The way home

Back in the U.S.S.R.

The Beatles

Flew in by Miami Beach B.O.A.C.

Didn't get to bed last night

All the way a paper bag was on my knee

Man, I had a dreadful flight

I'm back in the U.S.S.R.

You don't know how lucky you are, boys,

Back in the U.S.S.R.

Been away so long I hardly knew the place

Gee, it's good to be back home.

Need until tomorrow to unpack my case

Honey, disconnect the phone

I'm back in the U.S.S.R.
You don't know how lucky you are, boys,
Back in the U.S.S.R.

Well, the Ukraine girls really knock me out

they leave the West behind

And Moscow girls make me sing and shout

That JoJo's always on my mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mi-mind.

Show me 'round the sloping mountains way down south,

Take me to your daddy's farm.

Let me hear your baililakas ringing out,

Come and keep your comrade warm

I'm back in the U.S.S.R.

You don't know how lucky you are, boys,

Back in the U.S.S.R.

It's the good old U.S.A. rather than the U.S.S.R., but I think the mood fits if you've heard it. I'm back home now, and I'm very glad for it. At the end of a 28 1/2 hour trip, with layovers in Dallas and Miami.

Unfortunately, I have to share a piece of bad news: On Saturday, my camera was pickpocketed while I watched a cultural heritage parade with Kim. I left it in the cargo pocket of my pants, and when I got back to the hotel I realized it was gone. With all my photographs of the entire 2 1/2 months. This was sort of the coup de grace, that on the last day in Bolivia an item of real value along with the entire photographic record of my experience is taken from me. But it's only a material thing, and at least I have my life and my health (or most of it; 2 1/2 months sans exercise has put me a little out of shape. I've lost 10 pounds of muscle mass since arriving and I've got the chicken legs of pre-running days.)

But anyway, at last I've returned to my native land and my life.

At 4 A.M. on Sunday my desperta, or wake-up call, sounded on the room phone in the Hotel Espana. I'd paid my bill the night before, and all that was left was to drag myself sleepily into my clothes and breakfast on a chocolate chip muffin and a packet of brown sugar I'd bought/taken from a coffee shop the night before. Within ten minutes I was in a taxi, racing up the dark silent morning streets of La Paz to El Alto, 1500 feet above the city, where the airport was. I talked with the taxi driver a little about my return.

When I got to the airport I waited in line to get my three boarding passes for my three flights, passed through security, and had a more proper breakfast of an empanada, a shot of espresso, and my last Bolivian banana milk. Then I boarded the plane for Miami. We took off around 7 A.M. and hopped east to Santa Cruz, letting off some passengers and taking on more. Then we took off and beelined northeast, over the border into Brazilian airspace.

Dave Barry's humor book Money Matters segued into the first chapters of Saul Bellows' classic novel The Adventures of Augie March as the plane crossed the vast Amazon, trees and rivers and settlements beneath us, then we crossed the South American coast into the Mare Carebbieana heading northeast direct for Miami. Hours later we passed over Cuba and soon the Florida Keys, made landfall, and passed over Miami. An American city where the roofs were no longer corrugated metal, but properly shingled and papered. We landed, held waiting for a gate, and I finally disembarked at nearly 5 P.M.

I raced through immigration and cleared customs: my declaration only got a cursory look from the agents and I was straight through to pick up my check bag at the carousel and race across the terminal to pick up my connection to Dallas, departing in 20 minutes. I re-checked my bags and made my plane in time - only for it to take off 10 minutes late itself. No matter, because I sure as hell wouldn't have to rush in Dallas. There I was spending the night.

3 hours on the plane and I found Dallas. I knew that I was in the northern hemisphere was that the sun hadn't gone down yet and it was nearly 8 P.M. In Bolivia in winter, the sun sets between 6 and 6:30.

In the Dallas airport I dined at a restaurant on a burger, cheese fries, and buffalo wings. The dinner cost $25 dollars - 150 Bolivianos. If I really wanted to, I could probably eat three squares a day for four or five days on 150 Bs in Bolivia. but my waitress was really nice, and spoke English. it was a sports bar kind of place and for the first time in the whole summer I saw TV coverage of the kind of football where they wear helmets and hit people. Since it's pre-season, the ESPN commentators have resorted to beating dead old news. They were covering the Giants-Patriots Super Bowl.

I boxed the last half of the wings to eat during my long vigil in the airport and went off to find my departure gate, which ended up being a tram ride away on another concourse. I returned to my previous concourse and bedded down for the night on a cot the people provided with Augie March to keep me company. I watched the last planes come in, watched passengers disembark and head for their taxis in Dallas, hotels, beds, and families, including an hourglass-shaped brunette with hair like a waterfall whom I sort of wished was on my plane in the morning. But most of all I wished I was home, seeing my family as I entered the baggage claim. Just a few long sleepy hours more for that.

My night company was my novel, a bar of Toblerone, the chicken wings, and a bottle of Mountain Dew. I watched the cleaning staff and the security guards make their rounds, walked through chapters of the novel, stayed awake with pieces of the chocolate bar and hits from the Mountain Dew and, once they ran out, pinches on the arm, coming to every so often when I had nearly nodded off. There were two or three other travelers laid out around the terminal, sleeping, but I was staying awake to guard my baggage. After the camera incident, I wasn't taking any chances. But I also wanted to pass this last vigil, I suppose, to make the transition from my foreign sojurn to my Ithaca after my summer of exile. To make some Ulyssean odyssey in the spiritual sense. I don't know why it seems so necessary. Partly, I was also a little paranoid of oversleeping my flight. I probably could have just asked a night guard to get me up and watch my stuff, too. But let Ulysses be shipwrecked and swim the last sea to Ithaca and Penelope and the grown Telemachus he barely knows.

At four in the morning on Monday the 28th I demolished the last of the wings and rose, found the tram, and hopped a terminal. I went to the airport chapel and said a prayer of thanks for the experiences I've had, however trying they have been; and thanks for my family, safety for my friends still abroad, and for a safe return home. I walked around a little to pilot-light my circulation and waited for the 6:30 boarding call, reading more of Augie March. Finally, I boarded the MD 80 with a passel of Cincinnatians bound for home, sans brunette, and we took off at 7 A.M. I slept about an hour, then watched as our plane passed over the lower Ohio valley towards home.

I saw rolling hills and green fields, and towns in the settled lands below. Then I saw features become clearer as we began our descent: Southern Indiana, the northward-bending loop of the Ohio River which holds three Kentucky counties in place, Northern Kentucky cradled by Cincinnati across the river and the Bluegrass to the south. As we descended I saw I-275 cross the river at the Zimmer Coal Plant, right next to the outflow of the Miami into the Ohio. We started our approach, swinging over to the Ohio side and banking over the suburbs of Delhi. As we got even lower, I could make out the pier where the Anderson Ferry plies the river, giving traffic an option against going out of its way to the downtown bridges. Then, the Florence water tower out on Dixie Highway, the new suburbs of Hebron, and then the airport. We touched down around 10:15, taxied to the gate, and came up to the jetway. Safely on home soil at last.

I came across the jetway to the terminal where the morning flyers were waiting to fly to other cities at their gates, crossed out of the secure section of the terminal, and headed to the baggage claim. As I stood on the escalator, I saw the most welcome sight in the world.

Under a trio of balloons and a poster-board sign written in marker were Mom, Dad, Liz, and Daniel. We met at the bottom of the escalator and exhanged a round of fierce hugs and salutations. Dan pressed a cold botttle of Stewart's orange cream into my hand to revive me, and we picked up my check bag at the carousel and headed to the car.

I've spent most of that day and last night paying off outstanding sleep debts. Acclimatizing myself to the humidity of a Northern Kentucky summer and returning step by step to the land of the living. This afternoon I ran three miles with Dad, as the first step to getting back into shape after the horrible atrophy endured in Bolivia. I've decided to continue theis blog for a while, as I have vague plans for a jam-packed twelve days of things to do before I leave for school. My return to UD, then, will park the end of this blog. I also expect to make some reflective post chronicling what I've learned on the trip, which will include a lot of redemptive suffering and will not at all have a Disney ending. Actually, it will probably end up sounding a lot more like a James Joyce novel, or the end of Heart of Darkness with the critical difference that no one has actually died. Until then, I'll leave you to consider this mini-odyssey back to the land of my rearing.

In that spirit, we'll move from hasta luego to until then,

Drew

El Camino de Muerte

The "Most Dangerous Road in the World" leads about 35 miles from La Paz to Coroico in Bolivia's Yungas region. Leaving La Paz at 3200 meters (9600 feet) up to the Cumbre, the highest point at 4700 meters (14,100 feet). From there it drops over 30 miles to less than 1,000 feet above sea level. Until recently it was the only major highway between Bolivia's capital and the Yungas region, and therefore handled vitrually all the heavy truck commerce and bus passenger traffic between the two regions. The road conditions are more than dangerous: they are nearly suicidal. Most of the road is less than 10 feet in width, unpaved; on one side of the road are sheer cliffs which drop over a thousand feet into sheer tropical valleys. Because of the rapid change in climate from the cold Altiplano to the Amazon rainforest, visibility is often obscured by fog, while rockslides and waterfalls often cut right across the road.

Recently, a paved, two-lane bypass road was opened, significantly cutting down on traffic and road fatalities; still, the road has become in famous as being the most dangerous road in the world: at its worst, it was estimated that 200 to 300 people were killed annually on the road. In local parlance, the road is known as El Camino de Muerte, or "Death Road." However, the 13,000 feet of nearly continous downhill grade, plus the name, draws mountain bike enthusiasts and thrill seekers by the thousands every year. You can read the wikipedia article about the road here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungas_Road.

On Thursday I took my grateful leave of CEDESOL and Cochabamba, though not without some difficult goodbyes from Andrea and her family. I flew from Cochabamba to La Paz, the capital, and installed myself in the Hotel Espana for 190 Bolivianos a night (190 Bs a night is really steep and means a pretty swanky place - as in, television and private bathroom swanky, complimentary soap and hotel towels swanky. Since the offhand exchange rate is seven Bolivianos to the dollar, 190 Bs is about 27 dollars a night, better than Holiday Inn. However, at our hostel in Villa Tunari we were still paying about a third of this, even though bathrooms were shared abd you had to bring your own towels and toilet paper.) I was there to spend my last few days in Bolivia with Alex and Kim, two other UD ETHOS volunteers who were working in La Paz for two more weeks.

Alex, unfortunately, tore a ligament in Villa Tunari and wasn't very mobile. So it fell on Kim and me to try the Death Road by mountain bike.

7:30 on Friday morning, we were up and met at the offices of Barro Biking, on the corner of the Calle Sagarniga and Las Brujas. Our biking group was six: Kim, myself, and four Frenchmen who were spending some time trekking and adventuring on one of those ridiculous European vacations. We breakfasted with coffee and rolls, then piled into a van and drove about an hour to the Cumbre. We unpacked the bikes and got into some serious gear: helmets, gauntlets, jackets, vests, and pants to ward off the cold or any stray rocks that might be kicked up by a tire. Then we started down.

The upper part of the Death road is part of the new road, and therefore it's paved and has two lanes and is relatively safe. At such high elevations, snow stands on the mountain tops and visibility is very clear. I'm thinking we were topside of thirty miles an hour even on those Trek mountain bikes, and I did a couple of brake checks. I was satisfied; the Treks came with front and rear disc brakes and 28 speeds of Shimano shifters; very quality indeed and I trusted that Trek probably more than I'd trust my own Giant on terrain like that. The Frenchmen were also insane and were passing me at every opportunity. The upper road had lots of truck and bus traffic, so you had to watch ahead and anticipate in between taking in the breathtaking mountain views.

We passed a drug checkpoint and a toll booth, and then hit the uphill section of the trail which was only about a mile long but still rather tough, since we were still at high altitude. I found myself struggling for breath as I pushed my bike on the inner chainring. But youth and latent cross-country condition got the better of the four French riders, and I was first in position behind our guide Jose with Kim right behind.

Once we made it past the uphill section, the Death Road split off from the bypass: unpaved, beckoning, twisting down into the jungle valleys. We followed it, flying at still-high speeds down the 10 foot wide gravel road. Fog set in, cutting visibility to 30 feet. To our right was a cliff, and to our left - fog. Fog that hid another cliff that dropped nearly a thousand feet to the valley floor. We rode through waterfalls and around tight hairpin curves, just about perfectly safe on our mountain bikes, but what if we were in a heavy truck or a bus? Then, the road is barely wider than you are, and one false move gives you a free, one-way ticket to the valley below. Jose told us about how one girl on a bike dropped her camera, and then without thinking swerved over to get it, went over the cliff, and died. Thankfully, wasn't going to happen to us.

We came out of the fog and found ourselves on the slopes of beautiful tropical valleys, with spectacular visibility, warm, humid, weather, and sun. We stopped often to admire the views, but even still we found ourselves soon enough at the end of the road - Unduavi, 1,200 meters above sea level. We stopped at a roadside dive for refreshments and then piled all our stuff back into the van to go to the hotel at Coroico for a buffet lunch. The rest was the uneventful drive back up the death road in the van, about which I felt considerably more uncomfortable than I did going down on the bike. But soon enough we came over the Cumbre again and saw the lights of La Paz, and that was that. One hell of an adventure.

Here are some pictures:

Our group at the Cumbre, 14,000 feet above sea level. Note the snow on the mountains.

The upper road, paved and graded, seen at speeds in excess of 30 M.P.H. (Pretty fast on a bicycle).

The "Most Dangerous" part of the "Most dangerous road." That's me and Kim standing on the side of that cliff. I think this serves as a pretty good illustration.

Me and Kim on the trail by a waterfall.

The lower trail, the van chasing us.

Atypically from your usual Tour de France, the French are in the lead.

Literally about 100 yards before Unduavi there was a waterfall and a huge pool of water that was a ton of fun to ride through.

The Cafe in Unduavi at the end of the road.

So, that Friday was a lot of fun. And I'm still alive and have most of my major organs.

God bless,

Drew

The CNC Saga, Part 2... y otras historias

Despite the title, this post has very little to do with the CNC machine. Actually, I don't want anything else to do with it either. That's why "and other stories" is tacked on to the title. But I can't exactly have a part 1 without a part 2, and that's where this comes in.

At this point, I have one more half day of actual work. None of it will be with the CNC. Even as an engineer, that makes me very happy. I've been spending the past two weeks testing different materials on the machine, finding the voltage, current, and feedrate (how fast the torch travels over the material when cutting) that will give the best cut quality for the material at hand. If it sounds slightly impressive, I guess it is, but really I just followed the process laid down in the manual. Today I typed up a table with different materials and their appropriate settings, so that when they decide to cut out actual stove parts instead of lines in scrap metal they'll know how to set the cutter to do the best job. At least, I hope that's what happens. But when you're cutting two or three sheets of metal thick, there gets to be problems with accumulation of dross, or molten metal that solidifies again, and bevel, which is where the cut doesn't go straight down but the sides slant inward underneath the torch. Basically, when we cut several sheets at once, the top sheet is awesome but the bottom one isn't so good. Also, the heat generated from cutting also sometimes welds the plates together, but not too much. You can usually separate the plates with a screwdriver.

But moreover, I spent the past few days helping the new engineer build a stand which my boss has taken to Santa Cruz for an exposition. I have to say I'm pretty proud of it. It's made from lengths of 1/2 inch galvanized steel pipe, threaded and put into elbows and T-connectors and fittings. I spent almost all day yesterday polishing the tubes with a buffer and they shine. We actually used the plasma cutter for something useful and cut circular bases out of thick sheet metal with a 60-amp tip, which was pretty cool to do I guess.

I leave for La Paz tomorrow to spend some time with Alex and Kim before my plane home on Sunday. Actually, I couldn't be more excited to get out of here, although there are some people I'll definetly miss. Andrea, for one, has been my older sister of sorts and talking to her at times has kept me from going completely insane. I'll miss the rest of my family, too. They were great.

Last night we had a farewell dinner at my house with people from the office and the family who could make it. They got something called pizza interminable - the endless pìzza. Andrea told me it was as big as a table and they had to call a taxi to get it. I didn't believe her until the pizza showed up, and sure enough, it was as large as a small table. Probably about 3 feet across (36 inches! Enormous!) and it had four sides of toppings. There's still pieces in the fridge, but apparently Bolivians have not yet discovered cold pizza for breakfast because I haven't had any yet. It actually is bigger than the Beast from Snappy Tomato. It's huge.

Over the past weekend in between working like a dog on the banner stand I've been going out to clubs, dinners, and birthday parties with Mike, Colleen, Mike's relatives John and Ryan, and Ruth, a new arrival from England who's a university student interning with Climate Care. It's been lots of fun, and I was sad to see the Americans go on Monday night. They took the night bus to La Paz, and even as I write today they're flying back to the States. I've still got a lunch with Ruth tomorrow, and shopping with my host mother and Ruth the owner of Sobre la Roca.

In five days, I will trade the insane climate of Bolivia (it drops to below freezing at night to a dry heat in the day) for the hot, muggy late summer of Northern Kentucky. I'll have the advantage of being used to high altitude, but I haven't run since I got here and I'm not acclimated to humidity yet. But even still, all that heat and humidity will never feel better.

Ciao,
Drew

Frutillas con Leche

I tried a new route to the workshop where I work. Instead of taking the quiet side streets, I decided to go a block or two out of my way and go by the rotunda Tarija, which is the front door of the Catholic University of Bolivia. It figures that such a university would be literally four blocks from my house, which I take to be a sign of blessing.

Anyway, instead of being alone when I walk I'm surrounded by changing classes, university students hanging out, and... the small lunch counter which stands on the Avenida Reuben Dario literally ten steps from the University gates. Home to delicious empanadas, Bolivian breads, and... frutillas con leche, which the UD expatriates in Bolivia have translated as "Strawberry milk."

Take whole or sliced strawberries, whole milk, several tablespoons of sugar and put them in a blender. Blend until smooth. Serve in a soda glass.

The best ones are served cold. Very cold. And they are so wonderfully delicious I can't even begin to describe them. Plus, without ice cream they are healthier than a milkshake.

In other news, today was my interview for the documentary that Mike and Colleen are putting together. I'm the last of all the ETHOS people from Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Peru, among other places, to be interviewed. We conducted most of the interview in the Sobre la Roca workshop where myself and Braulio, the new engineer, were running tests on the plasma cutter to find the correct voltage and cutting speed to get decent quality cuts while cutting two sheets of material at once. Mike and Colleen were able to get footage of the cutter actually running, which is pretty cool. Then I got interviewed about my work and life in Bolivia. I gave my suggestion from my experience that no one go alone, which was well-received. Although that was no one's fault, really, just a terrible twist of circumstances. I feel that going alone has made me have to be more careful instead of going out all over Cochabamba, but there's still been some great opportunities. Plus, I think my Spanish has gotten at least halfway decent being practically alone here.

Lunchtime was spent at a vegetarian restaurant with Mike, Colleen, and Doña Mama Ruth, where we discussed the presence of a local farmers' market at UD next year and the advantages of eating local.

It's kind of a shame that the last two weeks I have in Cochabamba is finally when I start to see the city, but I'll take what I can get.

Finally, the package with my books arrived from home. The booty:

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
Some book by Dave Barry. It doesn't really matter which one, because every book by Dave Barry is hilarious.

This care package came welcome, considering I calculated the total duration of my return journey. 6:30 AM from La Paz to 11:00 AM in Cincinnati on Monday, July 28th. 28 1/2 hours. Almost 12 taken up by one hell of a layover in Dallas. Thank God for those books.

Ghetto life in Bolivia

Take seven gringos related to the University of Dayton. Pack them into a van. Descend eight thousand feet in three hours and suddenly change climates from semiarid mountains to the middle of the freaking jungle.

Basically, the weekend was awesome. It was probably my first time in Bolivia when I didn't want to go home. I was with UD students: Kim and Alex had come in from La Paz, Mike and Colleen had finally made it to Bolivia filming their ETHOS Global Awareness Program documentary, and Mike's hilarious brother and cousin were along for the ride. It was the most refreshing change of pace I've had from work and the boss man (Song lyric of Bolivia, from Bruce Springsteen's "Night:" You wake up every morning at the sound of the bell / You get to work late and the boss man's giving you hell.) And it was great to talk to people about my experiences who've had similar experiences and had similar moments of scratching their heads and thinking "What the hell?" and reference Seinfeld and South Park.

On Friday, the whole posse arrived and we headed out to a place called Brazilian coffee, which strangely has a large sushi menu. We talked, then the CEDESOL leadership left around midnight and we did what you do in Cochabamba on friday night if you're young, hip, and free from unpaid volunteer employ for a while: you go to dance clubs. I'm more of a swing dancer myself than grinding /shuffling your feet awkwardly in a circle while no one partners up to crappy electronica mixes, but it was all OK because here I finally was with people from Dayton. Alex and I headed back early at 3 A.M. and everyone else got back at 6. Asi es Cochabamba en Viernes.

Saturday once everyone had woken up we ate at this great breakfast place which Mike said had the only waffles in Cochabamba. He'd know, too, having lived here for six months. The waffles were wonderful, the syrup was maple instead of sugar cane, and I had real coffee.

Then Mike arranged us a van to take us to Villa Tunari where he and Colleen had to film stuff in the wildlife preserve there. Villa Tunari is in Chapare, which is in the jungle. I took bug spray. When we got to the town we checked into our hostel and played euchre and talked. it was a really nice hostel with an actual pool which we took advantage of.

Sunday morning breakfast was in the town market: Egg sandwiches and instant coffee again, but strawberry milk, which is just about the most delicious thing you can think of drinking in a humid environment. It would go over big in Northern Kentucky and Southwest Ohio. Basically, you take fresh strawberries, cold milk, and sugar, and blend it into a beverage that makes smoothies incredibly passé. Actually, by far the best thing about Bolivia has been the exposure to new foods, like empanadas and api and fruit milk. I'll be bringing recipes back to the States.

We went to the park and paid 21 Bs for the gringo rate (seriously, there was a gringo rate made explicitly clear: the sign said niños 2 Bs., mayores 4 Bs., extranjeros 6 Bs., camera 15 Bs.) 6 Bolivianos is still less than a dollar, but not too much anymore since the dollar's buying power is sinking apparently by the week. Then we had to take everything except out cameras out of our pockets and lock them up for safekeeping. In the park, there are monkeys and some of them in former lives were trained to be pickpockets. Crazy.

The first thing we did was hike to this overlook where we could see Villa Tunari, the mountains to the west, and the rivers which encircle the town. It was beautiful and breathtaking and I got a picture which really doesn't do it justice. In a rivers and cities related note, Villa Tunari is built right at the confluence of two rivers with wide floodplains, and in the rainy season they say the town completely floods out. Sounds like some small cities in Southwest Ohio I know about, without the sophistaced and wonderfully-engineered flood control system. Why people think building on floodplains is a good idea and are then surprised when the town floods out I will never know. People need to pay more attention to ecology and the environment when they build things, because too often they end up screwing something up which comes back to destroy their livelihood like one of the ten plagues of Egypt.

After the overlook, we met up with Mike's friend Paula who works at the park and went to see the Puma, which is old an arthritic... but still has jaws that could probably crush your skull. Some of us got to pet it. At one point it jerked around and play-bit Mike's brother's arm. He stayed impressively still, which is probably a good idea. You don't want to make any sudden moves around a carnivorous jungle cat. "Play" was the operative word of the bite, so it didn't actually do any damage at all. Not flinching was what was impressive about it.

After the puma we went to see the monkeys, which were hilarious and smart and amazingly dextrous. They'd randomly just climb up on you and sort of hang out, and they tried to feed Kim raw fish. Luckily no one got any stuff stolen although one monkey bit Colleen and Mike's video camera.

After the monkeys we left the park and ate lunch at a place with surubi, which is an almost boneless fish. It was grilled over charcoal and uncommonly delicious. In the afternoon, we hung out at the pool and played more euchre, talking about our experiences and about life. At 6:30 our van returned and we piled in for the night trip back to Cochabamba. Kim and Alex have headed back to La Paz, and this morning I headed to work and made some progress with a new engineer on the plasma cutter. Hopefully, we'll be in business soon.

All for now,
Drew

Hamburgesa

On the fourth of July, I got to barbeque and eat a hamburger. We were on a demonstration, and I said it was Independence Day in the USA and everyone barbecues. So we put some hamburgesas on the stove top and I cut a roll in half and chowed down. No ketchup, no lettuce, not an A-1 marinated steakburger. But I did eat a grilled hamburger on the fourth of july.

Oh, and thanks for all the prayers. They help.

Drew

Prayers

In the pocket of my track jacket, there's a little plastic tag. On one side it says "God bless and protect the Morrison family." On the other side, it has this prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

I've been fingering it a lot lately. Praying the Rosary, for strength to carry on through my own blunders and mistakes. For serenity to accept what happens to me and move on. For wisdom to learn the lessons I must learn here, however hard they may be. For this reason God has led me to this place.

23 days to go until I return home.

And I could sure use some prayers. If you feel like saying one. And I'll pray for my friends abroad and at home and my family. Because I think there are definitely situations and times when we should all have someone praying for us.

Like for 23 days of Grace. And for that to continue.

Drew

futból

Thursday night I went to a futból game. Or a soccer game. And despite the fact that I´m not a soccer fan whatsoever, I was pretty much ready to do something besides work, sleep, and stay in my room reading The Hitchiker´s Guide to the Galaxy for the 4th time. Yes. 4 times.

So my colleague Fito invited me to a soccer match between two Bolivian professional teams. Aurora, which is from Cochabamba, and Oriental, from Santa Cruz. The match was at Felix Capriles Stadium, which looks a bit like your average college football stadium in the states extept that there´s only one Jumbotron and it´s a little small. Also, attendance was way down. Fito told me that the stadium´s capacity was 30,000 but it was less than a quarter full, probably due to the fact that it was Thursday night. Fito told me that on Sunday when Aurora played the other Cochabamba team this place was going to be packed. I didn´t find that statement too unreasonable, even though right now the total attendance as a percentage of stadium capacity looked like something out of a Cincinnati Reds game.

Not that that was necessarily a bad thing. For 17 Bolivianos me, Fito, and his young son had perfectly good seats near the field and we weren´t crowded. So I sat, watched the soccer game, and serenely drank my Fanta while other fans around me screamed at the line referees using some choice words which aren´t repeatable in polite company. Like most drunk sports fans somewhere in the world, insulting referees favors volume over originality and soon settled into a pattern of and expletive followed by Abrir tus ojos! Open your eyes!

Even though my ability to appreciate soccer games is limited, it seemed pretty good. Aurora scored towards the end of the first half and was up 1-0 at the half, and then the floodgates just opened. In the second half Aurora scored two more unanswered, then put up a fourth goal towards the end of the game and played defense to close it out 4-2. It was as close to an unchallenged beating as a soccer game gets, I suppose. Since most of the crowd seemed to be Aurora fans, I decided it wouldn´t be bad if I was one too. Go Cocha!

Peace,
Drew

El Abra Prison

If I ever play a future game of "I Never" with friends I will probably lose, because of this one simple fact and thing that I did. Only time will tell if I will regret it or not. But the trunp card that people can pull on me now is that I don´t think there are many norteamericanos who have been in a Bolivian prison.

Maximum security prison, actually. Its name is El Abra. But, like in Monopoly, I was just visiting. The point of me going with my colleague Fito (a Bolivian engineer) is because we had to deliver new specifications on the rocket stoves to some of the prisoners there, who run a business there manufacturing the exterior parts of the stove. In order to reduce production costs, the outer dimensions of the stove have been made smaller to be able to cut more stoves out of the same pieces of sheet metal. Our task was to cut out and assemble a model stove with the prisoners to make sure everything fit together. In the middle of a rather heavily armed circle of Bolivian police, who wear olive green and look a lot more like an infantry regiment than your average unit of U.S. beat cops.

Actually, the prison workshop and business is a wonderful thing to do, especially in Bolivia where rehabilitation for lawbreakers isn´t exactly a federal priority. I don´t know if the average reader is acquainted with Johnny Cash´s song "Folsom Prison Blues," but I was kind of humming it internally during the whole experience. I actually really wanted to go here, because I haven´t been inside any prison before and I wanted to see what it was like with my own eyes. There are prison experiences, of course, which make all the hardship I´ve experienced so far seem like a ride on the merry-go-round. To give prisoners the dignity of work and earning their own money, not to mention the financial support this provides, is a very good thing that Cedesol and Sobre la Roca does.

And now, on to the activities of the day.

To get to the prison, Fito and I had to take the economy mode of transportation, called a Trufi or a route taxi. A Trufi is a 15-passenger van which drives a specified route through the city just like a bus. A ride costs around Bs. 2, compared to 7-10 Bolivianos on average for just your regular taxi. For me, 7-10 Bolivianos is still less than $1.50, a fare that would make any Manhattanite actually catch fire with jealousy, but for a lot of working Bolivians, the fare´s still a steep price to pay. Just a small thing that illustrates the wealth gap between us and our South-American cousins, to give you a bit of perspective.

At UD, a rule states that you can only put 12 people in a 15-passenger van for safety reasons. I´ve been in one that had 17 people in it before with one person sitting on the console between the driver and front passenger and another on the floor by the sliding door, but I´m not saying when or where in order to protect the guilty. I was not a decision-maker on that particular trip, so no one needs to come knocking on my door demanding an explanation. But that particular trip pales in comparison to the return trip from El Abra, when I counted 22 in the van at one point. That sets one steep record.

Anyway, the Trufi took us to El Abra, which sits in a suburb on the south outskirts of Cochabamba. Although when I say "suburb," I mean "shabby little town with dirt roads and open sewers in the streets." In an ironic reversal of American cities, the affluent of Cochabamba live downtown or close to it and the less fortunate classes live on the outskirts of the city. As a minimally related side note, some American urban planners and smart growth advocates would do well to consider this when they draw up plans for revitalizing inner cities. The point of all those plans is to create cities and communities for people and turning suburbs into the new slums in 20 or 30 years time is not what the term "sustainable development" annotates. But I digress.

We pulled up to El Abra, squeezed our way through the people standing by the taxi door like corks from a bottle, and made our way through the dusty road to visitor processing. There Fito explained to the guard on duty what our business was, which strangely enough resulted in a little small talk, and then we were searched. We then handed over our photo IDs. For Fito, this was his national identification card, for me, my UD student ID. Funny, I guess that little white card does sort of define me now. The guard wrote down Fito´s card number and for a moment I thought he was doing to write down the 8-digit code on my ID, despite the fact that it´s currently nearly 2,000 miles away from any place where it would have any meaning whatsoever.

We got our forearms stamped and were conducted inside the inner fence, and met the foreman of the prison workshop. He took us to the place where they cut and bend the sheet metal for the sides and bottom of the stove, using some very non-automated tools, like tin snips and folding presses which, incidentally, came from the Netherlands somewhere around Arnhem. Seeing all that made me happy because these tools are the ones you use to do an old-school kind of machining that isn´t dependent on complex technology and therefore doesn´t fail when a stepper motor chokes, like with some plasma cutters I know. For the whole morning, Fito and the foreman marked out the stove sides on sheet metal, cut them out with tin snips (think a second-grade skill, only cooler because the scissors are bigger and you´re cutting galvanized steel instead of 8x11) and folded the edges to stiffen them in presses.

They spent the whole morning cutting parts, leaving me largely out of it. Unfortunately, I didn´t feel assertive enough with my Spanish to cut in and I´ve never really cut sheet metal into parts before so I was afraid if I demanded to help out I´d probably screw up somewhere. In second grade I was very good at math and spelling but not the final word in precision when it comes to cutting straight lines.

In fact, I got very bored because the work took longer than expected, partly because after cutting out every single part according to the exact design specifications the foreman suddenly said that there was a problem: the folded edges on the stove sides were too narrow for screws to penetrate and had to be roughly doubled in size. I´m no machinist, but I seem to remember from my Autocad days that you can safely design a hole to be at least its own diameter away from an exterior edge and be perfectly fine when it comes to structural integrity, at least for light-load bearing applications like this. That makes a 3mm hole in a 10mm fold perfectly legit. But I wasn´t exactly making the call on this either.

So we cut new parts with new dimensions and that took the rest of the morning and then the afternoon, until 2:00 on a Saturday which is excessive by any means. We also ate lunch at the prison, which was a bad move. It led to a headache, fever, and chills in the afternoon, diagnosis by Señora Elizabeth, Bolivian host mother and default family practice physician, in the evening, and bed rest through all of Saturday night and Sunday morning. I think the screening of Spanish-dubbed episodes of Dragonball Z in the prison cantina may also have had a part in it. My compañeros asked me if we had this in the states, and I said yes. I added that it was weird because it was a Japanese TV show dubbed in Spanish, so the words didn´t fit how the mouths were moving. Then I realized it was anime and the words never fit how the mouths are moving. Then my compañeros asked me if I watched the show myself in the States. I told them no.

After lunch and a bit more work finishing the parts, we reversed the entering process and I got my trusty student ID back. Here in Bolivia it doesn´t mean much but back at UD it has served as house keys, RecPlex membership and towel collateral, and meal ticket as well as a host of other useful purposes. In a little less than two months it will be gladly back in action again.

Outside the prison we waited for the record-breaking Trufi and rode our ridiculously cheap but crowded way home. And that´s the story of how for six hours on one Saturday in June I was in a Bolivian prison.

Maximum-security prison, actually.

Aprovecho

"Aprovecho" is a colloquial saying in the Spanish language which is usually used after meals. It´s good manners, and it functions along the lines of ¨bon appetit¨or something similar. It comes from the verb aprovechar, which has no equivalent in English that I can think of. Its meaning runs somewhere along the lines of "to make good use of," or "to make the most of." It also has a negative connotation in the sense of taking advantage of something or someone, but I like the sense in which it´s used after meals much better. There´s a certain wisdom in it. Make the most of your meal. Incidentally, the leading think tank on ecological cookers of all types is named the Aprovecho Reseach Center for precisely that reason.



Aprovecho has been a sort of mantra I´ve been trying to live by while here in Bolivia. It´s about the halfway point of my time in Bolivia (5ish weeks gone, 4 more coming) and I thought I´d reflect a little on my experiences here and how I´m doing. As Charlie says in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, "I´m happy and sad at the same time and I don´t really know why."



Truth be told, this time has not been easy for me at all. I´ve been on my own away from home lots of times before. But I´ve never been truly homesick until now. At least, there are times when I very much wish I was home, because something about me just doesn´t seem to succeed here. At times, I thank God for all those years of cross-country and track running, because I think that trains in you a certain reserve of sheer will you can fall back on.


Part of it is that there are some very strong personalities around here of a kind I´m just not used to dealing with. I guess now´s as good a time as ever to learn, because it won´t be the last time in my life that strong personalities enter. Learn to deal now, or have to learn later. That´s the way of things.

Actually, as hard as it is right now this is still a good experience, having to learn to cope with situations which are not optimal and make whatever you can out of it. That skill is indispensable for an engineer, and I´ll be better for it. Also, one thing I´m trying to learn is to go into a job knowing next to nothing about what you´re supposed to be doing. Which begins a short list of crazy things I´ve done in Bolivia so far that I could never do in the states, which I hope is at least mildly entertaining.

• Eat goat. This was my first demonstration, a while back around week 2 or 3. We were in a town called Bombeo and the townspeople literally set out a feast. There were chunks of a tough meat that was really heavily spiced and not really too bad. I found out later from Dave when he asked me how the goat was.
• Fish a bird out of a vat of congealed sugarcane juice. This was in Saipina at a sugar mill. My colleague Darling and I saw the bird, and she grabbed a big spoon they use to stir the cane syrup with and lifted the bird out, because the bird was covered in syrup and couldn´t fly. Incidentally, the vat was this big cast-iron bowl and very hot, so the bird was suffering. We found some water to wash the bird off with and Darling set it in the bed of a truck so the dogs wouldn´t get it. I hope that bird´s OK.
• Dig a hole through an adobe wall with a pickaxe without a handle and a machete. At the same sugar mill. The wall was 6 inches thick and ridiculously hard.
• Tow a Toyota Land Cruiser with a Ford Expedition, without a trailer hitch and using a rope instead of a chain. We were trying to get the Toyota to start.

Incidentally, I saw Prince Caspian with my host family and maybe it was the fact that I haven´t seen the states in over a month and have little to no news (though I think I heard that Obama got the Democratic nomination,) I thought it was pretty damn good. It was a subtitle movie and not dubbed so I got to hear all the actual voices, British accents and all, which was nice.

Today I got a little break from grantwriting and got to go to the workshop and help manufacture solar box cookers. So all day I was working with tools in my hands planing, sanding, and putting on primer coats. So I was glad for that. Tomorrow morning we visit the El Abra prison where some of the inmates have a business doing final assembly for rocket stoves. That should be cool I hope.

Four weeks to go, and sometimes it seems that my flight home can´t come fast enough. But then again, my host family is wonderful and there are still a lot of great experiences here. I´m still praying for the humility to hear whatever lessons are out there for me, and to make the best use of the time I´ve got left. I will miss this place a little when I leave it, especially Andrea and her family. I really have become attached to them.

Thanks to the family at home and all my friends, Stateside and abroad, whom I´ve talked to. You´ve given me words of inspiration and support that have come just when I needed them. Just knowing that people listen is enough. I came here and I won´t let you down. You can be sure of it.

Provecho,

Drew

On a Sunday

... the title is Jimmy Eat World song. But it is Sunday, and it´s the first real down time I´ve had all week. I suppose Saipina will have to be summarized.

Last weekend, Dave, his wife Ruth, myself, and a 31-year old Bolivian engineer from Beni named Darling went on a whirlwind 4-day adventure in the campo, or countryside, east of Cocha. We lost elevation and stayed in a hotel in the town of Saipina where for several days a local named Roseli who worked in the clinic there led us around to houses of people who had bought either solar cookers or rocket stoves. Then, we interviewed these people to see how they were using the stoves, how well they functioned, etc. The surveys we conducted were from an organization called Climate Care. CEDESOL has an agreement with Climate Care for emissions trading, where the greenhouse emissions savings from the use of rocket stoves and solar cookers get sold to Climate Care to eventually enter the voluntary carbon market. The purpose of the surveys is to make sure that, in fact, people are using the stoves and therefore saving emissions. Whatever your feelings are on carbon markets, this has the potential to be an important source of funding which will permit Cedesol to keep operating.

Last week I worked on the CNC and a Grant application to Toyota. I think I know how to dial in the height control and find the correct voltages for the different materials we´re cutting. That´s good; it means the torch won´t dive into the material anymore and will maintaing the correct cutting height. Also, the Toyota grant´s due this Friday, which means I have to finish the application by the end of Monday so we can get it into the 48-hour mail to Tokyo. Luckily, it´s mostly done and only needs a few final edits.

But today is Sunday. Today is downtime. Thankfully.

La Paz from Bolivia,
Drew

The CNC Saga, Part 1

I´m going to hold off on recounting the four day trip east and south to Saipina and Pasorapa, so I can tell the stories good and proper. What we did was go around conducting surveys on stove usage, and we got around 50 although I mostly just took pictures as my Spanish isn´t up to snuff. But I did call home from a phone booth and get some pretty awesome pictures. It´s the little triumphs that count.

What I want to do now is talk a little bit about the CNC plasma cutter I´ve been working with for the past two weeks. I call the story "The CNC saga" because the story is already long, is epic at least from my standpoint, and will probably have a tragic ending. I´ve been working with a Bolivian engineer to try to get this damn thing to work for two weeks, and one problem after another keeps creeping up.

CNC stands for Computer Numerical Control, which uses a programming language called G code to automatically control what a machine tool does. In this case, the machine tool is a plasma cutter, a device which uses an electric current to superheat gas into plasma and cut through sheet metal. In this case, we´re cutting through 1/16" sheets of steel to make tapas, or the tops of rocket stoves. The plasma torch is mounted on a gantry which can travel in the x and y directions on rails using stepper motors. It´s a really cool machine, actually a kind of robot in that it is a machine which does the machining that a human operator might do, only with far greater precision and speed.

In fact, robotics was the subject which got me into engineering, in idyllic days before high school when men were men, boys were boys, and you could still buy very good and cheap canned root beer at Meijer. I worked with my friends Steve and Adam in a basement, designing and building a lego robot in Steve´s basement for the FIRST Lego League competition. We carried the state of Ohio two years running. Back then we called the robot "Free Willy" because we swore it had a will of its own. It wouldn´t do anything we programmed it to do. Now, when life has carried me to Bolivia, I find those words prophetic because this robot won´t do what we tell it to. The difference is that this robot costs thirty thousand dollars and can actually kill you. The plasma torch draws 40 amps of current and generates temperatures hot enough to vaporize steel.

Where the CNC plasma cutter fits into CEDESOL´s operations is that we´re trying to industrialize the production of rocket stoves and solar ovens. The idea is to have them in just about every village in Bolivia, which was partially the motivation for the trip to Saipina. We can use the cutter to rapidly cut out metal parts for stoves, and we want to do several thousand a month. Ideally, you can program the cutter to do what you want, put sheet metal under it, press "go," and the cutter will give you twelve stove tops like cutting out cookies on a baking sheet.

However, there are always hang-ups. For one thing, when the gantry travels along the rails it has a tendency to hang up on one side, stopping momentarily. This throws the cutter navigation off so that it starts cutting the second tapa over where the first tapa should be, or starts cutting the screw holes in the wrong place. Factor in the price of sheet metal these days, lost time and energy, and these mistakes start to look very expensive. Secondly, the sheet metal doesn´t lie flat, but bubbles up in the middle. The CNC system is equipped with an automatic height control which is supposed to compensate for material bubbling by sensing the torch voltage and jogging the torch up or down, but for some reason that doesn´t work. So the torch eventually hits the material and hangs up as well. The upshot of it is is that we have a program that works cutting three tapas at a time when we should be able to cut twelve, and two of us have to baby the machine the whole way in case something goes wrong. The whole cutting process almost takes longer than it would to just cut out the tapas manually. We´ve got about ninety right now, and cut sixty yesterday, but that took all day.

Hopefully the work of the afternoon will go better we can solve the motor problem, and I can calibrate the height control to avoid the torch catching the material. Hopefully.

Hasta Luego,
Drew

Trip to the Campo

I´m going on a trip with Cedesol´s executive director, Dave, and some others that is supposed to last five or six days, so this might be the last post for a while. We´re going either east or north, out of the mountains and into the semi-tropical lowlands. It could be either really buggy or freezing cold, if the prevailing wind is coming from the south pole. I´ve packed to be ready for anything.

The Hitchiker´s Guide to the Galaxy says that every good hitchiker should have a towel and know where it´s at at all times. The rationale is that a towel is an item with a number of uses: blanket, tent, air filter if you put it over your face, and, if it´s still clean, a way to dry yourself off after a shower. I think there´s some sort of wisdom in that, that the ones who really have it together "know where their towels are at." Needless to say, mine´s sitting in the bottom of my backpack along with my other warm clothes and a copy of Walden.

Happy travels all of my friends abroad and happy days to my friends and family at home. Until later!

Drew

Capinota

Much of Bolivia was once part of the Incan empire before the Spanish conquered it in the 16th century. The pattern of Spanish relations with the indigenous people was very different than that of the English in North America. Instead of killing all the natives wholesale and driving them off the land, the Spanish just impressed the ones who didn´t die from smallpox into forced labor. These encounters, as you may know, are the beginning of a long and successful history of entirely functional relations between Europeans and other cultures which continues to this day.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that a hybrid culture developed, part European, part native, in Bolivia as in other parts of the Iberian-conquered Americas. Over centuries of ethnic mixing, class division, revolutions, repressions, reforms, etc., Latin America simmered like a cultural stew. I find the music, people, and customs quite fascinating. Anyway, the upshot of that long discourse is that in Bolivia, there are actually four languages spoken: Spanish, Quechua, Aymara, and Guryani. Spanish, obviously, is the Latin American Spanish descended from colonial Spain. Quechua is the language of the Incan empire. Aymara is the language of the ancient indigenous kingdoms which the Incas conquered, and Guryani is the language of the tropical lowlands in the east. Take careful note, because although right now I´m going to leave you hanging, this language discussion actually is relevant to other parts of this post.

Sunday I traveled with the CEDESOL office staff to the village of Capinota, about 70 km (40 miles-ish) from Cochabamba. We also traveled with a team from the microenterprise Sobre la Roca ("Over the Rock," which is both a scriptural reference and a reference to the old three-stone cooking fire) to perform the bread and butter of distributing ecological cookstoves: demonstrations.

The point of a demonstration is to set up a bunch of stoves, cook stuff with them, feed curious onlookers with it, and then take down names as they line up to buy them. It´s slightly more complicated than that, but that´s the general idea. I helped set up one of the dual-burner rocket stoves, then helped Ruth, Dave´s wife and the owner of Sobre la Roca, make a dish called Pastel de Carne. In some parts of the world, this dish is called meatloaf. The recipe called for about a quart of ketchup and two dozen eggs, which I faithfully added to the bowl full of ground beef. Then, we separated it out into baking pans and put the Pastel de Carne into the solar box cookers we had set up around the plaza.

My next job was to hand out sheets of paper with the prices of the stoves to curious onlookers and answer any questions they asked me. Enter Drew the salesman, a job I was never particularly good at even when the clientele did speak my first language. I have never held a sales job. I sense something vaguely shady to working on commission. Luckily, I´m a volunteer so I don´t get commission, and my conscience doesn´t understand me when I speak Spanish.

About an hour into the sales session I spotted a woman looking curiously at one of the solar cookers. She was dressed in traditional campesino clothing: long dark pigtails, wide-brimmed hat, a particolored poncho and a long skirt. I went up to her, said "Perdon, señora" as politely as I could, gave her a sales sheet, and started my spiel. And I thought I was doing pretty well in Spanish with what I knew: este cocina no usa nada leña, this stove doesn´t use any firewood; usa solamente le energia del sol, it only uses the power of the sun; usualmente la comida cocina en uno y medio horas dependiente en el tipo de comida y el fuerzo del sol, usually the food cooks in 1 1/2 hours depending on the type of foor and the strength of the sun, et cetera, et cetera. I went on like this for two or three minutes, she wasn´t interrupting me with pesky questions that I didn´t have the vocabulary to answer, and I was too absorbed with forming cogent sentences in Spanish to really notice the blank look on her face. I was just about to drive my spiel home when she finally interrupted me and asked, "¿Sabes Quechua?" Do you know Quechua?

I think I froze in mid-sentence. I looked at Andrea, whom I hadn´t noticed come up. I think I looked like something that was about to be run over by a car. She looked at me, almost laughing out loud, and said, "Drew, that woman only speaks Quechua." Then she got Dora, who works at the Cedesol offices and knows Spanish and Quechua, to explain to the woman about solar cookers.

This is what I get for trying to learn Spanish.

I wasn´t the only victim of the Quechua language barrier, though. Later on, some of the people in the office were giving a presentation on the benefits of ecological cookers in Spanish in the town hall to a largely enraptured audience. The presentation was accompanied by a power point with lots of dramatic pictures, it was polished, it was professional. Andrea and I were in the courtyard outside, watching from the back because we had to take down stove orders from people going in and out. And then Andrea motioned me over and pointed to a woman slumped over in her chair, falling asleep. "She doesn´t understand a word they´re saying up there."

This is why one of the projects I´m working to secure funding for includes translators to translate educational materials on ecological cookers into Quechua, Aymara, and Guryani. Most often, the people who speak these indigenous languages live in the poor, remote rural areas where we go and have just the kind of problems we´re trying to help them fix. Cedesol and Sobre la Roca together have produced and distributed thousands of rocket stoves and solar cookers, but they´re trying to do more: combine the technology with education about how to manage kitchens in a sanitary way, how to use the stoves best to pasteurize water and reduce fuel expenses, and distribute more stoves. Cedesol and Sobre la Roca are smack in the middle of a process of industrial scale-up involving going from producing a few hundred stoves a month to producing over a thousand. One of our obstacles right now is the machine tool from the black lagoon, a beast CNC-controlled plasma cutter which is the machine shop equivalent, right now, of a bad-tempered donkey.

But more on that later.

Peace from Bolivia,
Drew

A quick one

Well, work´s progressing on fund raising, I have two grants in the pipe, several more I´ve going to write. Things are going quite well. Andrea and I just had a great conversation about language, why English is harder to learn than Spanish, feminism, machismo, cultural differences, life... having a 23 year old adopted sister with a totally different experience is a great way to gain perspective. Y practicar tu español.

Buena noche,

Drew

Monday Bloody Monday

OK, I guess I really need to stop posting every day because Katie Norris isn´t even in a foreign country and I´m posting more often than her. If you keep up with those sort of things (bottom link on the "other blogs you should read" section. I posted today. She didn´t. I swear I´m not going crazy because I blew past crazy without really looking at it many years before now.)

But: Monday. Bloody Monday.

It actually wasn´t that bad. But there´s just some intangible thing called "The monday factor" which makes you insert that sort of adjective. Since no one really tells me what to do at the foundation, I find ways to be useful. Today I started a grant application and then wrote a letter in Spanish to a Japanese agency concerned with Bolivian development. Ah, the times of grantwriting. Later on I helped unload the truck after some of the guys came back from a demonstration in the countryside. We unloaded the solar box cooker, thought we were done, and then Dave rather brusquely told me to finish unloading the truck. Fine, fine. I thought we were done. We grabbed a very heavy twin-burner rocket stove, some of the ceramic tiles used to make combustion chambers, chimnys, miscellania. Got off work around 6:30, and me and Andrea went to the mall and ate some very bad pizza. We also have a shared love of pizza, which I discovered in college when I realized I was eating an unhealthy amount of it. She promised to take me to a real pizza place this week. I didn´t know you could get Italian here but apparently you can. My surprise kind of reminds me of the scene in My Cousin Vinny when Marissa Tome steps out of the car, puts one spike heel in the Alabama mud, snaps a picture with a pink disposable camera, and says, "I bet their Chinese food is terrible."

For any of you who´ve seen the movie My Cousin Vinny, that is.

Also, thanks Steve.

Peace all and God bless,
Drew

Dances and Steak

Today, Sunday, marks the end of the first week. One-ninth of the time I am to spend in Bolivia has passed.

Wow. When I think of it that way, it seems like the time is flying by. And it seems that I still haven´t really found my niche yet here. All I´ve really done at CEDESOL is correct some web pages and do grant research. However, I suppose I can move things forward. There´s a couple grants I think I can help get written, and maybe even a technical project I can do if the wind blows right. The CNC plasma cutter the foundation purchased came with a CAD package. I checked it out the first day I was here, and it´s a little different than AUTOCAD, but not too bad. And there´s supposed to be a way to program the plasma cutter by feeding it a CAD drawing of the part to be cut. Actually, that would be pretty cool.

It is a bit lonely here, since I still can´t understand Spanish very well, ergo it is difficult to really talk and relate to people. Also, last night I had a very good dinner of charrisquo y sebollos (steak & onions) which then came back with a vengeance at 1:30 in the morning. I blame the onions. It seems to have passed now, though. Health is still lovely.

Since today was Sunday, I sat in bed praying the Rosary since we weren´t going to mass. I´ll have to ask if I can go next week, or whether the family goes to mass regularly. There´s a sacred heart of Jesus sculpture over my bed, though, so I´m sure I´ll get there sometime. I hope soon. Around noon we went to the Colegio de Juan Bosco, a primary/secondary school where Andrea´s mom is a math teacher. We went to watch her great-niece (gransobrina?) take part in a dance exhibition. There were a lot of great dances to great music, and freaking everyone was there. It was like watching a youth baseball tournament in the States, except without all the yelling and pressure. That part I liked. Afterward, the whole family went to a a charrisqueria for a celebratory lunch. Direct english translation: steakhouse. I had a real nice steak with a mustard sauce on top and tomato soup and drank like four glasses of Fanta, while at times managing to engage in conversation with the family. The Fanta was a nice, familiar touch. Since everyone did their own thing in the afternoon I read part of No Country for Old Men and now I´m here.

Tomorrow, I go to the workshop where Sobre la Roca and CEDESOL produce stoves. Hopefully there I can find something technical to make myself useful with.

Miss you all.

Drew

La fiesta de Corpus Christi

Today, Thursday, is the feast of Corpus C´hristi, or the Body of Christ. In Cochabamba, it´s a pretty big holiday, or at least it´s big enough so that everyone takes a day off from work. I, however, didn´t know this, and got up at 7 A.M. as usual for breakfast. How I´m Catholic and didn´t know about the feast of Corpus Christi I´ll never know.

Today, my family had their larger family over for lunch. It was kind of like Thanksgiving, except shorter and without a football game on T.V. But everyone was talking, usually too quickly for me to understand, and seemed to be having a good time. And the food was good. So today was pretty great.

To Be Continued...

Acclimating yourself to a new country is hard work. Luckily, Andrea´s family is extremely nice and understanding and accomodating, which is good ´cause I couldn´t possibly make it without them. Tomorrow, though, I´m taking a big step in getting used to Bolivia and paying the taxi fare to get us to and from work.

Speaking of work, I finally got some today. This morning Dave walked into the room where I was working on the computer, about to set up this blog and read my emails, and said:

"Why aren´t you doing anything?"

Now, generally the pace of life here should be pretty easy. Dave even told me that at the bus station when he picked me up. Now I was astonished. I told him that no one had given me anything to do yet.

"You can´t just sit around here waiting for something to happen to you. Take some initiative." Then he told me to help Severine, another intern, on translating some word documents for the CEDESOL web site.

Dave´s right, of course, though for a second I though he was mad at me. I have to take some initiative myself. It´s just kind of hard when you barely know the language.

Speaking of languages, Severine is from France and speaks pretty good Spanish and English in addition to her native French. What´s really weird, though, is when you realize that your native language is different than someone else´s, but you both have a third language you both know and you can actually understand each other in that. Holy moly, it´s strange.

I got to revising several pages she had written in some pretty good English, changing idiom when it was appropriate. They were about rocket stoves and solar cookers and why people should use them. I´ll recount the content for you a little bit:

A lot of people in Bolivia, especially in rural areas, cook with wood. If wood is burned incompletely, a lot of carcinogenic and toxic materials are released in the smoke. Outdoors, this isn´t a problem, but in an enclosed kitchen, two or three times a day, every day, this adds up to a serious health hazard, especially for women and children who hang around cookstoves the most. Additionally, wood combustion releases that famous greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the air. Meanwhile, generation upon generation of Bolivians cutting firewood, or leña, has led to widespread deforestation, which leads to erosion, soil depletion, and all kinds of things which throw the natural ecosystem out of kilter.

CEDESOL deals in developing and disseminating ecological cookers, technologies that have been developed since the ´70s to alleviate these kinds of problems. There are three main types: rocket stoves, solar cookers, and retained-heat cookers (colloquially known as "hayboxes.")

Rocket stoves work by improving the efficiency of wood combustion. They do this by making the fire as hot as possible, which means that it is largely smokeless: smoke is a byproduct of incomplete combustion, and therefore represents not only air pollution but inefficiency, chemical energy in the wood that hasn´t been converted into heat. Therefore, we want to make the fire as hot as possible. In a rocket stove, this is usually accomplished by an interesting trick of stove geometry. The stove is usually cylindrical and L-shaped, with the wood sticking into the horizontal branch and the combustion chamber in the elbow. The vertical branch is actually a chimney into which a pot is placed, with a small gap around the edge. When the fire really gets going, the heat and the chimney creates a draft which sucks air beneath the fuel wood in the bottom of the stove, which usually sits on a shelf with an air passage underneath. In this way the air gets preheated, which is important because then it won´t enter the fire cold and cool that down. The flue gases, largely without smoke, fly up the chimney at high velocity and scrape through the narrow gap between the pot and the chimney, punching through the boundary layer of still air which inhibits convective heat transfer to the pot.

There are finer points to the design, of course, but that´s the ¨rocket principle¨ that drives the whole thing. One of those finer points, however, was the materials testing for the ceramic combustion chambers which can both insulate the fire enough to keep it hot and still withstand the high temperatures without breaking. A good bit of that research was accomplished, if I´m not mistaken, at UD.

I´ve been writing for long enough, although that´s a brief explanation of one of the technologies CEDESOL works with and why it´s used. I´ve got to find something else to do tomorrow - probably having something to do with the website again.

A dios ustedes bendiga,

Dres

"Puedo obtener una visa aqui, si?"

My first real words in a Spanish-speaking country: "I can get a visa here, yes?" Getting to Cochabamba took more than 24 hours, and I didn´t sleep many of them. There isn´t much to say about the three flights from Cincinnati to Dallas to Miami to La Paz, except that all of them were late.

On the last flight to La Paz, I found Kim in the seat next to me. Kim´s another ETHOS engineer fron UD who will be working in La Paz this summer. Her organization is Proleña, which is similar to CEDESOL since they also develop ecological cookers: woodstoves, solar cookers, et cetera.

We touched down in La Paz around 6:30 in the morning and then began a harrowing trip through customs. Actually, it wasn´t that bad, but I have a neruotic fear of burecracy which included, in this instance, fantasies of being stranded in the airport for weeks living off peanuts because I couldn´t get my entrance visa. That fear prompted the aforementioned question to an immigration official, who took me to a teller window where someone scrutinized my passport and application, looked at me cursorily, and said "cien dollares." I laid 5 twenties on the counter and he stamped my passport. Golden.

Going through customs was pretty breezy, too. No long interrogations in closed rooms in front of a firing squad of customs agents, as I had also fantasized. I was a little afraid of this because in my check bag was stowed the sway bar linkage mentioned in the last post, which is for Dave´s car. How do you explain to a customs agent that you´re bringing car parts into the country? If you´re of age, they expect cigars and liquor, but car parts? I mean, really. Luckily, customs wasn´t much of a problem. I picked up my bag from the carosuel, handed them the customs declaration (marked nada de jurada - nothing to declare) and walked straight through to the other side. That´s when I finally began to breathe. The sweet, free air of Bolivia.

At the airport we were met by Juan Carlos, Kim´s contact in La Paz, who took us to his city apartment where Kim would be staying. He and his wife entertained us for a few hours and breakfast, and we talked a little about Proleña, ETHOS, ecological stoves, and our purpose here. Over a tasty breakfast of rolls, butter, jam, and coffee.

Looking out over La Paz, we began talking about people, about the poor of the world and the economic and social systems which keep them there. I found Juan Carlos and myself in agreement about many things, especially how the consumptive living in the first world is literally doing that - consuming the planet, consuming our fellow men. There´s a Shel Silverstein poem that I recall about a boy who started eating and just wouldn´t stop. He just kept eating, and when he had eaten all the food in the world, he started eating his family, everyone else, the planet itself, then the universe, and then finally he ate himself until there was nothing leftof him. I think it´s at least a fairly appropriate metaphor for how we affluent people do things. We are consuming everything we can until, eventually, we end up consuming ourselves.

The technolgies which Proleña and CEDESOL work with in Bolivia are energy technologies aimed at improving people´s lives by doing the same work, only doing it better and using less resources. That´s why rocket stoves are designed to burn with amazing efficiency and consume as little firewood as possible. That´s why Kim and I are here - to apply our expertise to a little bit of the problem of consumption and sustinability and injustice that all of us face, but also to learn about ourselves and our place in the world. To learn a little humility.

You start learning humility quickly, particularly in a foreign country where you barely know the language and must accept kindness from strangers. After breakfast, Juan Carlos drove me to the bus terminal where he paid my fare, because I hadn´t changed currency yet. And then, once everyone had boarded and we started the eight-hour bus ride, I realized that I was the only gringo on the bus. For the very first time in my life, really, I was a minority. It was my first experience of a loneliness, reinforced by differences of culture and wealth and class, of being alone amongst people who know each other, but don´t know you and are not like you.

And yet, everyone I met was insufferably kind. The elderly man in the window seat next to me instructed me in Spanish, punctuated by gestures so I could understand, how to give the bus conductor a ticket. At the halfway rest stop in a town on the Altiplano a woman named Nevia, a student of English, took it upon herself to help me make sense of Bolivian currency and buy food at the cafe, thankfully, since I had eaten very little on the flights and slept very little and was desperately in need of food. Then she held with me a very pleasant, bilingual conversation in which her English was light-years ahead of my Spanish. As we pulled into Cochabamba, she gave me her business card and told me that if I needed help or anything, to call her. The kindness of strangers, unprompted by anything except compassion, the recognition that someone is not from here and in need - the experience of it is one of the most incredible experiences of human dignity I have ever had.

During the bus ride, I read the entire Hitchiker´s Guide to the Galaxy and tried to understand a little bit of Spanish comedies. At the station in Cochabamba, David, the American expatriate who has worked with CEDESOL for something like 30 years in Bolivia and for whom I bought the car parts, was waiting for me with his wife. Thankfully, blessedly, I had reached home base. He drove me for a tour of the city and then to the house I´m calling home for the next nine weeks or so.

I finally met Andrea, who´s only a little older than me and works in CEDESOL, and her mother and father. They offered me a welcome dinner and then showed me a shower and a bed, gratefully accepted. In another humbling experience, almost all conversation in the household is held in Spanish. I can understand some, respond very simply, but other than that not much. I´m hoping the intensive exposure will help me come along quickly. I´m going to have to work hard to study the language and become at least conversational very quickly. And that, my friends, is where I leave you, por que hay 11:30 por la mañana en las oficinas de CEDESOL y las personas son hablando en español, y tengo que escuchar. Because it´s 11:30 in the morning at the CEDESOL offices and people are speaking Spanish, and I need to listen.

Packing

Today is the big day; my flight leaves at 4 P.M. I think I'll be at the airport around 1, though. I want to take no chances. If all goes well, I'll touch down in La Paz around 5:30 tomorrow morning and then clear customs, getting my entrance visa. I didn't have time to mail my application materials to the consulate in the U.S. before I left, but Dave, the head of the CEDESOL foundation in Cochabamba, says that he prefers I get the visa at the La Paz airport. I'll cool my heels in the airport until about 8 AM, finding breakfast along the way. Then I'll take a taxi to the bus station in La Paz and board a bus for Cochabamba. That trip will take about 8 or 10 hours, so I might not reace Cochabamba until at least midafternoon. Then I'll meet Dave or Andrea, an engineer in CEDESOL whom I've been in contact with, and get settled. Keep me in your prayers: hopefully this will go off without a hitch.

I stayed up until 3 A.M. last night packing. My luggage includes some fairly unorthodox items which might give you some taste of the trip. In my carry-on luggage are:

• 2 40-ounce jars of creamy peanut butter. This is one of Dave's special requests. Peanut butter is hard to come by in South America.
• 2 stabilizer bar linkages for a 2001 Ford Expedition, 5.4-liter engine, 4WD. These linkages help stabilize the car's suspension, which is probably very important on the largely unimproved country roads in Bolivia. Once again, spare parts for Fords are hard to come by down there.
• Two special shirts and pants which act like sunscreen when you put them on. The utility of these is obvious: Cochabamba's about 3500 meters above sea level, which means that the sun is generally more intense since there's less of the earth's atmosphere to absorb sunlight. Even though it's winter down there, a redhead walking around during the daytime will probably last about as long as a vampire in midsummer. Or most of the concertgoers at Warped Tour, who inexplicably wear hoodies and black jeans with chains on one of the hottest days of the year. No matter which way you slice it, you're cooked.
• Books. The first is John Neafsey's A Sacred Voice is Calling, a book on vocation which I have to read as part of one of the grants I got. It's good, though, especially if you wonder what you should be doing in life. The second book is Henry David Thoreau's Walden, which is another book on how to live well. I read it in high school, but I think it deserves a second read to catch stuff that I missed. The third book is Douglas Adams' The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've never read it, but I hear that it's funny and out there and somewhat philosophical. I'm saving it for the bus ride to Cocha when I'll have to stay awake for fear of someone on the bus stealing by luggage. In the same vein are Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (to save until July 25 and the return bus ride) and Stephen Chobsky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Don't ask me how I fit in all these books. I don't know myself.

In addition to all that, there's a Spanish phrasebook, a first aid kit including antibiotic ointment, band-aids, ibuprofen, and aloe vera, a regulation ultimate sport frisbee, and all that good stuff. I suppose I'm ready, or as ready as I'll ever be.

By the way, check out the blog of Pete Kolis. Most of you know this already, but he's a good friend of mine and a very good mechanical engineer who's going to Sabana Grande in Nicaragua with another ETHOS project. While there, he'll be working with a team from UD which won the UD business plan competition with a design and a business plan for solar-powered autoclaves (devices which sterilize medical equipment.) They'll be refining the design and testing prototypes while they're there: http://petesabanagrande.blogspot.com/

Welcome

If you're reading this, either I or a friend have probably invited you to read it. Even if you looked for this particular blog yourself, or just happened to stumble upon this particular alleyway in the endless metropolis of cyberspace, welcome. Welcome to a project I'll call, for lack of a better name, "Drew's Bolivia Blog," which will be the shared record of my reflections and experiences for the nine weeks of this summer I spend in Cochabamba, Bolivia. I hope that what I have to say here interests you, entertains you, or enlightens you. But I have to make the disclaimer that none of what is to follow is guaranteed to do any of these things. There is a well-worn proverb which says that "you get what you pay for." This blog is delivered to you entirely free of charge.

I don't have entirely altruistic motives for writing this, truth be told: I am required by the good folks at ETHOS University of Dayton back home to write weekly status reports so they know that I'm OK. This blog is one way in which I'm going to fulfill that requirement: in essence, this is a way to let you know that I'm still breathing. This means that in theory, these blog posts should come along at least once a week, maybe more frequently. Some of you know, however, that I'm extraordinarily bad at returning calls, emails, letters, or just about any form of communication known to man including the spoken word. It's a failing of mine. Hopefully, though, the required status reports will keep me on the level. Another note: while this will probably my main form of communication, it certainly won't be the only one. Some of you whom I'm in the habit of keeping in regular postal contact with will receive letters, emails, postcards, etc.

While we're on the subject of status reports, I'll talk a little about the content of this blog: it's still to be determined. The status reports themselves will probably include somewhat technical accounts of the work being done with the CEDESOL foundation, which I'll most likely email to Bro. Aaron, Dr. Pinnell & Co. and post in duplicate here. However, this kind of technical stuff won't be the main part of this blog. Instead, the blog will be an online journal of my experiences in Cochabamba and my reflections on them. Hopefully by reading it once it takes shape you'll get to borrow my eyes and ears to experience Cochabamba. Hopefully by borrowing my experience of Cochabamba, you'll come to understand a bit of the experience and life of its people as well. In the spirit of that, I'll leave you with a traditional salutation for a Spanish-speaking country.

Saludos (regards),

Drew