I came, I saw, I drank wine.
Apparently trainees are not allowed to get off a plane here without a group of people cheering them through the gate. As we landed in Tarija most of the current Tarija PCVs were there to greet us. It was a really nice welcome. Tarija is an awesome city, it´s small, it´s clean, it´s safe and it´s the heart of Bolivia´s wine industry (which isn´t all that extensive, but still, it´s Grapelandia!) After a long day of orientation where I got to meet my counterparts for the first time (I have 2, lucky me) we traveled by bus to Bermejo. As it got dark and started to rain the bus seemed to stop every 20 minutes, the 4 hour trip took about 6 hours, but it was pretty cool because it was pitch black but there was a ton of lightning and it gave the trip a really surreal feeling, as if it wasn´t surreal enough to begin with. Also, they started to show the ¨Terminator¨but it cut out half way through, just when I was getting really invested. Anyway, we got to Bermejo around 10pm crashed at a hostel because apparently the only transportation to my site is the one trufi that leaves at 5 in the morning, still haven´t confirmed if there is a later trufi, but everyone I asked said that was the only one, go figure. So almost all the teachers who work at the school, including one of my counterparts in my site have to wake up at 4am everyday to get the 5am trufi.
So we get to the school around 6, I am introduced around to the teachers and then introduced to some community leaders and then I crossed a small river (no bridge, perhaps that can be a secondary project) to the health post where I stayed in the 3 bed room where patients stay when they have patients (nice digs!) It´s a small town and it´s super campo (the country) with only 500 people but I don´t know where they all were. We also saw the room where I will live, it´s probably one of the nicest houses in town, the only one I saw with 2 stories. There is basically one main road where you have everything you could want, the school, the health post, the 2 stores, the one restaurant that sometimes serves food. I was really happy when I convinced Doña Santusa to let me eat lunch at her fine establishment each day of my site visit. She´s a damn good cook and even accomodated the vegetarian thing. Plus we got to watch ridiculous telenovelas during lunch and her family is super friendly.
So I really didn´t know what to do with myself during the day, I didn´t really know anyone so the following day I decided to go to the school and observe a class. The kids are great but they are crazy about learning English. I wasn´t trained for that! However, I did teach 2 English classes during my site visit and they went over pretty well. When I told Aaron (the volunteer in the next town over) he joked that I already had more work than most PC volunteers. I have to say the one thing I love about my site is how much potential it has. Because it´s so small and there is basically nothing there my mind was just racing with possibilities. The health post has a great room where I could have self-esteem, yoga and nutrition classes for the kids in the afternoon. Oh yeah, about the education system here, it is a lot to get used to. The kids are in school from 7:30am-12:00pm, in that time they have breakfast, lunch and 2 recesses. The style of teaching focuses on copying from the board, dictation and memorization. It is so hard to get kids to participate and answer questions, even ones like ¨What is your name?¨ But the kids really want to learn and I have a lot of material on non-formal education and plan on making my classes as interactive as possible. There is also a great spot for a school garden which is my major focus, I will have to start with composting because the rainy season just ended and it doesn´t make sense to plant now.
There is also a women´s group and they were supposed to have their meeting on Thursday but instead my counterpart said we were going to Bermejo to meet with the Mayor (alcalde.) So me and about half the town all piled into this truck and went to Bermejo. Besides the one micro that passes through my town 3 times a day, trucks are the major form of transport. Apparently during the sugar cane harvest there are tons of trucks going to Bermejo so transportation won´t be as big of an issue then. But just thinking about having to buy a bed and then somehow get it to my site along with all my other stuff is really overwhelming. Luckily the current Tarija
volunteers are incredibly nice and have already offered their help. I really have some of the best people in my region, which is important because it´s going to get lonely out in the super campo. I mean, I´m not going to lie, that first day was hard, no one knew me and I didn´t know anyone. But by the end of my visit I was feeling really good about everything. Francisca, one of the teachers who works in my site but lives in Aaron´s has already invited me to her house. On the way back from the city (it turned out the town was getting money from the prefecto, that´s like regional governor I believe, to invest in their town´s agriculture, which is sugar cane, but I´m wondering if I can put any of that money towards some of the ag projects I´ll be working on, this is a run on thought, sorry) we were riding in the micro with all the women and kids and this little girl came over and sat on my lap. When I got to my stop at the health post she had fallen asleep and I was like, uh, who´s is this? The next day I saw her at school and she kept calling me tía, which means aunt, it was just so fricken cute. Kids are definitely the key to integrating here.
Oh, I´m already collaborating with Peter, the Natural Resources volunteer from my group to coordinate some kind of watershed management for my town because apparently when it rains a lot the water cuts out, go figure. Yeah, I didn´t shower the entire time I was there and it was awesome. No worries, the hostel in Tarija has an awesome hot shower and I will probably hit that up like once a month (with bucket showers to supplement of course.)
Other Tarija highlights include: a trip to Max Ronald´s, a late night hamburger stand featuring Ronald McDonald´s evil Bolivian cousin; an amazing lunch buffet at a hotel overlooking the city; playing poker in the hotel with matchsticks, clove cigarettes, pieces of dove chocolate and a glass of wine as the ¨chips¨ and just hanging out with my Tarija crew, exchanging stories about our sites.
In other news I passed all my exams and wrote a commitment statement so I think I be allowed to swear in as an official PCV in just a few short days. There´s a postal workers strike here so I haven´t been able to recieve or send any mail. Another day, another strike, this is Bolivia afterall. Speaking of mail, my new address is posted on the side of this blog. Please send me things so that I may eventually recieve them. And speaking of social unrest, keep an eye out for news about the upcoming autonomy vote, happening just a week and a half after we go to our sites...these are some exciting times to be in Bolivia!
Apparently trainees are not allowed to get off a plane here without a group of people cheering them through the gate. As we landed in Tarija most of the current Tarija PCVs were there to greet us. It was a really nice welcome. Tarija is an awesome city, it´s small, it´s clean, it´s safe and it´s the heart of Bolivia´s wine industry (which isn´t all that extensive, but still, it´s Grapelandia!) After a long day of orientation where I got to meet my counterparts for the first time (I have 2, lucky me) we traveled by bus to Bermejo. As it got dark and started to rain the bus seemed to stop every 20 minutes, the 4 hour trip took about 6 hours, but it was pretty cool because it was pitch black but there was a ton of lightning and it gave the trip a really surreal feeling, as if it wasn´t surreal enough to begin with. Also, they started to show the ¨Terminator¨but it cut out half way through, just when I was getting really invested. Anyway, we got to Bermejo around 10pm crashed at a hostel because apparently the only transportation to my site is the one trufi that leaves at 5 in the morning, still haven´t confirmed if there is a later trufi, but everyone I asked said that was the only one, go figure. So almost all the teachers who work at the school, including one of my counterparts in my site have to wake up at 4am everyday to get the 5am trufi.
So we get to the school around 6, I am introduced around to the teachers and then introduced to some community leaders and then I crossed a small river (no bridge, perhaps that can be a secondary project) to the health post where I stayed in the 3 bed room where patients stay when they have patients (nice digs!) It´s a small town and it´s super campo (the country) with only 500 people but I don´t know where they all were. We also saw the room where I will live, it´s probably one of the nicest houses in town, the only one I saw with 2 stories. There is basically one main road where you have everything you could want, the school, the health post, the 2 stores, the one restaurant that sometimes serves food. I was really happy when I convinced Doña Santusa to let me eat lunch at her fine establishment each day of my site visit. She´s a damn good cook and even accomodated the vegetarian thing. Plus we got to watch ridiculous telenovelas during lunch and her family is super friendly.
So I really didn´t know what to do with myself during the day, I didn´t really know anyone so the following day I decided to go to the school and observe a class. The kids are great but they are crazy about learning English. I wasn´t trained for that! However, I did teach 2 English classes during my site visit and they went over pretty well. When I told Aaron (the volunteer in the next town over) he joked that I already had more work than most PC volunteers. I have to say the one thing I love about my site is how much potential it has. Because it´s so small and there is basically nothing there my mind was just racing with possibilities. The health post has a great room where I could have self-esteem, yoga and nutrition classes for the kids in the afternoon. Oh yeah, about the education system here, it is a lot to get used to. The kids are in school from 7:30am-12:00pm, in that time they have breakfast, lunch and 2 recesses. The style of teaching focuses on copying from the board, dictation and memorization. It is so hard to get kids to participate and answer questions, even ones like ¨What is your name?¨ But the kids really want to learn and I have a lot of material on non-formal education and plan on making my classes as interactive as possible. There is also a great spot for a school garden which is my major focus, I will have to start with composting because the rainy season just ended and it doesn´t make sense to plant now.There is also a women´s group and they were supposed to have their meeting on Thursday but instead my counterpart said we were going to Bermejo to meet with the Mayor (alcalde.) So me and about half the town all piled into this truck and went to Bermejo. Besides the one micro that passes through my town 3 times a day, trucks are the major form of transport. Apparently during the sugar cane harvest there are tons of trucks going to Bermejo so transportation won´t be as big of an issue then. But just thinking about having to buy a bed and then somehow get it to my site along with all my other stuff is really overwhelming. Luckily the current Tarija
volunteers are incredibly nice and have already offered their help. I really have some of the best people in my region, which is important because it´s going to get lonely out in the super campo. I mean, I´m not going to lie, that first day was hard, no one knew me and I didn´t know anyone. But by the end of my visit I was feeling really good about everything. Francisca, one of the teachers who works in my site but lives in Aaron´s has already invited me to her house. On the way back from the city (it turned out the town was getting money from the prefecto, that´s like regional governor I believe, to invest in their town´s agriculture, which is sugar cane, but I´m wondering if I can put any of that money towards some of the ag projects I´ll be working on, this is a run on thought, sorry) we were riding in the micro with all the women and kids and this little girl came over and sat on my lap. When I got to my stop at the health post she had fallen asleep and I was like, uh, who´s is this? The next day I saw her at school and she kept calling me tía, which means aunt, it was just so fricken cute. Kids are definitely the key to integrating here.Oh, I´m already collaborating with Peter, the Natural Resources volunteer from my group to coordinate some kind of watershed management for my town because apparently when it rains a lot the water cuts out, go figure. Yeah, I didn´t shower the entire time I was there and it was awesome. No worries, the hostel in Tarija has an awesome hot shower and I will probably hit that up like once a month (with bucket showers to supplement of course.)
Other Tarija highlights include: a trip to Max Ronald´s, a late night hamburger stand featuring Ronald McDonald´s evil Bolivian cousin; an amazing lunch buffet at a hotel overlooking the city; playing poker in the hotel with matchsticks, clove cigarettes, pieces of dove chocolate and a glass of wine as the ¨chips¨ and just hanging out with my Tarija crew, exchanging stories about our sites.
In other news I passed all my exams and wrote a commitment statement so I think I be allowed to swear in as an official PCV in just a few short days. There´s a postal workers strike here so I haven´t been able to recieve or send any mail. Another day, another strike, this is Bolivia afterall. Speaking of mail, my new address is posted on the side of this blog. Please send me things so that I may eventually recieve them. And speaking of social unrest, keep an eye out for news about the upcoming autonomy vote, happening just a week and a half after we go to our sites...these are some exciting times to be in Bolivia!
No comments:
Post a Comment