Carnival and the epoca de lluvia

¡Mas agua! The epoca de lluvia (or the rainy season) is in full force for the month of February. It rains every day here, hardest during the nights. People say it is due to La Niña. I hear that the people in the campo are having a horrible time with the rain and international aid has started to arrive.

The latest on the rain in Bolivia      More news

On top of all the rain, the epoca of the water balloons has begun for Carnival (the biggest festival in Bolivia). I don’t know whether it was planned or not but water balloons and water guns on top of the rainy season make for a very wet time in Bolivia! My only advice is don’t wear white.  Here, it is tradition throughout the month of Feb to throw water balloons at passerbys. Girls are mainly the targets and I have walked home many a time with soaking wet clothes. I now have a trained eye for the balloons and can usually spot them before their owners spot me. I will go to Oruro on friday for the start of largest Carnival celebration in Bolivia. I don’t have a place to sleep yet but from what I hear I won’t be sleeping so I just have to find a place for my things. It will work itself out. To be continued…

¿Quien tiene las manos mas limpias?

I have started a contest at Ñanta. Who has the cleanest hands? Since I have been in Bolivia I have noticed that hygiene is not at the forefront of peoples minds. From an early age, children in the states are taught about cleanliness. Scrubby the bear says, “Don’t get sick! Wash up quick!” Now, as adults we hardly think twice about washing our hands before and after we eat but for Bolivians it is an entirely different story. This is why I have decided to start the clean hand contest. It will be held on every wednesday during the month of February. The kids will come in and show me their hands. I will judge on shortness of nails and cleanliness of hands. There will be a prize every week for the kid with the cleanest hands. The prizes will consist of sponge bob toothpaste and mickey toothbrush, hand sanitizer with a book worm cartoon on the front, soap, and nail clippers with a flower design on them.  May the cleanest hands win! 

Trabajo

Psicopedagógico Hospital San Jaun de Dios

I have now completed my first couple months of work at the hospital. It has been challanging, rewarding, as well as a little frustrating. The kids I am working with at the hospital are between the ages of 2 and 7 years old and all of them have pretty serious handicaps. These children have been taken in by the hospital becuase they either have families that can not care for them or they were abandoned. The other kids who board at the hospital have gone home for the holidays and do not return until feb. About 20 remain and these are the children that I work with. There are a lot in wheelchairs and a good amount of them can not communicate.

At the beginning of my volunteer work I decided to work full days (from 9am-12pm and 2pm-5pm) three days a week and half days (0nly 9am-12pm) two days a week. The first day of work I was able to help one of the physical theripists who was helping Adelida (age 6 with spastic quad cerebral palsy) with her morning exercises. I really enjoyed learning about what is that the PTs do at the hospital with the children and Ade was a great sport while we stretched her arms and legs.

The next couple of days I took the time to try and learn all the names of the kids and to spend a little time with all of them. I played ball with some and walked others around the playground in their wheelchairs. It was a little hard to figure out what exactly to do with those that were both immobile and could not communicate but I did my best.

At the end of the week another volunteer and I decided to take a group of five kids in one of the classrooms and we did art classes with them which included making butterflies out of toilet paper rolls, doing finger painting, and cutting snowflakes out of paper. The kids we were working with were able to do the projects for the most part with little help. They mostly had a.d.d, anger issues, and other social dissorders.

I have grown to love the kids at the psicopedagogico hospital but I get very tired of just supervising. It is hard to communicate with the majority of the children as they are mute so I do not feel as though my Spanish is improving. Although, I really enjoyed helping the PT my first day I have not done that again. Unfortunately, I think the staff has more need for me in other areas that are less stimulating for me.

Ñanta

For some time I have been trying to look for another job to do alongside the hospital work. Before christmas break I met a girl, Nicole, my age from New Mexico who will be going to Physician Assistant school in June. She told me about where she was working. Ñanta, is a non- profit organization and is kind of an afterschool for the kids who live and work on the streets of Sucre. Ñanta in Quechua means “of the street” and the kids come from poor backgrounds and range in ages from 6 to 18 years. Nicole is working in Ñanta´s infirmary and said she would love the extra help becuase there is a lot to do. Most of the medicines are donated from volunteers from various countries so it is a huge job in itself just to sort through all of them and find out what does what. There is a doctor that comes in twice a week to examine the children who have some of the more serious problems and Ñanta works with a hospital that sees children that have medical emergencies for free.

I started working in Ñanta yesterday and so far it has been busy. There are a lot of kids coming in with verrugas or warts and sarnas (sores which could either be some sort of staph infection or impetigo). For the warts we have wart medicine that we apply but the problem is the kids need to come in everyday to get treated and usually that does not happen. As for the sarnas there have been around 4 or 5 cases so far. Chino, a 6 year old boy, and his older brother, Joel, both have sores (impetigo). We clean them with iodine, apply antibiotic cream, bandage them up, and tell them not to scratch. Not all the kids have them but those that do seem to start with one and then they spread to other parts of their body.

Nicole leaves in three weeks and then I am on my own in the infirmary. Even though I don´t have a lot of experience with wound care I am glad I will be there to examine and talk to the kids that come in. If anything serious arises, I can always call the Bolivian doctor to come in or consulte my mom!

So far, Ñanta has been an adventure and I really enjoy it there. The atmosphere is very relaxed. Kids can come and go as they please and are able to take a variety of classes from cooking, to music, to art, etc. In february they will go back to school in either the mornings and the afternoons and come to Ñanta either before or after their classes.

So now I will be splitting my time between Ñanta and the hospital. I will work at Ñanta every morning and go to the hospital in the afternoons, three days a week. Its a lot but the kids I work with are completely worth it. I have really grown quite attached to them. Finding Ñanta has really balanced out  my volunteer work. Now, I feel like a am getting some good experience and I can continue supervising at the hospital without feeling like I don’t have anything else going on.  I really look forward to the next 3 months and I am very glad to have found Ñanta!

If you are interested in reading more about Ñanta, check out their website here

The city in the sky

 

Machu Picchu was the most amazing place I have ever been to. Its hard to describe the magic of it all but you feel it once you go through the ticket gate. It is like entering a new world. There are massive lush, green mountains that jut out around you from every side possible. I got there early in the morning at around 7:30am so the mist and the clouds were still clinging to the mountains giving it a mysterious feel. When you walk through the clouds and the mist you almost feel like you go back in time and you half expect one of the Quechua nobles* to appear before you. When the clouds part, before you is the lost city of the Incas with its perfectly layed out stone houses and temples and its green plazas.

There are different ways to get to Machu Picchu. If you want to hike the 40 km Incan trail open to the public, you have to book it 6 mths to a year in advance. I of course, was not that organized so my friend, Gary, and I took a train to Aguas Calientes which is a small town that sits at the base of Machu Picchu. The next morning, we woke up early and started hiking the hour and half it takes to get to the top. We hiked on part of the Incan trail through the jungle. It was a pretty hard hike as it was straight up hill and rained the whole time but I really enjoyed it. Another way to do it is to take a bus up to the top but either way it is important to get there early in the morning before the masses arrive around 11am.  

At 11:45am we met our tour guide. Since we had gotten there earlier we had had some time to walk around and familiarize ourselves with the layout of the city. However, by the time our tour started, the mountain city was so crowded it felt like a completely different place and the touristy feel of it all kicked in taking away from the city’s initial mysterious feel. Needless to say, the tour was very informative and I learned a lot. Machu Picchu took 70 years to complete with 200,000 people working on it at a time. It was a city for nobles and the upper class and was split into two; the right half of the city containing houses for the highest class and the left side for the lesser nobles. On the right side of the city is where most of the temples were. The construction of them was very interesting as there was no cement or morter used between the stones (unlike in the houses). Each stone was perfectly cut and fit seamlessly on top of the next. Hard to belive that no metal tools were used-just hard rocks like obsidean! Most of the temples had three windows in them symbolizing the three worlds that these people believed in; the world of the condor, the world of the puma and the world of the snake. There was an agricultural section as well where people of the Incan empire would grow quinoa, corn, sugar cane, fruits, etc and where they would keep llama and alpacas for meat and wool.

It is amazing to think that the city of Machu Picchu was not fully discovered until 1911. Of course the indigenous people living in the area knew it existed but it was never put on the map until Hiram Bingham found it at the beginning of the 20th century.

Now, more than 5,000 tourists visit the ruins a day and I was fortunate enough to be among them!

*Only the supreme leader is referred to as an Inca. The rest of the people living in this empire were referred to as Quechuas.

Viajando

 

So, Im off once again to travel for a week or so. This time its not to the jungles of Rurrenebaque but to the mountains of Machu Picchu. I will return on the 13th or 14th and will update you all on my expedition to the Incan ruins as well as my last trip to the amazon which I have not yet written about. Hope all is well with you all and happy new year!