Sparkly Bulls

On Wednesday night after our WGM prayer meeting we went to Santa Cruz's Fair for the night. It's huge and has it's own complex just for this week alone. There are many buildings and all the streets are cobble stone. They keep the place up very nicely and the streets were far cleaner than any other street in Santa Cruz. There are booths from many other countries and then also businesses set up booths. There are restaurants and car lots, just about anything you can imagine is inside the fair. sparkly



We went to see the animals and found them very interesting......to show the bulls they put glitter all over them! We thought that was just the funniest thing that these gigantic bulls were soaked in glitter! Some of the bulls were enormous. One of heaviest weighed 1205 kilos which is 2651 pounds! It was fun. There was a baby pony that was absolutely adorable. I bought a ring that has the Bolivianita stone in it. The bolivianita is a mix between an amythyst and another kind of gem that is yellow. The two colors sort of mix together and it's very unique. The booths hire models to showcase their company or product and the models dress up formally without wearing very much clothing--very immodest. It was a late night and we still didn't see most of the fair.

Fire at Talita Cumi

On Sunday night the orphanage caught fire that Grant works at. The fire started in the storage shed but spread and one of the girls was trapped in her room and the stairs were on fire. She jumped out of her second story window which had shattered because of the fire. Fortunately she is ok and only scratched and bruised. Grant has been helping there a lot this week getting screens on the windows that broke out and putting in some new bunk beds. The fire department is close so they contained the fire before it destroyed too much. The cause of the fire is still unknown.

Ant Pop

I'm horrified right now.....there are officially too many gross disgusting creatures that live in Bolivia for me to handle. I got home from school today and got a glass out of our china cabinet and poured a little Green Apple Simba (pop) into the glass and drank some. I gave the cup to Grant he drank some--he handed it back to me and I took another drink and looked into the cup as I did so I found tons of ants swimming in the green pop!! I don't know how or why they were in a clean cup but that is part of the reason I have the heebie geebies today. Grant informed me that all the girls at the orphanage have lice. So I've been contemplating that one. Today the nurse at school told me she has been getting a lot of cases of this bug that crawls deep under your skin and it gets really infected and they lay eggs and you have to dig out the bug and it's eggs. I saw a girl come in with one under her skin on her forehead After coming back from Los Espejillos Emily had a tick on her that she said she wouldn't have noticed until she saw it move :( My students told me today about worms that like to crawl into your feet here and lay eggs. They said they are very hard to extract from your feet especially once the eggs hatch. Two days ago I went to take a shower and there was a frog and a black worm both in the shower. My skin crawls and itches all the time now. Ring worm is common here. I'm not a hypochondriac with diseases but with creatures that infect the body I'm pretty close to one.

Los Espejillos Waterfalls

Yesterday we got to visit Los Espejillos. It's an awesome park with tons of waterfalls and natural pools to play in. Mike and Aileen and Chad and Emily went with us for the day. The ride up there is not for the weak of heart. It's like being in a barrel of Monkeys (the game) and getting shaken for like an hour. The roads are incredibly bumpy and we crossed nearly 20 rivers--some were dried up because Bolivia really needs rain but others weren't. There was this river that was very wide and it was deep and a man had put sticks in the ground of the river to help direct you where you could drive safely and then he wanted to be paid.
This was the entrance clearing once you got there. It costs 50 cents a person to get in. Yesterday it was full of people because it's a holiday weekend this weekend here but other days they said it's empty.

This is Mike, Chad, Aileen and Grant climbing to make a jump off a cliff into the water. The water was impossibly deep in many different areas. One tiny pool you could jump in Mike, who is 6 foot 7 can not touch the bottom.

Here is one of the falls. It was really pretty there. We visited a similar site in Hawaii called the seven sacred pools but I think Los Espejillos has places to jump and swim.

This is Grant jumping off the cliff. He jumped twice and had a lot of fun. Emily and I stayed grounded in order to take pictures :)

This is the group of them after they just got finished jumping. All the Bolivians hooted and hollered for Aileen because no other women had jumped since we had been there.

Crossing this bridge was necessary to get up the river and to the tallest falls. It was straight out of the Indiana Jones movies. There was a board running down the middle and only bamboo sticks crossing that board and on the sides there were holes where people's feet had punched though. So you had to walk foot in front of foot just on the board in the middle if you wanted to not go through.We took our lunches and ate a picnic there. It's only accessible certain times of the year before there is too much rain. Then the river gets too big and the path too muddy. Chad and Emily got stuck once and they didn't have cell phone service and no one could get them out of the mud. Finally someone with a wench came along and pulled them out.

Break In

Even with a 12 foot fence and barb wire we were robbed on Thursday night. Here in Bolivia propane tanks are used for everything. There are cars that run by hooking up a propane tank to them. We get our hot water and our stove works from a propane tank outside our house. They are called garafas in Spanish. Thursday night someone cut a hole in our fence right behind our house and came in and walked away with everyone's garafas. We had two of them outside because we didn't know any better. Our neighbors just lost one. It isn't a good feeling. Our garafa was hooked up right beside our bedroom window so they were right outside our window while we were sleeping. So until we get a new one we can't cook or have hot water. We have an alarm system in our house and I think we might start putting that on at night.

Another funny difference I thought of this morning was the milk comes in bags and weirdly doesn't have to be refridgerated until you open the bag. I asked and no one knows why you don't have to refridgerate milk even here in our heat but you don't.

Saturday morning the missionary guys play basketball at the school so Grant is playing basketball. One of his classes he teaches at the school is a basketball class and yesterday he came home with a bloody knee and I talked to Tim, a student, and he said his leg is totally mangled too. They have been getting into some serious basketball competition but they love it.

We are both very excited about an orphanage that Grant is getting involved with called Talita Cumi. The name means Child rise up and they need some help with projects and so Grant has been helping them and plans to be there whenever he can. This past Friday the kids from Talita Cumi got a chance to go swimming at a pool that one of WGM missionaries have. Grant went to help and one of the boys who is five couldn't swim because he has ring worm and he was crying and crying so he and Grant played on their own all day. I think it's sweet and I wish I could go with him at times but I love teaching--it just doesn't give you many chances to do other things during the day.

Pictures at SCCLC

Here are a few pictures from SCCLC. I teach 6 different Spanish classes from 5th grade to 12th and I help with the drama department. The school has nearly 250 students grade prekindergarten to 12th grade. It is an outside campus so every class has a door only to outside. The grounds are kept by a sweet old man named Don Felix who never stops watering and babying his plants. The roses are incredibly beautiful right now.

This is my youngest class--5th grade. One of them is a little shy :)

Here is my classroom. It's starting to look a lot more homey with students work on the wall and I got a rug. It was just a plain white room completely empty when I got to it.

Indiana vs. Santa Cruz

Lately the conversation has been coming up a lot about the differences from living in Indiana and living in Santa Cruz. So I thought I would blog and share some of the differences.

One difference that I noticed right away is the seasons are switched. I have started to think about it, at Christmas we are going to be melting and the thought of putting up a Christmas tree with shorts and a tank top on.

I've really never once thought that Smoky could be a part of the forecast but it's true. The forecast for today for Santa Cruz is 95 degrees and Smoky. There are many many sugar cane fields here and they burn them and smoke just covers the sky. This morning it was hazy and dark and it wasn't cloudy at all--all smoke.

No where in Bolivia can you flush toilet paper in the toilets so there are little trash cans beside the toilets. That's all I'll elaborate on that but I miss Indiana's toilets.

The traffic lights here have red, yellow and green. But yellow is used to warn you when the light is going to turn green. So everyone starts going on yellow instead of green. Strange.

Every house, building or establishment has a fence with glass and barbwire. Also many residences have guards. At the grocery there are guards with guns to protect the store.

Here the police are to serve the people and the army serves the President. This means often they are not on the same team and they fight each other at times.

Instead of snow days being built into the school schedule they have strike days built in and they are always used up by the city going on strike.

Lunch is the largest meal of the day and soup is almost always served. Restaurants don't open until 7 at night and they don't get busy until 9 even on week nights.

Driving is for the brave hearted and aggressive only.

It gets dark about 6:30 pm here and it won't change or get any later as it gets to be summer.

Well that is all I've got right now. I think that some things are already so common place that I don't think about them anymore.

Guaracal

I tried to put the pictures after the blog and explanation of the day but on this round technology wins because I can't get it. So if you want know more about the pictures read the blog under all the pics. The kids were coloring on the suitcases that we had brought the T-shirts in for them to paint. Later they found that the truck made an even better surface so they stood and colored on the truck.

Here is the clinic that Rick set up for the day. He had a lot of antibiotics and vitamins etc to give to the people to help with whatever was bothering them.

Here Grant is working hard at pounding the bricks level. We mixed all the cement by hand on the ground.

Here are the houses we were helping to build. They are located at the base of the Andes Mountains--very beautiful scenery.

This past Saturday we went to a village called Guaracal. Guaracal is village in rural Bolivia, about 1 1/2 hours from Santa Cruz. During the flooding earlier this year all 12 families in this village lost EVERYTHING. WGM constituents responded to the need, and much money has been given. Twenty-four of us spent a day there to help with the construction of 12 new homes (all of them already started). Some of the group did kid ministry and painted shirts with the kids from the village (there were a lot of them around 60 I think). Grant and I both did construction work and trust me laying bricks is not as easy as it looks.

To get to Guaracal you have to have a 4x4 vehicle because you do a bit of off-roading. You cross rivers which was fun because I've never driven a vehicle through a river before. The homes that we were building were to replace the homes that were washed down the river in the flood. The people were sleeping under tiny tarps with all their belongings under the tarps with them. The government had given out tents but took them back after a few months leaving the people stranded. We gave out coloring pictures to the kids and there was no place anywhere for them to color. They don't own the first table or chair. They have a community cooking pot over a fire and they sit on logs. There are no toilets, showers or running water. We were getting attacked by this annoying little bug they call a mariwee. They just crawled all over the children and they didn't seem to mind anymore. I helped a little girl color after the guys were cleaning up getting ready to go home and she asked me if I was an art teacher. :) I laughed and said no I don't know much about art. We had a medical clinic as well going with a couple from our group being nurses--it was a neat way to serve the village.

Bolivian fast food

The rest of the week I was confused on what day it was since we had a day off on Tuesday and it felt like a Saturday. On Wednesday night Grant and I picked up Bolivian's equivalent to fast food. It's called Nescar, it's a chicken place that is just down the road from our house about a mile. It's a completely open-air restaurant and you go up to the counter put your order in and the options are very limited you can choose a hamburger, a economic meal (which costs 75 cents) or 1/4 chicken meal. All the meals come with rice and french fries and plantains. We ordered the 1/4 chicken. You wait in line and they make your to go bags in front of you. The food if very good and it cost us about 3 dollars. Fast food from the states does not do well here. They have Subway and Burger King and that is it. Only two restaurants in a city of 1.5 million. They had a Mcdonalds but it closed down because it was too expensive. You can buy a quarter pounder, fries and a drink for 3 and 1/2 dollars or you can go to one of the hundreds of chicken places just like Nescar and get 1/4 chicken a huge amount of fries, rice and platanos for 1 and 1/2 dollars or 75 cents if you don't want a quite as much. So the people here just generally choose Bolivian fast food.

Now that we have a truck when you leave the compound you have to open the front gate and let the vehicle drive through then you shut the gate. The first time I drove with Grant I got out and opened the gate. He drove through and then I worked on closing the gate and getting it back locked again. The second the dead bolt locked I looked up and realized I had locked myself inside the compound and Grant was sitting on the other side of the locked gate. Wow that was not my brightest moment but it sure got some good laughs here on our compound.