Showers don´t just grow on trees, you know

It´s really hard to believe that it´s been little more than a week since I left, it feels like everything I´ve ever known is so far away and I´ve been gone for a long, long time. We came to Bolivia at a very interesting time, because it´s Carnival and what Bolivians love to do more than anything is throw water balloons and shoot their super soakers, especially at us gringos. It´s quite the bienvenido a Bolivia. The first time we walked outside the hotel in Cochabamba we realized that we were prime targets for the festivities. It´s awesome when like 5 little kids all run after you with water balloons or super soakers, it´s like all right man, free shower!

Cochabamba is a really nice city actually with pretty decent restaurants. We got a great welcome from some of the PCVs in Bolivia and they took us out the first couple of nights for dinner. Even though Coch is at a lower altitude (like around 8,000 ft or something) and we are all in our 20s the volunteers would get winded going up 2 flights of stairs, it was pretty amusing actually. Everyone is pretty paranoid about getting sick, but it´s going to happen so there´s really no use getting worked up about it. One of our PCMedicalOfficer, aka Dr. Death loves to talk about all the exotic diseases we could acquire, ¨brain worm¨is definitely one of his favorites, not to mention chagas (beware the vinchuca!) Stay away from the chicha (homebrew alcohol made from corn,) but the chicarón (slow cooked pork dish) is fine. We have a huge medical manual (along with a ton of other handbooks that they´ve given us, I personally plan on making furniture with mine) and that is great bed time reading. I have a cough and a cold and I was pretty sure it was malaria or something horrible, but no it´s just a cough and a cold. Our med kit is stocked with everything we could ever want. I can´t wait to injure myself so I could use some of it. Although there is no vicks vap-o-rub and the other night I was lying in my mosquito net encased bed and acting like such a baby with this cough, like I just want my mom to rub so vicks on my chest and tuck me in. But I´m over it. My host mother Doña Juana is awesome and she is keeping me well fed at all hours of the day, if I leave she wants to know where I´m going and when I´ll be back, she´s like my very own Bolivian grandma. There are tons of people coming and going in the house, I´m still not sure who exactly lives there and who doesn´t because she has 7 kids and 9 grandkids. The 8 year old Adriana is adorable but man does she wear me out. We went to the market where her mom sells flowers and I picked up some pink (why is it pink?) toilet paper and soap. Toilet paper is definitely one of those luxury items here, much like flush toilets and showers. At my house we have a flush toilet (remember it´s Latin America so the TP goes in the trash not the toilet!) and an electric shower but in my site it will probably be a little different. I finally took a shower today and it actually got hot and it made me feel so much better. A little trick with the electric shower, if you turn off the light in the bathroom the water gets even hotter, nice. The thing is we have to give our family 2bs for every shower we take and when you make what we make that´s actually pretty steep. ($1=7.5bs)

The houses where we live now are all really different. Some are huge with modern bathrooms, some just have latrines and 3 rooms for the whole family. All the houses I´ve seen (mine and other PCVs) have this element of being inside and outside at the same time, it´s really interesting. There are animals everywhere. Dogs are a huge problem in Bolivia, I won´t get into it right now but I´m sure it will come up again. It´s the rainy season here and so the streets are really muddy and hard to walk on, but we manage. The other night it was raining all night long and the sound of that on the roof was really comforting and I also woke up to this symphony of cats, dogs, cows and birds. It was so amusing, like they were all trying to talk to each other in concert.

Okay, so food. First of all the potato is huge here. They have potatoes with every meal pretty much. One of the funniest things so far was lunch the other day at the training center (there is always soup with lunch) so we open up the lid to the pot and there are french fries floating in the soup! It was like mushroom soup with french fries, one of the tastier soups I´ve had here, definitely bringing that recipe back home. They also love their carbs. It´s typical to have rice, potatoes and pasta all in the same meal. For the AG volunteers a big part of our project is incorporating vegetables into the Bolivian diet. Our host families know to give us vegetables and so far I haven´t had to actually masticate any meat and I think that´s what being vegetarian in Bolivian will entail. Okay, I have a lot more to say about the training center and our projects and all that but my fellow volunteers are heading back and we travel in packs so I must go. I hope this was 3bs well spent. Talk to you soon!