling little woven bracelets or something simple of the sort. We passed by many cornfields and by some girls out with their grazing cows. We finally finished the steep part of the journey, but it was still quite a bit of trekking along through the flatland before we reached the pueblo of Maragua. We bought water from a family home because the only market in town was only open two hours each morning and two in the afternoon. We then walked over to the top of a waterfall and a view deep down into the crater and river below. On the way back through the garbage-filled streams on the edge of town, we passed two pigs tied to a fence, one with a rope so short that there was a constant strain on his neck, poor thing. A guy motioned to us from up on the hill and ran down to us. His son had gotten an awful gash in his finger from moving large stones which shattered and they had no medical supplies or even knowledge of what to do. Jorge cleaned it up and wrapped it using his first aid kit and I gave them the bandages I had in my backpack to keep it covered over the next couple days. Realized later that my feet could have benefited from them, but my feet survived and his finger was in much worse shape. We thought that we had arrived at our site for the night, but we continued to walk through the gorgeous countryside for another hour until we reached the town of Irupampa and settled into our room. There were eight beds in the large room in the kitchen, and I ended up with a top bunk but at least the mattress was decent, much better than the hay-filled mattress on the bunk below! The two couples stayed in a smaller cabin across the path. We had tea, collapsed on the beds, and hung out for several hours until dinner. Throughout the trip, I spent time mostly with Nicky (England), Esther (Spain), and Lea (Germany), and we spoke mostly Spanish, through Nicky and I would take the occasional break for English when we didn’t want to think or had something more complicated to say. Three of us were vegetarian and had fried eggs rather than meat with our meal, which was a nice huge bowl of a sort of vegetable paella. The bathroom around the back of the cabin was pretty ridiculous – there was actually a toilet seat, which was nice, but it was a sand toilet – there were strangely two holes inside it, and after you went, you sprinkled a scoop of sand on top and that was that. Definitely preferred the natural bathroom next door! The stars were gorgeous but it was freezing cold and we were exhausted, so we all fell into bed after dinner.
We got up at 5:30 for a small and disappointing breakfast of hot coffee with a single piece of slightly stale bread. It was still dark outside for a bit, so we watched the stars disappear and light come up into the sky before we began our journey. Sunday’s walk was much less intense and in a very different landscape, as we were out in the hills rather than deep in a crater. There was a stark color contrast in the distance, with bright green flora against the deep red earth. We definitely felt tiny as we walked through the vast countryside with dark sand dunes alongside us. We were relieved when we got to the pueblo of Quila Quila much earlier than we anticipated, and sat down outside the little shop to rest for a bit and drink cold sodas. We hiked up into the hillside to see rock paintings – we reached one large rock with several drawings of people and animals, and most of us were too tired and daunted by the huge hill above to continue further up as if we didn’t even know if there was more ahead, so we rested there. The Bolivians and Lea continued up the huge hill and apparently saw a few other large rocks with cool paintings, but with sore legs and feet, I was fine just resting on the mountain with breathtaking surroundings.
When the others came back down, we descended back to Quila Quila, where we ate the lunches that we had packed – my cucumbers, tomatoes, and cheese had somehow still stayed cold in my backpack next to my water – and waited for the truck back to Sucre. It was supposed to come at 12:30, but rumbled into town at 1:15. We tried to get on, but it was stuffed to the brim.
We were told there be another truck (the only other for the day) in two hours, so we had no choice but to wait. Two hours laying around and talking in the gazebo in the central plaza, which held little else besides a slide and a statue, went by quickly enough and we went back to the side of the road a bit past 3 to wait for the truck. But then it was four o’clock, and then five and we all got really antsy and tired and wanted to be back in Sucre for good food and hot showers. The town was completely desolate, except for the occasional local walking over to the store to buy something (its only offerings were bread, crackers, cookies, drinks, and coca leaves – I refuse to eat any bread today, I’m so sick of it!) The streets were empty aside from the sporadic pig or donkey that wandered by, and later the sheeps, goats, and cows that were herded home after their day in the field. We were joined at times by several dogs, one another little guy with Corgi-like legs who was well-taken care of and didn’t even want food that we offered but just wanted to be pet. There was another bigger female who was very skittish and in awful condition and unlike most of the dogs here who will gently take food from your hand, she would quickly grab it, and would scarf down anything that we put on the ground in an instant.
As it got later and colder and we had no idea if the truck was even going to come, we all got pretty frustrated and annoyed with Jorge. Because there were a bunch of us, it wouldn’t have cost a ton to get a two taxis or a micro, but he kept saying that he wouldn’t do that and that this was the Bolivian experience, the eternal waiting, the uncertainty, the being hours or even a day late to something. Yes, that is the Bolivian experience, it’s what the locals go through every day, we understood that, and I’ve definitely had my intense bits of cultural immersion like the six hour bumpy bus ride smashed in an aisle on the bus. But in this case, we were paying much, much more than the locals and should not have had to have that experience. If we paid ten times less than we did, fine, but given the amount that we were paying, it was completely wrong to make us wait in a desolate town for what eventually amounted to six hours. The price was obviously not high by US standards, but given what we got – no real guide (apparently there was supposed to be a guide, but he recently broke his leg, so Jorge attempted to guide and knew the route but that was it, nothing about the landscape or history or cool things to look for along the way). Combined with the tiny breakfast and unreliable transportation, we were all pretty angry about it.
Around 5:30, they got hold of somebody in the next town over who said that the bus was waiting there because there was a meeting. I later found out that the bus driver had to attend the meeting, so that meant the bus was delayed for hours and hours. They said it would arrive in about 30 minutes. Around 6:30, some locals said they heard the toot of the bus as it announced its presence through the countryside, but we didn’t believe it until we heard it ourselves 20 minutes later. Finally around 7, the truck rolled into town and we climbed up the ladder into the truck bed, which had quite a few people but enough room for us to sit down. We all had to sit close together, but that was fine because it kept us warm in the cold windy night air. I sat down on a sack of something and leaned my legs against something soft and warm, which turned out to be a ram who was lying down calmly against the wall – at first, we didn’t know if he was even alive, he was so still. But once we started moving, he decided to stand up in a way that my legs ended up under him. It was fine at first, a nice warm blanket and quite the odd happening, but he backed into me and half sat down so that a huge amount of weight was on my legs and feet. He then decided that my feet would be good foot rests for his own, so I had some nice hooves on top of my shoes for a bit. I pushed him off but he kept backing into me more, and I eventually managed to pull out my legs from under him and rest them against him. After a while, he was smashing me again, so I spread my legs out entirely on top of him so that I was pretty much sitting on him but trying to keep most of my weight on the sack. Felt really bad for him, but he was too heavy to have sitting on me the entire time! As people got off, he eventually moved to the side enough that he could have his own space… though I was pretty cold after that! It was supposed to be a two hour ride but took almost three and a half. It was quite the bumpy ride as we all balanced against each other on the winding dirt roads that rolled up and down through the countryside. I talked a bit with a local sitting next to me, which was really interesting but also quite frustrating as he talked about some of the sights that we had been close to but not seen. Looking up at the sky was amazing, a vast expanse of endless stars and the moon above us, the only other illumination for miles coming from our head lights. I stood for the last half hour or so of the ride, looking at the city lights as we approached and watching all of the dogs announce our presence as we passed through towns on our way back to civilization.
Around 10:30, we finally arrived in Sucre, exhausted but starving, having only snacked on cookies and bread since our 12pm lunch. I debated between going home to granola and yogurt so that I could go the kids in the morning, but decided to go out to eat with the others and sleep in. I went with Nicky and Esther to a restaurant bar that was still open and we got huge dinners – my plate had two spicy stuffed potatoes, a spiced quinoa, and a Russian salad with an apple base; I downed the whole thing. Too tired to walk 15 minutes uphill home, I took a taxi home at midnight intended to crash into bed. Turns out I made the right decision in going to eat instead of going home to try and get some sleep – the house next door was having a massive party with singing and blasting music that was deafeaning even with my door shut. Exhausted as I was, I couldn’t get to sleep until they finally stopped a bit after two, so it was very good to not have to get up early to go to the kids.
In the morning, I did the obvious thing to do after a weekend of intense hiking. With really sore legs, it of course makes perfect sense to climb up the steepest streets in the city to the highest lookout point,, the Recoleta. So that’s what I did. (Did it today because I won’t have time during daylight the rest of my time here.) So that was a really fun walk, but it was an awesome view of the city from the top. I sat at Café Mirador with a banana café and typed up most of this saga, and then descended back to earth for lunch. Today is yet another holiday, teacher’s day, so there are no classes at Fox tonight, but I’m going to stock up on food at the market and then go to the vet for a few hours. Tomorrow, I’m meeting Nicky along the bus route and taking her to the guardaria with me to work with the kids. It’ll be really nice to have another volunteer since right now I’m the only one, and that way I can get some lessons going – I want to go through the alphabet one letter a day with the older ones, doing more than their usual repetitive writing the letters over and over and that’s it – and have her keep going with that once I’m gone so that there is some structure and continuity in place.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
I Do, You Do, He DoES – The Hassles of Teaching English and Other Tales
6/1/11 9:30pm
At lunch today, paid in advance for the next two weeks of lunch at Freya’s (a grand total of about 14 dollars for up to 12 full lunches, depending if I am here or traveling on Saturdays). They have a ton of regulars there who just pay in advance each month and have a little subscription card. Turns out that Isabel is one of those people – I ran into her there today - so will meet there for lunch everyday. It’s so nice to be guaranteed a full vegetarian meal each day without paying a ton or worrying about finding a place that will accommodate me. The main dish today was pesto spaghetti, and I love their vegetable quinoa soups that we get every day (though the grains and types of veggies vary). After lunch, we sat in the park and I helped Isabel with her English readings. They were ridiculously difficult for someone who is just learning English – it was a reading on Puritan writers in the US colonies and had quite a few metaphors and old poetry that took me a while to interpret before attempting to translate to Spanish for her. We went through a couple pages of her reader word by word, sentence by sentence, making sure that she understood all of the ideas, but it was quite crazy how difficult it was – seemed like a reading I would have gotten in a high school or college history class and not something that should be given to people learning English.
At the vet, waited literally ten minutes for the thermometer to take the temperature of a pup, poor thing. I might buy them a new one because that’s pretty ridiculous. There were two young canine patients today while I was there, and both got several cocktail injections and were on their way. One had GI issues and the other, a respiratory infection. They were both told to come back tomorrow for more injections. From what I could tell, the owners aren’t usually given meds to give at home, they just come back daily for more injections until the issue is resolved. The costs to the owners are ridiculous cheap – there are no set prices and there doesn’t seem to really be any charge for the exam. One of the pups today got a vitamin injection, a steroid injection, and one other, and the total cost was 30Bs, which is about 4 bucks – just the cost of a meal or two, or two movie tickets. I asked why the costs were so low and the doctor said that was all people could afford, but they have their cell phones and such, so I think it’s more of a matter of that’s all they are willing to pay/that’s all their pets are worth. I don’t understand the vets can make a living with that little, as things are cheap here but still, with the staff and supplies and such, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
The first English class was again a private lesson to the same student. She didn’t do the homework that I had given her, but we did it in class instead and at least she remembered what we went over yesterday. The second class was really, really frustrating. Three students showed and we were doing exercises to practice what we had gone over the last couple of days. The skill level in the class is so varied, though, that it’s impossible to do an exercise as a group without having one person be completely lost and another bored to death. The fastest learner was a boy of about 12, and the guy having the most difficult time was probably in his late 20s. Even when we explained the activity that we were doing in Spanish, he had major trouble understanding what it was we were doing, whether it was matching a question with its appropriate answer or filling in the blank. Cinthya and I ended up having the three students each work at their own pace and went around and helped them. It got really, really frustrating when after I went over he/she/it does and i/you/we/they do multiple times and in different ways using both English and Spanish, the sentence always started with ‘he do’; the point just didn’t get across. Neither did the concept of creating sentences using a model and just changing the verbs based on what subject was being used. It’s hard to grasp that this doesn’t make sense to someone even when it is presented in their own language, as we tried it multiple times in Spanish before changing to English. Also, it would be most effective if I taught almost entirely in English, but I just get blank stares if I try that, so say everything in both languages instead and most of what I say in English is probably ignored. Doesn’t help when the students only show up half the time so people aren’t ever on track with others in the class!
At lunch today, paid in advance for the next two weeks of lunch at Freya’s (a grand total of about 14 dollars for up to 12 full lunches, depending if I am here or traveling on Saturdays). They have a ton of regulars there who just pay in advance each month and have a little subscription card. Turns out that Isabel is one of those people – I ran into her there today - so will meet there for lunch everyday. It’s so nice to be guaranteed a full vegetarian meal each day without paying a ton or worrying about finding a place that will accommodate me. The main dish today was pesto spaghetti, and I love their vegetable quinoa soups that we get every day (though the grains and types of veggies vary). After lunch, we sat in the park and I helped Isabel with her English readings. They were ridiculously difficult for someone who is just learning English – it was a reading on Puritan writers in the US colonies and had quite a few metaphors and old poetry that took me a while to interpret before attempting to translate to Spanish for her. We went through a couple pages of her reader word by word, sentence by sentence, making sure that she understood all of the ideas, but it was quite crazy how difficult it was – seemed like a reading I would have gotten in a high school or college history class and not something that should be given to people learning English.
At the vet, waited literally ten minutes for the thermometer to take the temperature of a pup, poor thing. I might buy them a new one because that’s pretty ridiculous. There were two young canine patients today while I was there, and both got several cocktail injections and were on their way. One had GI issues and the other, a respiratory infection. They were both told to come back tomorrow for more injections. From what I could tell, the owners aren’t usually given meds to give at home, they just come back daily for more injections until the issue is resolved. The costs to the owners are ridiculous cheap – there are no set prices and there doesn’t seem to really be any charge for the exam. One of the pups today got a vitamin injection, a steroid injection, and one other, and the total cost was 30Bs, which is about 4 bucks – just the cost of a meal or two, or two movie tickets. I asked why the costs were so low and the doctor said that was all people could afford, but they have their cell phones and such, so I think it’s more of a matter of that’s all they are willing to pay/that’s all their pets are worth. I don’t understand the vets can make a living with that little, as things are cheap here but still, with the staff and supplies and such, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
The first English class was again a private lesson to the same student. She didn’t do the homework that I had given her, but we did it in class instead and at least she remembered what we went over yesterday. The second class was really, really frustrating. Three students showed and we were doing exercises to practice what we had gone over the last couple of days. The skill level in the class is so varied, though, that it’s impossible to do an exercise as a group without having one person be completely lost and another bored to death. The fastest learner was a boy of about 12, and the guy having the most difficult time was probably in his late 20s. Even when we explained the activity that we were doing in Spanish, he had major trouble understanding what it was we were doing, whether it was matching a question with its appropriate answer or filling in the blank. Cinthya and I ended up having the three students each work at their own pace and went around and helped them. It got really, really frustrating when after I went over he/she/it does and i/you/we/they do multiple times and in different ways using both English and Spanish, the sentence always started with ‘he do’; the point just didn’t get across. Neither did the concept of creating sentences using a model and just changing the verbs based on what subject was being used. It’s hard to grasp that this doesn’t make sense to someone even when it is presented in their own language, as we tried it multiple times in Spanish before changing to English. Also, it would be most effective if I taught almost entirely in English, but I just get blank stares if I try that, so say everything in both languages instead and most of what I say in English is probably ignored. Doesn’t help when the students only show up half the time so people aren’t ever on track with others in the class!
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Being The Workaholic That I Am...
5.28 5:20pm
Even when I’m traveling, I can only stand so much free/unstructured time. Staying in the same place for three weeks, I have my mornings filled with kids and evenings filled with English students, but there were still the afternoons. I really like wandering around the markets, getting to know the city, going to the museums if they are actually open when they say they will be. But I can only do so much of that. And so it is that I got myself into observing and helping during the afternoons at a vet clinic. There is a clinic just a few minutes walk from my house that I’ve used as a landmark at which to turn right on my way to the center of the city. Once I got my fill of wandering today, I decided to stop by the clinic on the way back home. There is one vet who owns and runs the clinic but spends mornings working out in the countryside. The other staff there are a recent grad, a soon to be grad, and a vet student. During the day, they manage the clinic and take care of basic appointments and procedures, and in the late afternoon the older vet comes and does the more complex surgeries, etc. I talked for a while to Ricardo, the owner, who was really nice and willing to let me hang around. The two students weren’t there today, but I talked to Juanita, the recent grad. It was hard to get much out of her because she was really, really passive and shy, but it seems like she isn’t allowed to do surgeries and hasn’t done them since school. She says there are four vet schools in Bolivia and school lasts five years; I think you start straight out of their version of high school.
5/31/11 9:30pm
Didn’t have my flash drive with me the other day so posting the above late. On Sunday, I went to the vet at nine and waited around for an hour watching the cars race by, but no one showed, aside from a confused client who stood there for a while and left. I found out Monday that the office was closed on Sunday because it was the vet’s birthday – though he forgot to tell me that on Saturday when he said he would see me the next day!
Yesterday at the clinic was definitely interesting and so different than back home, but also very different and slightly more advanced than the clinic in Peru. The first patient was a dog who had been bitten badly by a larger dog earlier in the week and came in for wound care. The abdomen was filled with some sort of the fluid and the ribs were potentially broken, so they were sent to go get xrays elsewhere – definitely was an owner on the wealthier end of the spectrum. Another patient was a cat named Gato (which people name their cats in the US where Spanish isn’t the primary language, but here, really, a cat named cat!) who came in for a nail trim. They all kept gaping over how huge he was, and weighed him in quite the interesting way. They wrapped him in a blanket, stuck a hook into the blanket, and held him above the table on a hanging scale, poor thing. He was a whole twelve pounds and they thought that was gigantic; cats here are definitely on the smaller end but that was just funny to see. He was amazing for his nail trim, the owner holding him and the vet just taking one paw at a time to snip. Of the animals here I’ve seen so far, they are so much more well-behaved and easier to restrain than those in the US. Non-veterinary eyes can skip the next paragraph!
The most interesting case was a four month old pup with a history of seizures and an awful upper respiratory infection, no appetite, neuro symptoms, completely dehydrated, not looking good at all. The owner couldn’t afford much of anything, so they ended up putting the pup down. There was a bit of debate with the owner about the cost as well as a lot of joking around, which seemed really odd, but I only caught bits and pieces of what was going on. Owners are allowed in the room for pretty much anything else including surgeries, but not for the euthanasia. They started off by sedating with Ketamine IM, and then gave the final injection in the heart. I asked why they didn’t do IV and they said it was because the pup was dehydrated, but then they said that they always do it intra-cardiac, never IV, and don’t even check the veins first. Which I absolutely do not understand because it took a good four sticks and a bunch of probing around for them to even find the heart – thankfully the dog was completely sedated at that point. They injected a bunch of solution (well, a very small amount of euthanasia solution and about 20 mLs of diluent, strange…) into the heart but then decided it had gone into the lungs, so pulled up another syringe to inject again, but ended up not needing it because the other injection had indeed worked. All the while, the owners sat in this waiting room completely unperturbed, and then the doctor eventually bagged the pup and gave her back to the owners to dispose of as they pleased.
Okay, back to non-vet things. The more advanced English class last night was harder to teach because it got into some grammar specifics that I never learned, I just knew. In that sense, Spanish grammar would be easier for me to teach someone than English grammar since I never had to learn the rules or terminology. Between the teacher and I, we hopefully got the point across, though the book did a pretty awful job with that segment too. I got lunch today at Freya’s, which will be my new afternoon place to be. It’s a restaurant that serves vegetarian almuerzo (set menu lunches). You sit down and they bring you a drink and salad with bread, then soup, then the main course, and then dessert. Everyone gets the same thing, but the menu changes daily. The grand total for the meal is just under 2 USD. Much better than the more expensive or boring other things I can eat around here like an individual pizza for 5 bucks or the typical cheese and egg sandwich.
After lunch, I went to meet Isabel, the girl who I will be doing the intercambio with. She’s a university student about my age who is studying languages. Her English is pretty good but practicing is important for both of us, and it was fun to get to know a local student. I’ll meet her again tomorrow after my lunch at Freyas. With this added in, my schedule is ridiculously packed – leave for the kids at 8:15, leave there around 12:30 and make my way to central Sucre, grab lunch, talk with Isabel 2-3ish, walk 15 minutes to the vet and stay there till 5:40, teach English 6-8, then make a quick dinner at home before I crash for the night. Busy, busy, busy but lots of interesting fun things.
Tonight at Fox, the teacher I’m working with had a lot of studying to do for a test tomorrow, so she read while I taught the first class. Well, it turned out to be a private lesson, I had only one student show, but it was really good for her to have the one-on-one. She’s at a very basic level of English so I had to say most everything in both English and Spanish to get my point across, consulting occasionally with Cinthya when I couldn’t think of the word in Spanish. The second class had a better showing with six students, and we reviewed telling time, which is quite challenging for them but hopefully with all this repetition they will get it down. I walked most of the way home with one of the students who turned out to live just a few blocks from me; she’s in her late 20s or early 30s and works at a fancy hotel. I was a lovely nagging teacher and kept correcting her English as we walked, but it was really good for her to practice conversational English because in class she’s very hesitant to say anything in English front of the others.
Even when I’m traveling, I can only stand so much free/unstructured time. Staying in the same place for three weeks, I have my mornings filled with kids and evenings filled with English students, but there were still the afternoons. I really like wandering around the markets, getting to know the city, going to the museums if they are actually open when they say they will be. But I can only do so much of that. And so it is that I got myself into observing and helping during the afternoons at a vet clinic. There is a clinic just a few minutes walk from my house that I’ve used as a landmark at which to turn right on my way to the center of the city. Once I got my fill of wandering today, I decided to stop by the clinic on the way back home. There is one vet who owns and runs the clinic but spends mornings working out in the countryside. The other staff there are a recent grad, a soon to be grad, and a vet student. During the day, they manage the clinic and take care of basic appointments and procedures, and in the late afternoon the older vet comes and does the more complex surgeries, etc. I talked for a while to Ricardo, the owner, who was really nice and willing to let me hang around. The two students weren’t there today, but I talked to Juanita, the recent grad. It was hard to get much out of her because she was really, really passive and shy, but it seems like she isn’t allowed to do surgeries and hasn’t done them since school. She says there are four vet schools in Bolivia and school lasts five years; I think you start straight out of their version of high school.
5/31/11 9:30pm
Didn’t have my flash drive with me the other day so posting the above late. On Sunday, I went to the vet at nine and waited around for an hour watching the cars race by, but no one showed, aside from a confused client who stood there for a while and left. I found out Monday that the office was closed on Sunday because it was the vet’s birthday – though he forgot to tell me that on Saturday when he said he would see me the next day!
Yesterday at the clinic was definitely interesting and so different than back home, but also very different and slightly more advanced than the clinic in Peru. The first patient was a dog who had been bitten badly by a larger dog earlier in the week and came in for wound care. The abdomen was filled with some sort of the fluid and the ribs were potentially broken, so they were sent to go get xrays elsewhere – definitely was an owner on the wealthier end of the spectrum. Another patient was a cat named Gato (which people name their cats in the US where Spanish isn’t the primary language, but here, really, a cat named cat!) who came in for a nail trim. They all kept gaping over how huge he was, and weighed him in quite the interesting way. They wrapped him in a blanket, stuck a hook into the blanket, and held him above the table on a hanging scale, poor thing. He was a whole twelve pounds and they thought that was gigantic; cats here are definitely on the smaller end but that was just funny to see. He was amazing for his nail trim, the owner holding him and the vet just taking one paw at a time to snip. Of the animals here I’ve seen so far, they are so much more well-behaved and easier to restrain than those in the US. Non-veterinary eyes can skip the next paragraph!
The most interesting case was a four month old pup with a history of seizures and an awful upper respiratory infection, no appetite, neuro symptoms, completely dehydrated, not looking good at all. The owner couldn’t afford much of anything, so they ended up putting the pup down. There was a bit of debate with the owner about the cost as well as a lot of joking around, which seemed really odd, but I only caught bits and pieces of what was going on. Owners are allowed in the room for pretty much anything else including surgeries, but not for the euthanasia. They started off by sedating with Ketamine IM, and then gave the final injection in the heart. I asked why they didn’t do IV and they said it was because the pup was dehydrated, but then they said that they always do it intra-cardiac, never IV, and don’t even check the veins first. Which I absolutely do not understand because it took a good four sticks and a bunch of probing around for them to even find the heart – thankfully the dog was completely sedated at that point. They injected a bunch of solution (well, a very small amount of euthanasia solution and about 20 mLs of diluent, strange…) into the heart but then decided it had gone into the lungs, so pulled up another syringe to inject again, but ended up not needing it because the other injection had indeed worked. All the while, the owners sat in this waiting room completely unperturbed, and then the doctor eventually bagged the pup and gave her back to the owners to dispose of as they pleased.
Okay, back to non-vet things. The more advanced English class last night was harder to teach because it got into some grammar specifics that I never learned, I just knew. In that sense, Spanish grammar would be easier for me to teach someone than English grammar since I never had to learn the rules or terminology. Between the teacher and I, we hopefully got the point across, though the book did a pretty awful job with that segment too. I got lunch today at Freya’s, which will be my new afternoon place to be. It’s a restaurant that serves vegetarian almuerzo (set menu lunches). You sit down and they bring you a drink and salad with bread, then soup, then the main course, and then dessert. Everyone gets the same thing, but the menu changes daily. The grand total for the meal is just under 2 USD. Much better than the more expensive or boring other things I can eat around here like an individual pizza for 5 bucks or the typical cheese and egg sandwich.
After lunch, I went to meet Isabel, the girl who I will be doing the intercambio with. She’s a university student about my age who is studying languages. Her English is pretty good but practicing is important for both of us, and it was fun to get to know a local student. I’ll meet her again tomorrow after my lunch at Freyas. With this added in, my schedule is ridiculously packed – leave for the kids at 8:15, leave there around 12:30 and make my way to central Sucre, grab lunch, talk with Isabel 2-3ish, walk 15 minutes to the vet and stay there till 5:40, teach English 6-8, then make a quick dinner at home before I crash for the night. Busy, busy, busy but lots of interesting fun things.
Tonight at Fox, the teacher I’m working with had a lot of studying to do for a test tomorrow, so she read while I taught the first class. Well, it turned out to be a private lesson, I had only one student show, but it was really good for her to have the one-on-one. She’s at a very basic level of English so I had to say most everything in both English and Spanish to get my point across, consulting occasionally with Cinthya when I couldn’t think of the word in Spanish. The second class had a better showing with six students, and we reviewed telling time, which is quite challenging for them but hopefully with all this repetition they will get it down. I walked most of the way home with one of the students who turned out to live just a few blocks from me; she’s in her late 20s or early 30s and works at a fancy hotel. I was a lovely nagging teacher and kept correcting her English as we walked, but it was really good for her to practice conversational English because in class she’s very hesitant to say anything in English front of the others.
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