Saturday

Today we went to Quillacollo on our own. It was interesting and empowering to know that I could get on a bus and get where I needed to go in one piece. I know I’ve been comparing here to India a lot, but the buses are different. First there are fifty different kinds of buses. I’m not kidding, there are a lot. Then, people don’t generally hang out of the buses. Some buses in India are stuffed so full, the bus starts to lean to one side or the other. Moreover there are people hanging in the doorways and they look like they’re about to fall out. There isn’t any of that here (as far as I’ve seen). When buses are full, people usually don’t try to cram on. That isn’t to say that the buses can’t get full. It gets pretty crowded in there sometimes. The type of bus that I’ve been taking mostly is called a trufi. It looks like a minivan, so there are doors to close and whatnot, hence, no people hanging out the doors. Anyways I went to an internet café in Quillacollo and updated stuff, including my blog (yay!).
In the afternoon, we had our rescheduled charla (group discussion) from Friday. It was rescheduled because of the paro civico. My host sister came along with me. The charla was about trash – the dangers of littering and the benefits of recycling. My host sister seemed interested, so hopefully when I bring up my worm bin assignment she will be open to it. We played a little game where everyone was given a picture and they had to explain their picture (in any language) and place it in a category. I don’t remember all the categories, sorry! After that they taught us how to crochet with plastic bags. It was really cool since I didn’t know how to crochet. Now I know! They had examples with them of some very pretty purses that had been made with recycled plastic bags. At this point, our host family members went home and our training started. The main point of the lesson was how to involve the community and motivate them to do our projects. We learned about dynamicos (sp?) which are what we call ice breakers in English. We did one that was like telephone and the message was about plastic recycling. It turned out exactly like it did when we played when we were little, except the message was even more garbled since it was in Spanish. I don’t think the coordinators took our varying levels of Spanish into account since most of the novice speakers ended up on the same team. It was hilarious to hear their end message. Then we played freeze tag and said that the catcher was a contaminated droplet. The lesson was that it is very easy to spread contamination. It worked since the game was over in less than two minutes!
I think that a lot of people reading this blog may think, ‘Hey! Aren’t you supposed to be working hard?’ Actually, I was thinking this too. Despite the hectic schedule, this has been more like a fun summer camp than anything else. And next week, we start constructing our first ‘baño ecologico’! After training one of the trainers drove us all back in the Land Cruiser. And when I say all of us I mean 15 people. The trainer told us it was good practice for traveling around Bolivia. It was pretty comfortable!