Bolivia - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

                I can’t believe I only have three weeks left in Bolivia! I already have every weekend planned out until I go home (and every weekend at home planned out until I head to Stanford!). I’m excited to go back, but I will also definitely miss people and certain aspects of the culture here. As I get ready to head back to the US, I have been thinking about the things that I’m looking forward to and the things that I could do without. So, here’s my condensed list:

Bolivia – The Good:

A couple of weeks ago Pope Francis came to Bolivia, and I was able to see him and attend a mass that he presided at! Some of my fellow volunteers and I camped out for almost 24 hours before the mass to try to get good spots (which kind of worked, and we were interviewed 8 times along the way!). Anyway, the pope’s homily sums up what I think is one of the best aspects of Bolivia. He says that it has become more common in our world to discard “all those who are ‘unproductive,’ unsuitable, or unworthy, since clearly those people don’t ‘add up’.” Many Americans, myself included, are often times so focused on productivity that they forget to make time for people, to stop and ask someone that looks down how they are doing, and really want an honest answer. In contrast, in Bolivia, it is not uncommon for an event to start two or three hours late, but this is partly because people and conversations are emphasized much more than productivity and efficiency. Pope Francis also said in his homily that “The greatest wealth of a society is measured by the lives of its people.” Most Bolivians understand and live out this statement much more fully than most Americans. Bolivia has taught me so much about the worth of everyone and focusing more on people, and this is something that I want to remember and try to live out as I go back to the US.  

Camping out for the pope!
(after getting kicked out the first time, before getting kicked out the second time)

I pulled a Zacchaeus and climbed a tree, but luckily we got in after this,
 so I could see the pope without having to be in a tree

Oh hey there Papa Francisco!

Bolivia – The Bad:

My time here in Bolivia has made me so grateful to have had the opportunity for the education that I have received. I mostly help the older girls with homework, and many times they have “investigaciones,” or research, where they need to use the internet to look up something to complete their homework. However, although this is good practice to get them acclimated with computers, the extent of the research is either to copy and paste an article to print out (usually so they can then copy it in their notebooks later) or to print out large quantities of pictures, many times representations of different holidays, which have to be big and use excessive amounts of ink and paper so that they can paste them in their big notebooks, or archivadores. Because of the way the education system works, the most original writing that the girls ever have to do (at least through high school that I have seen) is a couple of sentences on short-answer questions. During my first couple of months here, when I was helping the girls write an “essay” and saw them just copy and paste sections of different essays they found on the internet to create “their own” essay, I thought they were cheating and would get in trouble. But I have realized since then that this is how the education in Bolivia (or at least in Montero works), and there isn’t any sort of copyright law. I was definitely never grateful for this in school, but I can honestly say I’m thankful for all of the essays and copyright policies in school, because it helped me learn so much and be able to form original and educated thoughts and ideas based on research, which is much harder for the girls because they have no practice. This is one of the things that we were warned about during orientation that we would get frustrated with, because it’s not possible for a few American (and German) volunteers to come to Bolivia and change the whole education system, even if it were a good idea to do it.

Bolivia – The Ugly:

Another warning we received during orientation was that every female volunteer that has gone to Bolivia has been sexually harassed in some way because of how dominant males are in society (aka machismo). Of course we were no exception, mostly through excessive amounts of catcalling while we were walking down the street throughout the year, but there were also times when the men were more inappropriate. Although we are by no means perfect in this regard in the U.S., women definitely have more respect there than they do here, which I am looking forward to returning to.

Obviously there are multiple good and bad aspects of both cultures, but I chose to highlight these three because they affected me a lot in my time here. I am so thankful to have been able to fully experience Bolivian culture by calling it my home for a year, and I’m sure there are many aspects of life here that I won’t fully appreciate until I have returned to the US and realized how different things are. 

PS. Because your 15^th birthday is considered your “coming-of-age” in Latin America, this past weekend we took all of the girls that turned 15 this year on a trip to Samaipata, a nearby town in the mountains with pre-Incan ruins and really pretty waterfalls! The girls had a lot of fun, even though we had to walk for an hour-and-a-half up the mountain in the drizzling rain with our luggage to get there because heavy rainstorms had washed out part of the road earlier in the week. But once we got there it was awesome! That's all for now. Hasta luego!

Walking up the mountain past the road block

See that tiny gray blob on the rock at the top of the waterfall?
That's me!

The girls with their birthday cake!

Service

A few weeks ago, I went with a couple of the older girls and one of the older workers in the hogar to go pick up milk from another dairy farm/orphanage about 45 minutes away. On the way there, we stopped to drop off some extra clothes donations to one of the poorer neighborhoods close by. And when I say drop off, I literally mean drop off the truck. The worker told us that in order to avoid fights, we should drop the clothes in small piles on the street and in the grass because as soon as we pulled up, people started swarming towards the truck. Although I had heard some terrible stories about the backgrounds of the girls in the hogar, this situation allowed me to clearly see the poverty faced by much of Bolivia, being the poorest South American country. And while the girls face a lot of psychological problems in the hogar because of their backgrounds, at least they always have food, clothes, and are educated. I had heard about very impoverished parents dropping off their children at the hogar to give them a better chance at life, and watching this situation at least began to show me why.

                During holidays like Christmas (and more recently, Día del Niño, or Children’s Day) we received so many visitors and donations to the hogar that we literally didn’t know what to do with them because there were multiple groups here at once or they came to bring us food right before we were about to eat dinner. On Día del Niño, the girls got so much candy, cookies, doughnuts, etc. that I wasn’t sure how they didn’t get sick. Also, there is a sweet bread here called paneton that is popular during Christmas, and we received so many paneton donations during Christmas that they told one of the groups to bring their paneton back in May. So they recently came with a giant truckload, and in addition to during Christmas, we also ate paneton for breakfast, dinner, and snack for multiple weeks in May. Although many people think of volunteering or donating to the hogar, few think about serving within their own communities. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. Every year during college I participated in an Alternative Break, which were great experiences because they allowed me to travel to a new city to go do service for a week during my spring break or part of my winter break. However, during the school year I didn’t make time for much service aside from my service learning classes or required service hours for my Christian or band sorority.   

                I am so glad that I have had the opportunity to come here to Bolivia to volunteer, to learn a new culture, improve my Spanish language skills, and interact with people so different from me. However, I hope that when I go back to the US and start grad school, I am able to make time for regular service in my community, because this is just as important if not more important. Not everyone is called to take a whole year of their life just to volunteer, but everyone can spend at least a little time every month giving back to their community, whether that’s through something formal like tutoring or volunteering at a nursing home or things as simple as raking a neighbor’s lawn.

The University girls after their dance on Children's Day

Playing a game

The staff performed an hogar version of Cinderella for Children's Day

Their piñatas here have flour in them and so are really messy!

We have three new puppies in the hogar and decided to give them beanies on a cold day

                On a separate note, I was so blessed to be able to see my sister a third time before she left South America to head back home. The first time I visited her in Ecuador with my parents, the second time she came to visit me in the hogar, and the third time we met in the middle: MACHU PICCHU! We decided to do the 4-day Salkantay trek to get there, which involved walking 64 km (about 40 miles), climbing 800 meters (over 2,600 feet) to get to the Salkantay Pass at 4650 meters (15,255 feet) and then descending 2650 meters (about 8,700 feet) to get to the closest town to Machu Picchu. It was definitely a challenging hike, especially since I am not as physically fit here in Bolivia as I was in the US, but I was so glad that we trekked to get there because I felt so much more accomplished when we arrived, and met a lot of cool people along the way too! Then on the way back from Machu Picchu, we stopped in Puno, Copacabana, and La Paz before flying back to Santa Cruz. In Puno we saw the floating reed islands, which are constructed by the Uros people, whose communities of 20-40 people live on each of the more than 80 islands on Lake Titicaca! Then in La Paz we biked down the Death Road, which is a road in the mountains that used to be the only route to northern Bolivia and so named because of the amount of car accidents that happened when cars went off the side of the road down the cliffs. There is a new road, but it was under construction, so we had to drive back up the road after we were finished biking, which I thought was much scarier than biking down! But we are now safely back at the hogar, and I only have about two months left here, which is crazy! Stay tuned in my next post (which will hopefully be more timely) for info on the Pope’s visit to Bolivia at the beginning of July! :D 

My sister and I at the Salkantay Pass

MACHU PICCHU!

That terrified look on her face is real

Community Life (Feliz Pascua!)

Throughout the whole SLM discernment process, including the application, phone interview, discernment weekend, and three-week orientation, the importance of community was stressed over and over again. I distinctly remember being asked during my phone interview my previous experiences with community life, and as I had never had a bad roommate situation during my time at Vanderbilt or my study abroad experience in Australia, my response was that community was great and helps to build you up. To this response, I was told by the director that community can also be and was one of the hardest things about his time as an SLM. I can now say after living for 8-and-a-half months inside the hogar where I pretty much exclusively interact with the same volunteers, staff, religious sisters, and girls day after day that I agree with him. However, although the negative aspects of community have been the most challenging thing about my time here, the positives have also made it the most rewarding.

                Living in community here is pretty much like living in a huge family, and if you think that there are people that don’t get along in your family (however big or small), think about how many different personalities there are with potentials to clash with 130 people! However, one thing I have noticed about the girls is in general the amount of solidarity they show for one another when they really need it, especially because all of them come from some sort of broken family background. For example, last week one of the girls’ moms came to visit her, and I was walking past the door where she was crying just after her mom left. I wasn’t sure if something specific was wrong, and I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, but she didn’t, so I just gave her a hug. We were standing there for a while, and three or four girls walked by and asked her what was wrong. When she didn’t respond, they didn’t just give up and go about their business, but stayed and started joking around trying to make her smile and then afterwards she started talking a little bit about her family.

                Another example of positive community within the hogar was during the feast day of Saint Joseph (or San José) a few weeks ago. All of the girls’ dormitories have different names here, and the dormitory of oldest girls is San José. So, to celebrate the feast day of the patron saint of their dorm, we took the older girls to a nearby resort for the afternoon, where there was a nice restaurant, pools, a sauna, and a lake with a couple of canoes! As part of the festivities, each girl was randomly assigned another girl to make a card for, and these cards were exchanged before eating lunch so the girls could show each other how much they mean to them. Of course, some of the girls complained about having to do them, but others put so much time and effort into these cards and were so heartfelt when giving them out.

Two of the girls exchanging cards

They wanted to take lots of pictures by the pool!

We found a really friendly baby deer (I think)

I accompanied some of the girls to dance and recite
poetry for their Father's Day celebration at school!

                I have seen examples of this sense of importance of community not just in the hogar, but in Montero in general. I would say that many people in the US think that your religion should be kept to yourself or at least in your church, but here the churches want to get the whole community involved. For example, during Lent, every Friday there was a Via Cruces, or Way of the Cross, which is very different from the Stations of the Cross that we do in the US. Instead of just staying inside the churches, everyone walked around Montero after Friday evening mass and stopped to pray at different homes and businesses that had prepared a station. This led up to Good Friday, when there was also a dramatization of the stations put on in the back of a flatbed truck that drove in front of us to all of the stations. It was really cool to see that whole community get involved, and I would say that we pretty much always grew in numbers as we progressed and people saw us passing!

The Good Friday Via Cruces

                I was also so blessed to have a member of my family community (my wonderful sister!) come visit the hogar during Holy Week. It was awesome to have her here to see and participate in my community. Just like our relationship, where we often have our disagreements but are always there for each other when we need it, community in general can cause a lot of problems, but can also be so rewarding and build you up when you really need it, which I have experienced myself and seen among the girls. I hope all of your communities had a blessed Easter Sunday and continue to have a blessed Easter season! J  

Welcome Home, Parte Dos

Well I’m officially back from my whirlwind week of vacation travelling around Bolivia and Ecuador with my family! It was so good to be reunited again after six months, and I had a lot of fun showing my parents where I had been working for the past half year and all of the girls that I work with. Although they were only able to make it to the hogar for a couple of short days, they definitely made the most of it as they read Spanish books that they couldn’t really understand to the girls, danced with the girls and then each other after some prompting, utilized their drawing and coloring skills (limited as it may be for my dad :D), participated in a 2-hour stations of the cross around Montero, and even took mototaxis when we went to take our goddaughter out for salteñas! After six months of working in the hogar with only a few days off, I have to admit that I was definitely ready for a vacation, but just seeing my parents interact with the girls reminded me why I was here and that although the girls can be difficult at times, they are also really sweet and definitely worth it!

Those beautiful drawing skills being put to use :P

My parents with their goddaughter Mayra

We ran into the neighborhood sloth on our way to salteñas!  

                After leaving the hogar, we headed to La Paz and Copacabana, Bolivia. In case you’re curious, the Copacabana in Bolivia was actually the original Copacabana, where a shrine to the Virgin Mary was built. Travelers headed to Brazil stopped at Copacabana and prayed to Our Lady of Copacabana for a safe passage to Brazil, and when they arrived safely, they christened the beach with the same name as well. Copcabana, Bolivia is located on Lake Titicaca, one of the highest navigable lakes in the world, and close to Isla del Sol, a beautiful and isolated island with some Inca ruins. The town, the island, the cathedral were all beautiful, and we even did a second stations of the cross (with plenty of stops, we’d like to say mostly due to the 12,000 feet altitude!) up a mountain next to Copacabana before heading back to La Paz for an afternoon and then onto Ecuador the next morning!

On Isla del Sol

The view of Copacabana after finishing the Stations of the Cross

                Although Quito was beautiful, surrounded by 80% active volcanos and with probably about a dozen gorgeous churches in the few blocks of their historic center, what struck me most about the trip (aside from being together with my family again of course!) was the overwhelming hospitality that we received by everyone there, especially the friends of my sister’s host parents that owned the apartment which we stayed in. Because I spend the large majority of my time in the Hogar, I don’t get the chance to interact with too many Bolivians besides the girls, the madres, and the staff, but meeting my sister’s host family and staying in the apartment of their friends really continued to show me the extent of South American culture and hospitality that I had experienced in Peru during my mission trip last year and in Bolivia this year.  

Reunited at last!

                Throughout the whole trip, it was so nice to have good food, hot showers, (a little) time to relax, and even laundry machines in Ecuador! I was kind of worried at first that coming back to the hogar would be difficult, but it actually wasn’t. Yes I will miss my family and all of the conveniences mentioned above, but coming back and seeing how excited the girls were to see me (even though some of that excitement was because I could open the library and help them with their homework again), did make me feel like I was coming home. This is where I’m supposed to be right now, and although the vacation and seeing my family was wonderful, I’m glad to be back at the hogar too.

PS. I promised a description of carnival in my last blog post, so I’m just going to post a couple of pictures and say that carnival here is crazy! We had a party at the hogar on Saturday, where each dorm dressed up as a different theme (with the staff theme being wonder women (and men!). Then we went outside of the hogar on Monday of carnival and returned with anything from mud to paint to oil on ourselves (which is very difficult to get out of your hair!). It was a lot of fun!  

Our staff wonder women costumes!

The winning dorm in their Egyptian costumes

After going outside on Monday

La Parte que Falta

The last two weeks of summer here (which was also the last two weeks of January), we had a type of summer school for the younger girls in the morning. As the librarian, my job was (obviously) to work on reading with them. Before coming here, it had been a while since I had read children’s stories, and especially reading so much with the younger girls these past couple of weeks, I have realized that some of them are actually really well-written and profound. One of my favorites that I recently read was a Shel Silverstein book called “La Parte Que Falta y La O Grande,” or, in English, “The Missing Piece Meets the Big O”. For those of you not as well-versed in children’s literature as I now am, I’ll give you a brief synopsis or I would recommend that you just read the whole book here because it’s really short, has pictures, and I’m not nearly as good of a writer as Shel Silverstein. But for those of you who just want to hear my synopsis, basically there is a little piece shaped like a pie that wants to go somewhere, so it is looking for a circle with a pie-shaped piece missing so that they can join together and be able to roll. But it can’t find a shape the right size and shape that will help it to roll. After a long time, one comes along that fits perfectly, but then the missing piece grows so that it doesn’t fit anymore, and it gets left alone again. Then, one day, the big O shows up, and the missing piece wonders if it would fit in the Big O so they could roll together. The Big O says it is not missing a piece, but maybe the missing piece can roll by itself. The missing piece replies that it is not shaped for rolling, but the Big O says that shapes can change before stating that it has to go and rolls away. After a long time of being alone, the missing piece slowly lifts itself up and flips over. It does it again and again until its edges start to wear off and eventually it’s rolling on its own as a little O! The book ends with a picture of the missing piece (now a small O) rolling next to the Big O.

Did anyone else think that Shel Silverstein was a woman? Definitely not.

                I initially really liked this book because it was adorable, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it could relate to so many aspects of life. First I thought about romantic relationships. So many people (including myself in high school and the beginning of college) think that they need to be involved romantically for them to be happy and move forward in life, but they don’t realize that they need to learn to “roll” on their own first. But then I realized that it could be generalized even more and apply to any type of relationship, romantic or otherwise. A healthy relationship is not one where the lack of one person cripples the other from moving forward, but one where they both help each other along, side-by-side. This also applies to mission work as well. My job is to help the girls move forward: in their education, their spiritual life, and their emotional maturity. However, like it or not, I personally will not be here for the rest of their lives to help them (although other volunteers will come and replace me). If I am successful in helping them this year I will not do it in such a way that when I do leave in a little more than half a year, they will stop growing and learning because I am gone. Rather, the best method of teaching is to help your students help themselves because they are capable of so much more than they imagined, just like the missing piece never thought it would be able to roll on its own until the Big O suggested it. And even though I initially thought it was kind of mean of the Big O to leave the missing piece on its own when it couldn’t move anywhere (it just said “I must say good-bye” without any explanation), I realized that that was exactly what I was going to do to the girls when I leave. And after going through new volunteers every year, they know it too, because from the first day I got here, they continually ask me when I am leaving. However, by just saying a few words to help the missing piece realize that it could move on its own, the Big O was doing so much more for it than just pushing it along. I hope and pray that when I leave here, I will have made some impact on at least some of the girls’ lives, by encouraging them and helping them realize that they are able to move on their own too.

                As far as other news to report, I don’t have too much, but a couple of exciting things have happened. First of all, Don Bosco’s feast day is January 31, so we got together with all of the orphanages in the Santa Cruz area to celebrate, especially because this year marks 200 years since Don Bosco’s birth! There was a big celebration complete with dancing, clowns, carnival games, and a swimming pool! It was also a good way to end the summer, because this Monday the new school year began for the girls! February should be an exciting month because of Valentine’s Day, Carnaval (Bolivia's version of Marti Gras, which is apparently a lot of fun!), and my parents coming to visit on February 27! Stay tuned for my next post to hear about it!

Our girls dancing a Spanish dance with castañuelas!

Enjoying the prizes at the carnival

Enjoying the swimming pool in the heat

Kelsey, Chiqui, and I with our Don Bosco trophy

Feliz Navidad

Think back to the craziness of Black Friday shopping. Everyone gets up ridiculously early in the morning, stands in line for hours, runs to the section of the store with the best deals, tries to cram as much stuff in their shopping cart as possible, and then repeats at four or five stores. Now picture Black Friday shopping, except instead of waiting in line to get into the store, everyone waits in a complete lack of a line to get a taxi to the market, then literally runs to beat out the other people waiting for the same cab. Instead of trying to maneuver your cart around the other carts, you have to carry everything that you are buying in large plastic bags while you cram your way through people in the narrow alleyways in between the shops. And instead of rushing to the section of the store where you know that TV with the ridiculous sale price is, you have no idea where anything is, and when you ask the shop owners who don’t know, they always just tell you, “Oh, that’s on the complete opposite side of the market.” Then you walk to the other side of the market just to get the same response to your question. Oh yeah, and instead of this being one day, you have to do this about eight times to buy Christmas presents for 130 girls, then organize everything that you bought and try to figure out what sizes the clothes that you bought are because clothes are sold from all over the world where sizing is different so there is no consistency.

Some of the Christmas presents for the older girls

This pretty much describes my entire month of December. Yes, I have obviously bought Christmas presents before and participated in Black Friday shopping, but never to an extent such as this. Honestly, Christmas this year (or at least the time leading up to Christmas) felt more like a deadline than a holiday. However, towards the end of my Christmas “deadline,” as I was seriously stressing out about Christmas presents among other things, I stopped and really reflected on the first Christmas. I’m not sure that Jesus thought about it as a deadline, but it seems to me that He didn’t really get to enjoy his first Christmas. In fact, it was probably a pretty unpleasant day for him, going from His beautiful home up in heaven to this imperfect world that we live in. Then, after the initial sacrifice of even coming down to Earth for us, we couldn’t even give him a proper place to be born, and the only people that recognized the great sacrifice that He made for all of humanity were a handful of poor shepherds and later, finally, some kings. So I had thought that this Christmas would teach me more about the true meaning of Christmas because of the fact that I was doing mostly buying with little to no receiving of gifts (although I finally got my Christmas package a couple of days ago!). However, in reality, I had shoved the true meaning of Christmas in the back of my mind behind all of the gifts that I was in charge of buying. However, by the time Christmas arrived, I realized that it wasn’t really about the gifts that I was getting the girls, rather all of the physical and emotional time and effort that it took to get all of the gifts. This eventually helped me experience the true meaning of Christmas in a way that I never had before. So even though it was really difficult to be away from my family and friends (and cold weather, fires, and Christmas cookies), it was a blessing to be able to spend my Christmas here sacrificing for the girls, in a manner more similar to the way Jesus spent his first Christmas.

After talking so much about it, I guess I should explain what we actually did on Christmas day and Christmas Eve. First let me say that I’m pretty sure that I’ve eaten more in the past month than I did the two months prior because we have had so many visitors lately that want to come and do something special for the girls during the holidays. Which is great except it would be nice if they could spread their visits out throughout the year when there is such a scarcity of food here or inform us that they were coming so that we could not eat two dinners in a row, which is what happened on Christmas Eve. First we had second lunch when one of the staff members brought us some delicious fish after a not-so-satisfying meal of chicken feet stew (two notes on this: 1. Chicken feet stew is actually very common here, but I’m not sure why because there is literally no meat on a chicken foot, just skin and 2. The fish we ate happened to be a cousin to the piranha, as evidenced by its sharp, human-like teeth that we could clearly make out considering it was a whole cooked fish!). Anyway, right before we were about to eat dinner we had an unexpected visitor that brought the girls dolls, as well as hot dogs, empenadas, and cake. Then we went straight to dinner, which was now a bit cold, but still delicious chorizo sausage and ground beef with rice. After going to mass at 10:30 we then came back and drank cider and had sweet bread and (actual) chicken soup at midnight as ridiculous amounts of fireworks were set off all around Montero (fireworks are popular here for Christmas Eve as well as New Year’s Eve here, or year-round when you want something exciting). After our midnight snack, we then had to sneak past a nasty street dog that had gotten spooked by the fireworks and wandered into the hogar so that we could get the girls’ candy bags that we put in their beds so they would have a present to wake up to on Christmas day.

The girls' candy bags ready to be given out!

We woke up early on Christmas day so that we could go buy salteñas for the girls for the Christmas breakfast (I think I’ve explained salteñas before, but they’re basically Bolivia’s form of empanadas, except they are baked and popular for breakfast). After breakfast, we all went to mass again, then came back for a nice lunch. After lunch, we brought the girls’ presents down out of the library so that Papa Noel, or Santa Claus, could give them out (it took a lot of trips to carry down 130 presents!). The younger girls then put on a nativity play, the older girls danced to and sang Christmas songs (which had won them first place in a Christmas choir competition the previous week!), and we volunteers even danced to Justin Beiber’s “Baby” with the “baby” being baby Jesus in our version. After all of these performances, our friend Connor who is volunteering about an hour away, arrived just in time to be Santa Claus and hand out the gifts to the girls. With the money that we raised, we were able to buy each girl a nice outfit, including undergarments, socks, and shoes. Then we got stuffed animals for the younger girls and nice tote bags for the older girls! The seven university girls received nice, professional-looking purses, a nice blouse, and their very own hair dryer! I was definitely relived when the last gift was given out, and we even got to relax a little bit on Christmas night and watch “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which I had yet to see before. Overall, the whole Christmas season and Christmas itself was crazy and definitely had its ups and downs. It was a rewarding experience to be a part of, but now I’m just excited about getting back into a normal routine. Hasta luego!

The girls after winning their choir competition!

The younger girls enjoying their saltenas!

The youngest dorm of girls with their presents!