Random Music…

So I finally decided to open up the folder of music that another volunteer transferred to my pen drive…aptly named “Latin Music” for what I had asked for…and I found some oldies but goodies that I feel I need to remind you guys of. Does anyone out there remember Poe? Such classics as “Hello” and “Angry Johnny”…haha, was that like middle school or what? And I hardly believe that Ludacris’ “Shake Your Money Maker” can be classified as Latin music, but hey whatever goes, when I get the urge to practice my dance moves, now I have something to flail my lanky limbs around to. Also, there was a song in this folder called “Las Chicas Quieren Chorizo”…hmm…if you don’t know what that means I’ll leave you to look it up. Whoever’s music this is I am having some serious doubts about their taste…

With that I will leave you with my favorite profound quote from Ludacris: “…took yo momma 9 months to make ya…might as well shake what your momma gave ya…” And isn’t that quite the truth.

My War vs. The Creepy Crawlies

One of the factors that might make me move houses once my two months are up here (when you’re allowed to find other housing if you want) are the bugs. My aluminum/tin creaky crap roof is pretty lame compared to what I’ve seen other people with and it sucks because it’s so loud when it rains, when the wind blows, when random animals run across it (pigeons, cats, etc.)…plus it’s kind of stinky around my house with all the chickens running around free and the pigs next door. I could sacrifice some of my space to have a little nicer place. I guess that’s the problem with not having a hardcore site without electricity and running water…then you want more things that are like what you had in the U.S. and before you know it you’re like, hey, this place is not like 35 1st Street in Stamford…when you should be thankful for the ridiculous amount of space and privacy you have and the reliable running water.

Anyways, back to the bugs…I think the roof might be a place where they’re getting in but I’m not quite sure. All I know is that I’ve identified and classified several groups of them and I live in fear that they’re going to end up in my bed crawling all over me during my sleep. I’ve always been squeamish when it comes to bugs (aka asking people to kill them for me) but I’ve already killed so many bugs here that I can’t count. The fumigation guy did come today (they fumigate your house 3x a year) but I doubt in my case it’ll make that much of a difference.

Flies – at first these were my biggest problem because there were literally like 50 of them at any given time in my house, but once I kept the door closed and not so many got in…but enough where a few would buzz around my head and really annoy me so I started killing them (I probably killed 10 the other day); I’ve designated a special piece of corrugated cardboard that was from the packaging for my bedsheets that is my fly-killing apparatus. My fear with the flies is that they are carrying some kind of horrid disease from the farm animals and then crawling on my dishes and food. I also noticed that some of these flies actually bled when I killed them. Is that possible?
Spiders – I’ve noticed two different types…one that is light brown and a little furry looking with longer legs and bigger sized, then the baby ones that are black and one hopped onto my shirt today to my horror. Spiders always kind of gross me out but just because they can move quickly and get away from me. I use the “Speaking Italian Made Easy” book that the volunteer before me left to kill these.
Pill Bugs – these are the least offensive although the most numerous, I generally just go around stomping on any that I see and then go back and clean them up when I sweep the floor. Kind of gross but I don’t mind them all that much.
Wasps – you already know my first experience with these. I think they have a nest in a tree outside my door that kind of scares me…plus when I throw water from dish washing or whatever else out my door from my wash basin I’m afraid that they’ll attack me. I generally don’t try to kill these unless they’re in my bed obviously. Or somehow managed to get in my house and are buzzing around ominously. Then the most effective method is squashing between “Life of Pi” and “CultureShock! Bolivia” or any other two solid books will probably do.
Cricket/the MSB (massive scary bug) – these are my least favorite (enemy #1) because they appear on the walls and are quite large, definitely more than an inch in length and it puzzles me how they get in. I once again use the “Speaking Italian Made Easy” book to kill them and then hop on the book a few times for good measure. The worst part of these bugs is that they have a surprising amount of slimy guts that end up splattered all over the floor after killing them. This requires me to use cleaning spray to spray down the book and the floor after each killing to scrape up as much of the guts as possible…but no matter how thorough the cleaning is, it always leaves a bug-gut stain on the floor wherever it got splattered. I’ve killed three of these since I’ve been in my house. Grossssss. Wah Mommy.
Miscellaneous others – includes fruit fly types, ants, and itty bitty reddish spiders. Clearly these are not memorable enough to warrant their own categories but are annoying nonetheless and I would prefer to live without them.

So I think that in essence…I’ll either be desensitized to it all in two months where I’ll just accept bug killing as a part of my daily routine like eating breakfast…or I’ll move out. I’m trying not to be scared of the bugs since I don’t really have any other option but I don’t like the idea of bugs popping out at me from random places like bags and whatnot so I try to keep bags that I have zipped up (don’t want any surprises in my bookbag) and I try to shake out clothes before I put them on (apparently the result of that can be bugs shaken out onto your body as what happened with the spider today).

Thanks Mom!

For the magazines (and cute note, I´ll be sure to keep on moving on up!), dried fruit (esp. the dried berry mix) and nuts, and most of all the yummy yummy YUMMY jar of peanut butter!!!! T´was a lovely surprise to get while I was in the city last week!

Festival de San Severino

Another Tarata festival has come and gone…this one is the biggest one of the year in the town, complete with dancing, marching, bands, food and more than enough chicha. I participated in this festival as a dancer in the morenada…requiring me to wear a sparkly skimpy outfit and dance for 5 hours in the cobblestone streets in platform thigh high boots. I had long braids woven into my hair (ew gross, real hair, when I had it in my house I would look over at it and get scared because it would remind me of that horror movie where you watch the video and then the girl with the hair covering her face comes out of the TV…for some reason the name is not coming to me right now) and I felt the pain of someone French braiding my hair that I had not since a dance recital many years ago. Some other interesting things that I observed…although it’s much more acceptable to urinate in public here (especially during festivals…you always have to watch out for the wet spots in the street because during festivals a lot more of those are attributable to people rather than dogs)…I did see an interesting sight: a man peeing on the side of the road against a building…while a young infant was perched on his shoulders. And throughout our dancing through the streets I came across more than a normal amount of women’s sanitary products (pads)…now these pads were just lying in the street along the way and luckily they had not been used for the appropriate purpose as of yet, so I have two theories of what people were using them for. One was as insoles for the ridiculously uncomfortable boots that both men and women had to wear (I haven’t felt that much foot pain ever…near the end I could barely stand much less dance…and that’s coming from a person that has done pointe before)…the other theory is that they were used as shoulder pads because in the morenada the men have to wear these ridiculously heavy outfits made out of this really solid cardboard (by their weight I might even think it was some kind of light plywood). Most of the men had pieces of foam for padding on the shoulders or shawls or towels layered in order to provide some sort of comfort. I guess I will never know though…

I definitely recommend anyone that wants to come visit me to come during this time since I could see the festival being pretty fun…I enjoyed minor celebrity status while we were dancing since I was like 8 feet tall and not Bolivian…got my picture taken several times along the way and of course we were invited to a lot of chicha and beer which of course made dancing more enjoyable. My most amusing moment was probably when we were taking a break and Nelly and the other two girls in my group were talking to this guy that Nelly went to university with (I’m not quite sure if they knew each other or whatever) and then the guy’s (cute but young) friend came up to me. Here’s the gist of the dialogue but of course this was in Spanish:

Guy: How did my friend end up with you guys?Me: Oh, he has beer and we wanted a drink (sarcastically).
Guy: Oh…where are you from, blah blah.
Me: The US, here as a volunteer, etc. etc. Are you from Tarata?
Guy: No, I’m from Cochabamba…just here for the festival. It’s my birthday!
Me: Oh happy birthday, how old are you turning?
Guy: 23…
Me: Oh, you’re a baby! I’m old…25.
Guy: No you’re not.
Me: I have lots of white hairs.
Guy: I have white hairs too.
Me: So what do you do for work?
Guy: I work in business doing budgeting/planning (I didn’t totally get this part…)
Me: Oh, so for the government or for a company or what?
Guy: In the private sector for a company.
Me: What does the company make?
Guy: Sugar.
(And then…I couldn’t resist…)
Me: Oh, you must be very sweet then. (har har, slapping him on the arm)
Guy: Umm…okay. Heh?

At that point I changed the topic back to his birthday just long enough so he could run away. Clearly he did not appreciate my sense of humor. Either that or he was scared. Most likely a combination of the both. Plus I know I need to work on my humor in Spanish…I don’t think people are all that into the puns around here.

I also attended a “dance” which totally reminded me of the one we went to during Tech Week. Conti – this one’s for you, the place was pretty much all high schoolers (high school boys!) I went with Nelly, who’s actually 23, but her brother was also there (who’s probably like 15) with his friends as well. The dancing actually was decently fun, but definitely having a beer helped in the process. If you’ve never been to a Bolivian dance, one thing you should know is that people don’t dance in circles…or in random groups scattered around. Everyone lines up in two lines facing each other…and when those lines get too long then they start another two lines next to it with people facing each other. One of the other girls that was in the morenada was dancing across from me for awhile while Nelly was dancing with one of her friends…and this girl across from me was actually a good dancer…but for some reason when I looked at her all I could think of based on her style of dancing was someone riding a horse. So I attempted not to look at her…but then she kept on invading my personal space and dancing closer and closer to me so I kept on having to move back lest I would be soon riding a horse as well. Giddyup.

Blast from the Past…Gas Scheduling…

I was just cleaning up my desktop and I came across an old gas scheduling spreadsheet that was leftover. I opened it up and when I took a look at it I got an odd chill and thought, man, that was kind of a fun job to have…as much button pushing and Excel work as it was…for a person that thrives on exhibiting my efficiency at mindless tasks, I’d have to say it fit my skill set very well. Looking at all those net outs and book outs and contracts…oh man! I will go as far to say that I kind of miss it…after all, even though there were those days that I was so bored out of my mind…but then there were those exhilarating days when you had so much to do and were down to the last minute before the 12:30 pm deadline that made it exciting to be a scheduler. Who knows, I always said that I’d leave it open and if I come back in two years and I want to schedule gas (is there any demand for bilingual gas schedulers? or does gas scheduling exist in the non-profit realm?)…then by golly, I’ll schedule gas. Of course on the West that is…since high volume and fewer pipes is more my thing. Absence does make the heart grown fonder and I think that you have to not be working in a particular job to appreciate the best parts of it…like how when I left OTC I realized how much I enjoyed the camaraderie of the group (which had fueled my baking insanity). When it comes down to it I’d say that I really did enjoy scheduling considering the circumstances and whatever I said about it earlier was true…that my reasons for leaving had nothing to do with the job, after all I think it was probably the most enjoyable for me job-wise that I had in my three years.

I think it’s really hard in this world to find a career path where you use the technical product knowledge that you already know from past jobs but then build on it to be able to perform your new job successfully…more often than not (at least in banking), it seems like you hop from one company to another performing basically the same job but maybe in a little different context. More realistically, I’ve seen that the “soft skills” are the ones that are really important and it doesn’t matter what product area you’re working in…if you’re a quick learner, analytical and have decent interpersonal skills (along with being semi-competent on the computer), you’ll be fine wherever you go. After all, in most jobs they do teach you everything you need to know on the job. Or you could go down the different path of dropping everything that you knew before in terms of technical knowledge (have I used anything to do with energy or credit derivatives yet? and trust me, nobody has been knocking on my door to learn what I know about gas pipelines) and starting over again. I guess that’s another prerequisite of signing up for the Peace Corps…not only do you have to be okay with showering once a week, but you also have to be okay with feeling incompetent and like a recent college graduate with no work experience from the day you arrive at your PC staging/orientation. In that case I think it’s a good thing I prefer to be the kind of person that knows the least in a group of people that can learn from everyone around him/her rather than being the subject matter expert (not that I would consider myself that in anything but sometimes it seemed like I gave off that vibe at work when people would come to me with the most random questions that were like…umm…how should I know?). Some days I look around me and wish I had a clue what was going on (esp. after someone rambles off something in Spanish to me that I totally didn’t catch and then gives me a look and I can’t tell if it’s because they asked me a question and I’m supposed to answer or if a nod and smile is sufficient)…but other days I just sit back and enjoy the ride. After all, I’m a VOLUNTEER and half the battle is figuring out how to help people and how they want to be helped before you can do anything useful. Patience. Have another cup of coffee (with powdered milk), chill out, and we’ll figure it out mañana…

Anyways, enough of living in the past three years. I’m ready to move on and fake it until I make it around here…no, I am neither an expert on tourism nor small business consulting, but heck, I will give it a shot at keeping my wits about me and using common sense in my approach and will try to learn quickly…

English Class is Therapeutic

I guess what they say is true about English classes as secondary projects being good stress relievers. Earlier today I was ready to throw a computer monitor out a window due to the ridiculously slow internet…and then I ate like 1/3 of a pan of brownies that I made supposedly for Turkey Day potluck dinner tomorrow…and 4 oreos and 4 cremositas (tasty sandwich cookies that are half the price of oreos)…so maybe it’s just PMS. Anyways, I literally sat in the internet café scheming to delete all the games on the computer I was at like Warcraft, etc. downloads…thinking that if I deleted them all then the computer would operate at a normal pace. I did sit at a computer for literally 15 minutes and was not able to pull up a single webpage (email, news, nor facebook!). So after that I decided to give up and pay my 1 boliviano for sitting in front of the useless piece of junk. Alas…I’ll try again another day. But then after that I had English class and although only two students were there…I did manage to spend some quality time with them. The first student is actually a teacher at the place where I teach…and we went over a little English then I spoke to him about the NGO that is where most of the students in the class are students. It’s a pretty neat concept actually…students that have to work during the week so they had to drop out of school but these students are over 18 (not eligible to be enrolled in the local school) so they’re working to get their high school degrees by going to classes Thursday – Saturday. Then the other student that came actually lives in a community close to Tarata and is going to university in Coch and she’s a linguistics major…working on not only her English, but French as well and later will be studying Quechua. I managed to help her a bit with her homework that she had for school as well as teaching her a few words in Chinese at her request…now she knows “ni hao” and “zai jian” along with my name in Chinese. Haha, that’s the second request I’ve had for learning some Chinese here…if I were actually any good at Chinese I would have started a Chinese class by now. So all in all, by the time I left English class I was much calmer and didn’t want to destroy any electronic equipment so I’d say that’s pretty good therapy considering the facts.

Tomorrow is Turkey Day! Pat and I are quite excited about going into the city to get some good grub and stay overnight and watch CABLE TV. Woohoo! It’s kind of like when I would go into the city from Stamford and go over to “assume the position” at Steph’s…as much as you might try to get me to leave the apartment…a quality weekend in my opinion involves plenty of DVR’ed episodes of good shows along with a fair share of Food Network and a little MTV thrown in and of course a late breakfast of bagels with cream cheese. Man oh man, I wish I could see some episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and Ugly Betty right now though…

La Cancha…

In español it means field…as in basketball or soccer…but in Cochabamba it also is synonymous with massive open air market to buy anything and everything under the sun. It’s a must-see tourist attraction if you’re here and it puts any other open air market I’ve experienced to shame, including the one in Shanghai (at least during the daytime…at nighttime Shilin in Taipei is better, but maybe that’s because I’m partial to the food there). I’ve bought anything from fruit to furniture to accessories to fabric to cleaning supplies and yes, real hair (for the dance that I’m in I have to wear long fake braids…and when I found out the hair I was buying was real I did have the gag / I want to vomit a bit reflex) there. The experience of being in the Cancha is basically a sensory overload. I’ve been there more times than I can count since being here in Bolivia but each time I go, once I’m in the thick of it, I get completely disoriented and have no idea where I am. When I’m there with other volunteers or by myself, I tend to stay on the edge of things so I can find my way out, but when I’m with someone (aka a Bolivian) that knows where they’re going, I basically run after the person trying not to get my eye poked out by the low hanging tent poles, getting caught behind slow-moving old people carrying ridiculously heavy loads of stuff, and trying not to get too distracted by the tasty food stalls. I couldn’t tell you really where anything is located in there…you’d have to ask a Bolivian for that information, but I do know that the meat section is definitely NOT for the faint of heart. Yes, I know some of you out there had some issues with the little sardines looking at you from my freezer while we were growing up or some get squeamish with whole fish or shrimp where the eyes look at you or a full duck hanging in a window…you can forget about surviving the meat section at the Cancha. They don’t hold anything back there and your nose tells you that. There are plenty of tasty choices though, such as the slices of fresh pineapple (risky), jello or flan served in little plastic cups (risky as well), and my personal favorite is the smorgasborg of bakery delights which are probably safest followed by anything fried. I’d have to say bread here in Bolivia rivals that in Taiwan…I’m partial to the cuñapes (yucca and cheese yumminess), empanadas (when they’re fresh and soft with cheesy goodness and onions on the inside), and humitas (a delectable slightly sweet cornmeal pastry).