Back to the orphanage

Today I started back working in the orphange, but this time I am working in the babies room and am completely in my element. These gorgeous little tackers are my work for the next 5 weeks. Today was the last day for 2 of the volunteers and the last few weeks have seen the number of volunteers reduce dramatically as they all head back to start University in September. We´ve gone from having 9 to just 2 volunteers, but the permanent staff are used to it, they tell me that it happens every year. Nevermind, just means more hugs for me.

The past weekend we had our monthly ¨dirty weekend¨where we head to an orphange to do something for them. This time it was decided that we would make board games for the children but alot bigger than normal so they could play them outside and we would spend the day with them teaching them how to play, it was a huge success. There was Chinese sticks, Chess, Twister and Snakes and ladders and another game the french team made and they turned out great. The frenchies really lived up to their reputation as being artists, their game was incredible. The orphange was a little over an hour away from Cochabamba in a small town called Arani. It was an orphange that is run by nuns and it was incredible compared to the one that I work at. The staff at from Projects Abroad tell us not to compare but its hard not to when you see the difference. This place had a beautiful big vegetable garden, running water, separate kitchen facilities, toys to play with, a great outdoor area to play and alot more law and order which means the children are alot better behaved. My family tell me that is the difference between places run by the churches and places run by the government.

Otherwise its been a fairly standard couple of weeks, I´ve eased off the weekend travel as most of the places the other volunteers are heading to are places I´m heading to after I finish working and they are just so far for a weekend. So its meant that I´m spending time in Cochabama and lots of time with the family which is what they do on the weekends, visit Aunts, Uncles, cousins and more aunts and uncles. Luckily Marcelo (my host brother) helps me to escape the entire family from time to time. The other weekend we went shopping at the market, first and last time I go shopping with a Latin American boy. For starters they like shopping more than a women and their taste in clothes is not something that I would ever give a second glance to. I tell him he like bling way too much and he tells me that I need to trade my old clothes for new ones. Given that my beloved jeans (the only pair I brought with me) decided to rip right through the crutch it was time for a new pair. And given that saying no it not something I am that great at, after saying no to his suggestions at least 30 times I was starting to feel a little bad and gave in and agreed to try on some jeans. Now we all know that women like to be told that they look great in whatever clothes they are wearing, so after the 3rd or 4th time of me asking ¨are you sure they look good¨and the response being ¨they look amazing¨who wouldn´t buy a pair aof jeans with 2 playboy bunnies embroided on your arse?? Awful I tell you, my only reassurance is that cost the equivalent of about $10 and I own alot of long tops.

In the past week I had another little vist from my old friend Mr Food Poisoning, my only problem is that he doesn´t give me 1 proper dose that is over and done with in 12-24hours, no I´m lucky enough t have 3 days of constant nausea with the occasional vomit. And I finally had to come clean and tell my host mum that I just really dont like soup when she tried feeding it to me for 3 days when I was sick, then I gave her the explaination of all the things I didn´t eat when I was younger but explained that I was much better with my food now, and all she could say was ¨your poor mother¨:) Anyway by Friday I was sick of the sight of my room and agreed to go out with my Uncle to see a local musical groups that come from the department of Cochabamba but the town is about 3 hours away. It wasn´t that much fun sitting through the first hour of speeches and presentations but the music from this group was incredible, so incredible and like nothing I seen before, its been great having an Uncle connected with tourism. Then for a change of pace on Saturday night I thought lets see if we can fix this stomach with a beer, and to be honest it didn´t work but a vodka and OJ seemed to do the trick, and Marcelo and his friends took me to see a Bolivian Rock band---loved it!! The boys gave me a translation of the lyrics, a little less rock sounding when you translate it but great music, especially when they mix in some of the traditional instruments from Bolivia.

This is a photo from a parade, they seem to have them at least once a week here. I just loved these outfits, the shoes in particular.

Urkapiña

A view from the top of the hill, this line of people went on my miles and miles and people were still arriving in the thousands when we were leaving at 11am.

A view of Cochabamba from Christo.

This week has been a fairly quiet week following the weekend. In Cochabamba it was the festival ¨ Urkapina¨, which is basically a festival for the Virgin (I think it’s the Virgin Maria), and people from all over the country come to celebrate , many people say that everyone once came for their faith but its fast become a business for a lot of people.

So, I didn´t make it to the festival on the Friday which is the day that thousands of people dance through the streets from 8am until midnight, but I didn´t feel too disappointed as I had at least seen the practice a few weeks earlier, and I happily watched it on TV with the family.

However weeks earlier I had for only god knows what reason agreed to do ¨the walk¨with my host brother on the Saturday night. Now what this ¨walk¨consists of is getting up at roughly 3am on Sunday morning and walking 16kms to the suburb Quillacollo and climb a small hill. Now as some of you know I´m not exactly the most chipper person when my sleeps been interrupted, so waking up at 3am and walking in the pitch black while it is freezing is not exactly my idea of a good time, but this was something else. I mean they block off an entire side of the highway for people to walk on and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people walking this walk. There are families with small children and so many women carrying their babies, at this point I realized it was not going to be possible for me to complain, and aside from my freezing butt, there wasn´t anything to complain about. There were bands playing on the side of the highway, people selling food and drinks and plenty of promotional people handing out freebies.
Now I´d like to tell you that we walked the whole 16kms because the idea is that the walk is your sacrifice so when you reach the final destination(the name has escaped me) you can ask the virgin for whatever you need and it will come true. But once we reached km 12 and the boys saw a truffi that was heading in the right direction needless to say they weren´t going to get any complaints from me and my legs were happy once again.

And it really was truly amazing when we reached the top of the hill and could look down and see all the people walking from miles away. At the top of the hill you can buy token objects of the things that you need. To begin with I was being all moral and telling Marcelo that I was a truly happy person and that I didn´t really need anything and blah blah blah, but when we both saw the fake $$$ we both thought, it couldn´t hurt could it??? So fingers crossed people!!

Also at the top of the hill there are areas where people get a pick and hammer the rocks, the idea is that the bigger the piece of rock you break off the more money it represents. Then you must carry the stone home and walk back with it the following year to return it to the virgin. Given the small possibility of bringing the rock back next year I declined, but inside had my morning shower when some priests blessed me with peace, so as far as I can see I´m set now, I mean I´ve got my peace and money should be on the way anyday now……………

So all in all it was a really great day/night and I am happy I gave up some sleep for it. The only thing that was missing was breakfast which I had been dying for since the wee hours of the morning. Marcelo and his friend Jose decided to take me to this stall and assured me that the stall was ¨clean¨what they neglected to tell me was that they had ordered me soup for breakfast, needless to say when the pepsi arrived at the table it was rapidly returned for beer for the 3 of us. Marcelo says to me, ¨Sarah its 8am in the morning you can´t have beer for breakfast, what would your mum say¨? I said ¨Marcelo its 8am in the morning if my mum saw us now she would say ¨I can´t believe your trying to feed Sarah soup not I can´t believe you´re drinking beer¨. And now it’s any ongoing joke as Marcelo as kindly told my host mum that soup is my favourite food, don’t worry revenge is a dish best served cold………………

A relaxing weekend

This is me at ¨Christo¨in Cochambama, apparently higher than the one well know in Rio.

This is my friend Sam and I in Sucre.

Last Thursday was the day of Bolivia which I celebrated in a very mature way by going to the main street to watch the parade with my host mum, sister and her kids. It seems that all the kids in school here learn how to do baton twirling and nearly all of them play some sort of brass instrument, some of them in tune and some of them not so much. They were all actually pretty talented, but it was a fairly boring parade and Sam and I soon wandered off to eat some Pastels, our absolute favorite street food and probably one of the only things that we don´t get ill from.

We headed off to the Bus station on Wednesday night to buy Bus tickets to travel to Sucre the next morning only to find out that buses only leave in the evening, so it looked like our 4 day weekend was going to become 3. So after a relaxing day on Thursday we headed off on our Semi-cama bus in the evening. Now people had told us that the road to Sucre wasn´t the nicest and to be fair it was probably one of the bumpiest and winey roads of been on but I was well impressed with the bus and even managed to get a few hours sleep. So we arrived in Sucre and immediately noticed the difference of how much cleaner the streets of Sucre are compared to Cochabamba. Its meant to be the place you go for some culture in this country and the place is full of Museums and important buildings so that’s basically what we did for the weekend. I know it doesn´t make for very interesting reading so I wont bore you with too many details. But it was nice to spend the weekend in and out of cafes and museums and the Recoleta had an amazing view of the city that we walked up to each day.

Probably the most interesting place that visited was a place just out of town where they found Dinosaur footprints roughly 20years ago and was confirmed by Paleontologists in the 90s. Its basically a massive big wall that they were mining for whatever it is that they use to make cement when they came across these footprints. I don’t think that photos do it justice as the lookout makes them look a lot smaller than they really are and it’s a bit sad that they still don’t have the money to protect the wall from the effects of nature.

So anyway, in short the weekend was super relaxing and was great to get away, we headed off to the airport and as some of you know, luck isn´t always on my side when it comes to transport . I mean the whole time I was in London, very rarely did my flights and trains leave on time so I ´m used to things running behind schedule, but for once I was a good hour or so earlier to the airport than necessary and what should happen, the plane left 2 hours early!!! I mean what the??? Since when does that happen, apparently in Bolivia, so we´ve been told they often overbook flights and when its ready to go it just goes. Luckily there was a really lovely guy at the airport (a local) who helped explain the situation to us and kindly drove us with mum, grandma and the 2 kids to the bus station which was a good 15kms away. They helped us to buy a ticket for a floata bus (the only buses left) which is a normal bus but on the road to Sucre overnight its not the form of transport you want to take. So filling up the backseat of the bus was a young guy, Sam, myself, a mum with a sick baby, and the dad with the 4 year old, yep it was a tight squeeze. And to make it worse the poor baby vomited as soon as we got on the bus and left a nice odour for the trip, but the father of the baby was lovely as attempted to speak to me for most of the trip which is always welcome practice for me. Needless to say it was a difficult morning at work on Monday with arriving in Cochabamba at the wee hour of 5am. But mow I´m back in the swing of things and ready for another week of work!

A few more stories from Cochabama

My host sister and her husband Eddie. On the right is Eddie´s dad and Barbara who is another volunteer from France that loves with us and Lisa a volunteer from Germany on the left.

This was my class that I helped teach in the last 2 weeks I was working at the orphange. The other guy is Jan, a volunteer from Germany, he´s my hero, he´s 18 and speaks 5 languages and is a really cool guy, wish I was 18 again :)

This is Tom from USA, possibly one of the funniest guys I ´ve met, and this is our Garden that we painted.

Ok, so with a little encouragement from my mum I´ve realised that its time to write again. A couple of weekends ago we had what is commonly known here as a ¨dirty weekend¨, my Spanish teacher was very excited to here what I had planned and needless to say was a little disappointed when I then better described it as a workshop weekend. We fixed boxes and painted muriels on the wall at my orphanage which turned out to be a pretty fun day and the kids loved the final product. The only downside to these weekends is it only leaves us 1 day to travel somewhere and given that I don´t exactly live close to anywhere else in this country its pretty limiting. But luck was on mine and Sam´s (my English companion) side as we went to visit a neighbouring town for the Sunday markets and as it turned out it was the practice day for the dancing for a massive festival that is on here in another 2 weeks. And these people really turn it on for their festivals. Apparently the dancing starts early in the morning and goes till late in the night on the Friday. And when I say dance I mean groups of anywhere up to 50+ people fully decked out in traditional costumes dancing with brass bands behind them down the streets of the town. All entry and exists to the town are shut off. So there are literally hundreds and hundreds of groups of dancers that have spent months preparing for it. The groups practice on random streets in town every evening, there is one group that practices outside my house, its pretty cool, but the pictures will explain better. So the festival is in 2 weeks and on the Saturday morning at around 2am people walk from Cochabamba to Quillacollo (where the festival is held) up to the mountains- its about a 12-15km walk. My host brother has comvinced me to do it and tells me that people do it to cleanse their souls- I told him mine was pretty clean thanks all the same but I could do with the exercise and I have a pair of runners here so I´ll still come along :)

Last week I started my nursing placement here and if I had to choose one word to describe it it would have to be¨different¨. Where to begin, its definately better that I´m actually a qualified nurse or I´d probably spend my days simply observing but on my first 2 days I went with some of the other nurses and doctors to schools to give flu jabs to the teachers, pretty standard stuff but really enjoyed geting back into the nursing role.
Then on the 3rd day a few of the student nurses came to get me and said that we were off to give more immunisations (you also need to remember that no-one at my new placement speaks english so I think a little- or alot gets lost in translation). Anyway on the way down the street they tell me we´re off to immunise perros and gatos and for everyone that means dogs and cats, mmm hmm yep not a standard day in the life of a nurse. So off we went banging on fences in search of cats and dogs to immunise against rabies. I tell you at the first house I had the wind put up me, there were about 5 dogs in the frontyard (if you want to call it that) which is pretty standard for this country and the other nurses and the owner were telling me to get off the street. I looked at the dog and thought- mmm looks pretty harmless to me, what I didn´t see was what looked like a spun out drug addict walking up to the house carrying a massive rock ready to throw at the dog as obviously the constant barking from the animal had completely pissed him off. Luckily the dog and me both made it inside the gates in time, to be fair the guy only had eyes for the dog so I think I was pretty safe. But that day I definately got to see parts of this city that I would never have seen otherwise, the last place I visited was well in the countryside and we had to walk over paddocks of whatever they were farming and arrived to a place that had not 1 nasty dog but 4 of them, it was a wee bit scary having a massive dog fight at your feet while you´re surrounded by cows and other sorts of farm animals, like I said its been interesting. The other days I´ve spent working with the nurses and I spend all morning weighing, measuring and taking temperatures of babies, I love it, the babies here are all cute, there is no exception and I can definitely handle cuddling babies everyday.

Time is going to quickly I can´t believe its August already, my spanish is improving, slowly slowly but luckily everyone is very patient with me. My friend Sam has the same situation as me and my Spanish teacher couldn´t believe that the 2 of travel on the weekends without knowing alot of spanish, honestly its not that hard, thats why charades was invented.
This past weekend we went back to Villa Tunari- the place where the park for rescued animals is. This time we visited the Jungle Park, we were told that it had a great big tarzan swing and both loving a little adventure we thought great, why not. When we arrived I would need to say that the entrance doesn´t do this place justice, it looks like a dive, and I guess it is a litle dodgy but still so much fun. And I just have to clarify the correct term wouldn´t be tarzan swing, I would call it a tree swing. I mean these things are attached to branche of the trees and have a piece of wood for you to sit on, again the pictures explain much better. So we went on the first one and it was fun, not too scary then there was a makeshift zipline, then we arrived at 2 more swings. The girl gave us the choice- being a bit wussy we choose the smaller one, turns out it was a double swing and we still had to do the higher one. After this we were pretty chuffed with ourselves, followed the track to a really nice river, had a little paddle and thought time to head back. At the end of the track we discover the ¨real swing¨, I´m talking 25metres high and they actually had what they called harness for this one. It was awesome-not something I´d do again after you see the branch having a proper swing of itself during the swing but it was good to get the adrenelin pumping. Unfortunately it poored rain that night and the next morning as its very tropical in that part of Bolivia so we headed back to Cochabamba where the sun never stops. We met a really fun Aussie guy at the park and met up for drinks and dinner with him and some other travellers, it was refreshing to get a dose of people our own age and I definately enjoyed some good old Aussie banter. So thats where I´m at, this week will be a short one as its the day of Bolivia on Thursday which means no work and my work are kindly giving me Friday off aswell so I can have a lond weekend to travel.