June

June went by so quickly for me and was a very fun month. The highlight for me was that my parents came to visit for 2 weeks from June 9th to June 23rd. My parents worked with MCC Bolivia for many years, but we left in 1991, and it had been exactly 20 years since they had last worked with MCC. My parents last visit to Bolivia was in the year 2000, which was 11 years ago. So it had been a long time since my parents had seen the city of Santa Cruz and many years since they had seen many of their Bolivian friends.

My parents stayed at my host family's house in the upstairs guestroom, and it was so great to have them so close every day. We enjoyed many late night talks around the table with my host parents, and my mom and dad got to know my host siblings because they lived with us. When my mom was here, she made us apple pie, cinnamon rolls, and jelly rolls (since these are all things I have missed this past year). One of my favorite memories is when it was 11:30 at night and we were eating apple pie around the table with my host family. My host dad had bought ice cream to go with the apple pie...the flavors of ice cream were mango and chirimoya. We were eating the apple pie so late at night because that is the time my parents and I had gotten back from a supper with friends that we had gone to, and my host family was waiting for us to get back so that we could have the desserts that my mom made.

My parents also visited my job at Stansberry. It was great to have them meet the kids that I work with, and they even helped with homework in my classroom. I told them that it was one of my easiest days of work because the kids were so fascinated by my parents that they wanted their attention, and I had two extra people to help with the homework. It was also great for my parents to get to meet the other profes that I work with. Some other trips that we took were out to the countryside to visit churches and people that my parents know out there. The only bad thing was that it was terribly windy one of the days and dust got into my mom's eye and scratched her eye because she had contacts in. My mom had horrible eye pain and some swelling, and my parents went to the eye hospital where she got some eye drops and a patch. Thankfully, there is no permanent damage and her eye is back to normal, but we were a little worried for a couple of days.

Another highlight of my parents visit was that we went to Amboro. This is about a 4 hour drive from Santa Cruz, and it is the community where my parents lived and worked for 5 years of their time here in Bolivia. The community is now in the middle of a National Park that is a rainforest. It was absolutely beautiful to get to walk through the rainforest and it was so great to see some of the people that my parents worked with who are still living there today. I also got to meet and pet a little animal called a jochi pintado. It was so cute! One of the families had it as a pet. It was about the size of a cat or small dog and it is just the cutest little brown animal with beautiful white spots along its sides and a whiskery nose. Her name was Perla, which means Pearl and I just fell in love with her at first sight. So while my parents talked about all of their friends out in Amboro, I always mentioned Perla who is the friend that I had to leave behind when we left.

While my parents were here we ate lots of typical Bolivian food, especially since it had been 11 years since they had last eaten here. The morning that we picked them up at the airport, we stopped to get saltenas, which are these meat and vegetable pastries. We also had empandas, cunapes, sope de mani, arroz con queso y churrascos, and bolivian hamburgers that come with corn and egg on top. We also ate a pizza that was a meter wide with my host family. You would not believe the pictures of how big this pizza was!

Overall we had a great time together and it was sad to see them go. It was crazy though to say goodbye to them and to say, "Well, I'll get to see you in about a month from now." That means that my time here is quickly coming to an end. Right now I have 10 days left in Bolivia and that feels surreal. I am honestly not ready to leave here yet. This year went by so quickly and was a year filled with so much growth and learnings. I have made lots of friends here, and it will be difficult to say goodbye to everyone before I leave. This week will be my last time going to work, and I will need to say goodbye to my little class of kids and the profes that I worked with. I do have some days to get last minute things done before we leave on July 20th and head back to Akron for a re-entry period. There are many things that I am looking forward to in going back to the States and there are many, many people that I can't wait to see, however it is a bittersweet time as I have many goodbyes to say here in Bolivia.

April and May

Hello world! Yes! I am still alive and well and enjoying Bolivia! I have been meaning to post on my blog for 3 months now....ever since April ended, but life has picked up pace here, and it is hard to find the time and a reliable internet connection/computer to get an update posted. However, here is some of my life that happened in April and May...

Some highlights from April

• Our SALT group took a trip in April to go and visit one of the SALTers who is placed outside of the city in the mountains. We took a long bus trip and then a bumpy ride in a truck to get there. The mountains in Moro Moro were absolutely beautiful and I enjoyed the chance to be outside of the city and back in nature again. We took a couple of hikes and also visited some of the places where the MCC team is working on water projects and dry latrine projects. We also made apple cider from the cider press that some of the MCCers had created in the fall. I think it was the most delicious cider that I had ever tasted. A new fruit that I got to try is one that is called 'tuna'. It is the fruit from a cactus and it tastes like a mix between watermelon and papaya. I didn't know that you could eat stuff that comes off a cactus.
• My job at the After School Program was filled with special events in April. One of the days was called Dia del Nino or Day of the Child. It was a special day where we played lots of games and made hotdogs to give to all the kids. It was a really fun day and the kids loved it (and they were really wound up all day, because they played games and got candy and cake at their schools). We also had a cleaning day where only the teachers came to work on a Friday and we spent the day deep cleaning everything in the Biblioteca so that things were clean again. One Saturday all of the profes also went to a workshop on child abuse, and on a Friday night we had a sleepover with all of the girls. It was a month filled with fun experiences at my work.
• April also included Good Friday and my family went out to the campo (country) to spend the day at my host mom's family's house. We ate a lot of good food and spent a fun time with tons of cousins and relatives. Also, when we were out there, someone spotted a sloth and all of the kids (and me) ran out to see the sloth that was walking along in the field. I was soooo excited to see a real sloth in the wild! I remember watching sloths when I lived here as a little kid, but I had not seen any yet this year. Needless to say I took lots of pictures and was incredibly happy the rest of the day!
• Another experience that I had with wildlife was with some ants in my room. There are teeny tiny ants here that are called sugar ants. They are smaller then a grain of rice. I had been seeing them walking around in my closet for a couple of weeks, but they are always walking around, so I didn't think anything of it. However, when I opened my drawer of winter clothes (which I have hardly touched this year) to put things away after visiting Moro Moro, I dug down to the bottem of the drawer and discovered that the ants were making a nest in my clothing! There had to be hundreds of these little guys and when I discovered them they started to run! So I grabbed my clothes and ran outside (dropping ants all over the floor and having more crawl up my hands and arms) and beat my clothes on the ground and then hung them up outside. Then I cleaned everything out of the drawer. Luckily these are not ants that bite, they just tickle when they crawl on you. However I have now declared my closet a death zone for ants and I squish every little ant that I find walking through my closet. I am hoping that they spread the word that my closet is a closet of death for little ants and that they build their ant nests somewhere else.

Some highlights for May:

• May 1st started out as Dia de Trabajador or Day of the Worker, and so the first Monday of May we celebrated Worker's Day by having a day off of work! It was nice to have a day to rest and we also had a nice lunch given to us by Stansberry later in the week to appreciate all of the staff who work there.
• I got a roommate in May. Her name is Rebekah and she is a student at EMU who is working in Bolivia this summer. Since I have an extra bed in my room, she moved in with me and we have had a fun time talking about life and about Bolivia, and she is a part of the church and youth group as well, so we do a lot of stuff together.
• During May MCC had a Focus Weekend. We had 2 days together as an MCC team. The mornings were always a time of Workshops on Conflict and Resolution and the afternoons we played games or learned how to make Bolivian foods or sang together. It was a really nice time to see all of the MCCers again and also to have the SALTers together as a group again.
• At my job, we had a parents meeting in May to hand out evaluations of the kids that come to the After School Program. Each teacher had to write up evaluations on their students of strengths, weaknesses, and suggestions for the parents. I realized how much my Spanish has developed this year as I filled out the evaluations and then spent 2 hours talking to each of the parents who came to the parents evening. Overall, everything went well.

Well that is a short update on these two months. Next week July starts and I will need to post on the month of June that is coming to an end. I really love it here in Bolivia and I don't know where this year has gone! It has flown by (especially these last months after Christmas) and I will be leaving here in 25 days...we fly to Akron on July 20th.

February and March

Hello to all! I know that it has been a long time since I have updated my blog and I apologize to those who have been checking for updates and there haven't been any for February or March. I have not been able to get on the computer in a while to post an update, and I also have been neglecting my e-mail and facebook accounts as well. March was an incredibly busy month for me and I am hoping that April will be a little bit more tranquilo. :)

My job at the after school program has been really great these past 2 months. The second of February was the first day back with the kids after their summer break. And for the new school year (which started in February) I was moved into a different classroom so that now I am working with the youngest group of kids in the morning and in the afternoon. I have 7 first graders in the morning and 7 first graders in my afternoon class. I really enjoy working with both groups and I find that I have more ideas and more experience with this group of kids then I did when working with the older kids because of my studies in Early Childhood Education and also my experience teaching Kindergarten for 3 years. I also enjoy helping the younger kids with their homework because it is more working with learning and writing letters, words, and numbers and less of long division and searching in textbooks for vocabulary words. I have also gotten to know some of the parents of the kids that I am working with this year because we had an Open House night for parents to come and visit the After School program and meet the teachers and we also have been doing some home visits during the past couple of months. It has been really great to work with the younger kids and also to get to know the parents. However, the only downside is that now that I really enjoy my job and my time spent in the classroom, the days pass by quickly and the weeks are gone in a flash. I cannot believe that we are now into April and that my time here in Bolivia is rapidly winding down.

Some highlights from February

• A trip to Santiago de Chiquitos with the group of SALTers to visit Karla who is working in Santiago. We spent 4 days hiking, seeing her school, visiting caves, and enjoying the mountains around Santiago. We also rode on the train of death to get out to Santiago. It is called the train of death not because it is dangerous, but because it goes so slowly that it feels like the death march. I think it took us 10 hours by train to get out to Santiago. Overall it was a really great trip and I enjoyed the chance to get out of the city for a weekend and to see another part of Bolivia.
• I took a kitten on the public busses here! One of my friends found a kitten on his roof and everyone told him to throw it out in the street. But I told him to wait and we would find it a home. So he kept it in his bedroom. I was able to find a family that would take it, but I had to be the one to transport the kitten to its new home and so I took it with me on the bus. I was really nervous about getting on one of these crazy, crowded public busses with a kitten that had never ridden on a bus. I had visions of the kitten freaking out and scratching me or of the people around me freaking out and kicking me off the bus. However, everything went well. I was able to get a seat and I held the kitten in my lap until he fell asleep. We had a 45 minute bus ride and then we got off at the end. We named him Boomerang and he is doing great with his new family. They told me that he loves to hunt cockroaches.
• February was kind of a crazy month because transportation was not reliable in the city. The bus drivers wanted to raise the price to ride the busses, but the mayor and people of Santa Cruz wanted it to stay at the same price. So several of the bus drivers held marches and went on strike. I spent a lot of time waiting for my bus to take me to work. Instead of waiting 15 minutes for the bus, I would end up waiting a half hour or more. And when the bus would finally come, it would be packed full of people. One day I ended up takng a different bus to a marketplace and then I got off to take another bus to my job (someone told me that this would be faster)...however there were tons of people trying to get busses at the same place that I was now waiting and when a bus would pull up, hordes of people would run and push and scramble on, and I was never aggressive enough to get into the bus. Finally I was able to get on one of the busses after some older lady got on and I ended up hanging outside the door until some people got off the buss and there was room for me inside!
• Like I stated earlier, in February I started working in the classroom with the youngest group of kids and I really am enjoying that. Also February was a fun month in working with the other teachers. They are all college kids and many did not start classes until March. So in February they had more time to do things in the evenings and we planned some meals together and also had a sleepover with the girls that work at the After School Program.

Some highlights from March:

• The first weekend in March was Carnaval weekend. This is a crazy time in Santa Cruz when there is a lot of partying and celebrating and people throw paint and water and the city is basically a giant party. A lot of the churches hold church camps out in the country during this time and so I went to the Bolivian Mennonite Church camp that was held for the 4 days of Carnaval. I had a really great time at the camp. It was at the same spot that the youth camp that I went to in September was, and once again there were frogs in the bathrooms and under the toilet seats. There were also many crazy games that we played in groups and there was a talent night the last night where each group had to have a song and a drama. There was also a little store by the camp that sold empanadas...these fried cheese bread pastries that I absolutely love....and in the 4 days of camp, I bought and ate 16!
• One reason that March was extra busy for me was because I had some visitors from the States!!!! Joyce and Leroy Bontrager from church came to visit for 3 weeks and my friend Jess Penner also came to visit for a week. It was so much fun to show them around and to have them see where I work and meet my host family and get to see Santa Cruz. I got to show them some of my favorite spots and we also got to eat at some of my favorite restaurants here.
• Another big highlight was that the last weekend in March I got to go on a trip out to Samaipata. The SALT group and the Radical Journey group went to visit this beautiful spot. It is about 3 hours away from the city and is out in the mountains. There were 10 of us that went and we were able to all stay at a hostel. On Saturday we went to some waterfalls and then hiking in the mountains. We had a map, but ended up getting lost and never really found the right trail. We could see the road from on top of the mountain and so we just decided to go straight down and end up on the road. However, we ended up in this mess of thorns, vines, brush, bushes, and trees, and most of us got pretty dirty and scratched up, but we blazed our own trail and made it back to civilization!

So that is just a quick update on my life and adventures here in Santa Cruz during February and March. I promise to be more prompt on posting for the month of April. :) Blessings to all of you!

January

January passed by very quickly. I cannot believe that it is now February! On New Years Eve the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales announced that he was going to reinstate the gas subsidies, and that the gasolinazo and rise in gas prices would end and things would be back to normal. The next day prices for transportation dropped back to what they were before everything happened and the riots and roadblocks were ended. This meant that I was able to continue with my travel plans for January. I was on a break from the after school program because it was summer vacation for our students, so it was a perfect time to get to travel and have a break from work.

I left on January 4th with two of the other Salters, Vicencia and Becca. We took a 17 hour bus ride from Santa Cruz to Sucre. Sucre is one of the capitals in Bolivia. The other is La Paz. Sucre is a very old city in Bolivia with a lot of history and it is the place where indepence was first declared. All of the buildings in Sucre are white and it has a very different feel from Santa Cruz. From Sucre, we traveled to Potosi which is the highest city in the world. We took some tablets so that we would not be affected by the altitude. Potosi is a city that has grown because of the mines and the silver, tin, and other minerals that have come out of the cerro rico, the mountain that looms over the city. We went on a tour of the mines and it was very eye opening. The workers there still use hammer, chisels, and dynamite to get to the veins of minerals in the mountain. It was a very intense tour that involved going to 4 levels of the mines and crawling, and walking through many tunnels. We were given head lamps, boots, jackets, and pants and were lead by an ex-miner.

After Potosi we took an overnight bus to the Salar de Uyuni. This is the second largest salt flat in the world. It was incredible to be able to see this place. It is white salt as far as you can see. There are also different rock formations and a volcano. I enjoyed this day immensely. We also visited a hotel made entirely out of salt...the walls, floor, chairs, tables, beds. etc. Everything was made out of salt! We only visited there and did not spend the night because we took another night bus back to Potosi. From Potosi we returned to Sucre to spend some time relaxing a bit and enjoying this beautiful city.

Some things that I really enjoyed about this trip:

• Being in the mountains. Sucre and Potosi are both in highlands of Bolivia and the landscapes are beatufiul.
• The weather in the highlands was a nice change from the heat of Santa Cruz. It was cooler during the days and cold in the evenings. I ended up purchasing a coat, a sweater, a hat, a scarf, and gloves! I haven't used any of these since being back in Santa Cruz, but they will come in hand in June when it is winter here. :)
• Seeing real llamas outside my window when we were driving along. I have not seen any llamas in Santa Cruz and we were super excited to see them in the highlands!
• Staying at a fabulous hostel in Potosi called the Koala Den and getting hot chocolate for breakfast in the mornings
• Celebrating with pizza in Sucre after our "survival and arrival" on the bus trip back from Potosi. Our bus overheated and broke down for about an hour and we were worried we wouldn't make it back.
• Getting to see dinosaur footprints at a place outside of Sucre (some of you know how much I love dinosaurs!)
• Going to a show of traditional bolivian dances by a group called Origenes and getting pulled up on stage at the end to dance with the cast. What? I don't know how to dance!
  
• Getting to hang out and laugh with Becca and V. during our trip
• The chance to travel and experience a change of pace. It was great to see some other parts of Bolivia.
  

We arrived back from our trip on the 15th of January. And then it was back to work on Monday. However this was a week of workshops and the MCC Focus Weekend. It was really good to be back with the other teachers again and I also really enjoyed the Focus Weekend with the other MCCers. The last week of January was spent at the Biblioteca, but we did not have any students yet because school didn't start until February 1st and so we spent our time cleaning and getting things ready for when the students would start. Now the kids are back at the Biblioteca and we are back to work again!