Donate, Take Two!!

Hi everyone! So it seems that this Donate button doesn't work for some of you, or all of you, so I'm going to go ahead and post this link as well to the PayPal page: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=967028

That should work!! If it doesn't, please let me know!

Also, if you have any questions about this project or anything else, my email is Sarah.Machacek@asu.edu. Thanks!!

Peace,
Sarah

DONATE DONATE DONATE!!!

Hi all!

OK, so the time has come for me to grovel at your feet and kiss the hems of your jeans...in other words, my non-profit here in Bolivia, Fundacion Gaia Pacha, could really use some of your cash, and there is a PayPal donate button at the bottom of this blog post that eagerly awaits your enthusiastic clicking.

While our educational center has a great start with plenty of games and educational activities, it is far from being a sustainable project - we need money to be able to buy educational supplies for the kids as more and more of them come (in addition to working with local elementary, middle, and high schools, we are now also holding workshops for orphanages in the city, meaning many more children will be using the space) to learn about recycling, compost, climate change, water conservation, and the lovely science involved in turning cow waste into workable soil and cooking gas. We are looking for general donations for these supplies, as well as to hopefully fulfill our dreams of having more education resources for the kids, like environmental books, a TV/DVD player and environmental DVDs, and enough money to create a publication for the public hear to see what we are doing. Here are a few photos of the various educational activities of the project:

Another volunteer, Ali, teaches the really young kids about the transfer of energy in the world. This gets really cute as the kids flip out with excitement when they realize that they get to play with little foam animals - so much excitement that such incidents as the loss of frog legs and flower petals are not uncommon - one of the many reasons to donate!! :)

Proof that I actually work - the kids are putting together the water cycle and discovering the many uses of water, trying to fish foam pieces of the water cycle out of a bucket before they fish out the uses of water and have to lose water from the "Water-meter," which is much more fun to say in Spanish - "aguametro!"
Kids are learning how to separate the trash to make recycling and composting easier by racing each other to separate boxes of trash the fastest. They also learn how long it takes for each material to decompose if it is not recycled or composted, as the box for organic material is closest to the box of trash and takes the least effort to run to, and the box for plastics is the furthest away. I tried to make it more realistic by suggesting that we put the plastic box 1000 feet away from the others, as that is how many years it takes to decompose, but the others stopped me.

This is our climate change game - unfortunately I don't have a photo of everyone in action because I haven't been able to spend much time at this game, but it is a great game of tag between some kids, that are rays of the sun that trying to reach the Earth and return to the outer atmosphere, and greenhouse gases, which prowl the inner atmosphere trying to tag the sun, which is then caught in the atmosphere.

If you would like more information on my non-profit, my blog post in October, titled "Gaia Pacha, my work" is a good explanation.

Thank you so much for your support!!! I have a fundraising goal of around $1500, as a month's worth of supplies to keep our little education center going costs around $1oo, but really, every dollar counts, so whatever amount you are able to donate is very appreciated!!! Just click the "Donate" button below - it is a personalized FSD donation button for my project. Or, if you prefer to send a check by mail, all checks can be made out to "Foundation for Sustainable Development" with my name, Sarah Machacek, in the memo line, and mailed to:

Gaia Pacha Fundraising
c/o Gary and Pat Machacek
203 Twin Willow Dr.
Boise, ID 83706

Thank you all!!! Here is the donate button for you all to click on (Although under "Purpose" it says the money will go to Aldeas Infantiles SOS, it is really going to Gaia Pacha - Aldeas Infantiles SOS is the location of our little farm):



Peace,
Sarah

We made up.

OK, quick and happy update about the organization change from yesterday...I talked with my supervisors today, and they have had an amazing project in the back of their heads for quite some time now that involves working with blind children in environmental themes. There is a center here that works on capacitating (ok, it's not a word in English, but it is in Spanish and you get the idea) blind adults and children to read, write, cook, etc. etc., and they have been hoping for a kids environmental education program for a bit. So this is what I will be developing and doing for the next several months, in addition to working on the other education program with the Ecoteca that we have already been developing :)

Basically, I feel extremely lucky to be working with Gaia Pacha and my coworkers, and am super excited. No, seriously, I had to control myself from screaming those really giddy happy screams in the street this morning. It was so good. I love Bolivia.

OK, that is all! I still hope all is well :)

Ciao,
Sarah

So I just realized I never explained the title of that last blog...Lake Titicaca is on the border of Bolivia and Peru, and Bolivians proudly say that Bolivia got the "Titi" half, and Peru got the "caca" half ("caca" means "poo" in Spanish, I think we can all imagine what "titi" means.)

The Titi part of Lake Titicaca, woohoo!!!

Holas todos!!!

I hope all is well with you all! These last two weeks have been really crazy for me, mostly emotionally, so I will try to relate to you all that has happened.

First of all, I am starting to feel that Cochabamba is my home. Not to be super corny, but I know that I am feeling comfortable in a new place when I go out for a run and everything seems familiar and happy. I definitely miss everyone at home still, family and friends in Idaho and friends in Arizona, and I miss a lot of things I am so familiar with, like backpacking and climbing trips in Arizona and yummy mochas and cooking my own food and playing with my sister's dog, but let's be honest, I wouldn't be able to do all that at once anyways even if I were in the States, so it is A-OK. I just feel like I have made good friends here , both Bolivian and Gringan, and am liking what I am doing, so I am feeling super lucky right now.

Alright, blah blah blah Sarah, enough already.

So I just got back from Lake Titicaca with the organization that I came here with, Foundation for Sustainable Development (FSD), and it was so beautiful and so much fun!!! We started the trip off in Copacabana, where that lovely Barry Manilow song got stuck in my head, even though this Gringo-tourist hotspot is a bit different from the nightclub in Cuba. For some reason, Gringo hippies lined the streets, with dreadlocks and baggy colorful pants, so it was our group of gringos plus a bunch of these young hooligans, as my mom would lovingly describe them :)

This was our mediocre view from Copacabana:


Highlights from the trip include spending a whole day sitting around, chatting and eating. Maybe not the typical tourist activity (ok, well the eating maybe), but seriously, spending a day eating trout that has not been in a warm truck for hours on end, like you would find in Cochabamba, was wonderful, and my fellow FSD-ers . And they have trout of all kinds...grilled ("trout a la iron," as a direct translation...yummy, no?), with garlic, stuffed with ham, fried in butter...I could go on for this for so long, it was so yummy. Probably doesn't sound like much in the US, but in the fish-starved heart of Bolivia where I am currently living, fresh trout that is a cousin of the fresh salmon in America was nothing short of heaven. Mix that with having Argentinian mate (a tea) that I have been missing for the past few months, eating pasankalla (a delicious type of popcorn here that the cover with yummy sweet crunchiness that all Bolivians eat like Americans eat potato chips...go figure that obesity is a bit more prevalent in our good ol' home country), and chatting among good company, it was a really good time.

The second day we spent some time being a bit more touristy, going to the Isla del Sol, which is a sacred Incan island and an extremely interesting place. Here is my favorite photo from the boat ride:


I feel lucky to say that , thanks to this trip to the Isla del Sol, I have now seen the OFFICIAL birthplace of the sun and moon, not to mention civilization, as well as the footprints of the sun itself (which I have dirtied with my own footprints, seen below).


This was such a gorgeous place (made more beautiful by the fresh trout we ate...have I mentioned that yet???)...here is one more photo of the view from the Isla, complete with six extremely good looking people (sorry, I drank my first cup of coffee in a week or so shortly before writing this blog...bad idea):

We spent the next day racing an international bike race to La Paz, where we spent time in the Plaza Principal where President Evo Morales was somewhere nearby (I tried to convince my fellow gringos to hold up "We heart you, Evo!" signs, in hopes of seeing him) and in the Mercado de Brujas, the local witch's market, which looked like this (why yes Virginia, llama fetuses sold as sacrificial offerings for $4.50 a pop do exist):
I end my Lake Titicaca sum-up with a photo of Jeremy, one of my fellow interns, simply because I promised to post this success photo on facebook (he has been trying to find a campesino technicolor hat like this since he's gotten here, and finally managed to), but facebook doesn't let me laptop update photos. So.....enjoy?


The other big news from these last few days is that I am thinking about changing host organizations but really don't want to, so it has kind of been a bit of an emotional roller coaster for me. My current organization has me doing exactly what I would like to be doing for the rest of my life, and is extremely fun for me. Unfortunately, it is so chock-full of projects that my supervisors really only have time to work on mine, the kids education program, during the mornings, and the result is that I'm half-bored in the afternoons (though I have to admit, enough time to work, run, travel, and spend time with friends and family has not been the hardest thing to adjust to). Talking to FSD about this, they felt that the best situation would be to change organizations (the one they had in mind is called the Insitute for Human Development, whose main focus is AIDS, sexual identity, and....the environment??? Not quite sure how my specialty fits in, but I guess it does somewhere). Unfortunately, I am far too attached to my host organization, its mission, and my coworkers, for this to be a happy thing, and today I had to let my supervisors know what was going on so that we could "discuss our options" (sounds dire, no?).

No matter how sad I am about this, I have to laugh a bit (OK, and nearly cry a bit) about how much this possibility of organization change has resulted in me feeling like I broke up with my NGO and my supervisors. I have become really attached to my organization, through the hot and heavy dates to the farm and through our shared love for the environment, spending time with kids, and long walks on the beach. We even spent this really good night out last night as a goodbye party to a few American volunteers, where my supervisors and I really connected, having a fun time discussing environmental issues in Bolivia, and then the morning after (my NGO and I modestly went back to our own beds in our own houses last night) we spent a really fun morning chatting more and doing crosswords in Spanish (ok, they did the crosswords, I watched and repeatedly said, "Que significa esto?" aka, "What the heck does that mean?" while pointing at every clue). And then, perfect timing, I had to drop the bomb, telling them that FSD was thinking about letting me see other NGOs. Such a fun relationship turned sour extremely fast. What followed was a really ugly session of yelling, getting ceramic dishes thrown at my head, and watching photos of me and my NGO being ripped in half. No really, it's me, not you!!

OK, seriously though, I was really sad about telling my supervisors, who have turned into good friends, about this possibility, and am trying very hard to find a way to stay with them. The result is that I am hopefully going to take on my own environmental project through them in the afternoons, such as establishing a similar environmental education program in the Zona Sur, the poorest part of Cochabamba and one where water issues (aka, not having any, or at least not having any that does not have human waste in it), or working with one of the American-based schools here (which happen to have a lot of money, hopefully, that they are willing to throw at NGOs) to establish their own environmental program.

Anyways, that's my last two weeks, the good and the bad!! Hope all is well with you all!!

Cheers,
Sarah