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
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
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
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
Sunday, May 25, 2008
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
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
Thursday, May 22, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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
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
Monday, May 19, 2008
"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.
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.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
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:
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/
Monday, May 12, 2008
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
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
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