Only in Bolivia...
Unfortunately, no matter how much fun it is to have a very forward not-so-gentlemanly monkey attack you with kisses in the middle of the jungle, my joy was a little bit hampered by the conservation conversation (ooo, wouldn´t that be fun to try to say out loud after three months of talking almost all Spanish) I had shortly after. The way this park is managed, monkeys are more than accustomed to human presence (bet you couldn´t have already gathered that from the photos), and the result is that any sickness that a human has poses a major exposure risk to the monkeys of the park, or, possibly, to a whole species of monkeys in the Chapare. We spent a chunk of conversation debating if the benefits of environmental awareness and protection that came out of such close contact with the rainforest outweighed this risk to the animals...we still don´t have a solid answer.
Well, that´s about it about this last month! In other news, I have pierced my ears for the first time ever in my life because of the gorgeous earrings down here (my family and I went on a family piercing trip). I also discovered about a month ago how much of a sense of humor that my host family and I share, which is pretty much down to a tee, and have now found that I prefer to spend my time at home nearly rolling around on the ground laughing and more or less seeing how much we can lovingly insult each other, instead of going out (wild, I know). Also, I´m feeling really lucky to be coming home to visit my family for Christmas, so if you want to get together, shoot me an email or call my home phone (or my Bolivian cell phone, if you really want to burn the bucks)! And thanks to all of you who are donating!! I´ve gotten some really great emails from some of you, and it has been so inspiring!!
That´s about all! I hope all is well and hopefully I´ll be seeing a good chunk of you all (my, what an image) soon!
Cheers,
Sarah
...can you ignore the fact that you have a blog for a few weeks right after asking for donations.
No, really, I'm sorry I've been slacking on this! I'm going to try to give a quick update on my life and the craziness that has been going on in the last month or so!
No, really, I'm sorry I've been slacking on this! I'm going to try to give a quick update on my life and the craziness that has been going on in the last month or so!
So. Only in Bolivia....
...can a first birthday party take 3 months to prepare for and seem as important as an (American) wedding.
I say American wedding because Bolivians put even more effort into their weddings than their children´s first birthdays. One of my cousins was having her first birthday while I was here, so the family bussed it down to Santa Cruz, the tropical paradise (or for me, inferno) 10 hours away from Cochabamba. Although I didn´t get to see a bit of Santa Cruz while I was there, I did get to experience a full-on Bolivian first birthday celebration, which, it turns out, is a really big deal here. My Aunt Carmen, the grandmother of the baby, spent a full month up until 3, 4, or 5 in the morning every night, and she, along with her daughter and the mother of the baby, made everything from porcelain invitations (for 80 people!) to handmade goodie baskets (for 80 people!) to homemade artwork. To give a bit of a taste for what the party looked like:
My cousin, Andrea, and her now one-year-old baby, Yara, in the middle of a mess of dressed up kids. You´ll notice a Snow White in the middle of the bottom row...this little angel refused to play any of the games the entire party because she ¨was waiting for her dwarfs to arrive,¨and when they never did arrive, she promised us that she would call their cells and see what was wrong. No, really.
This is me, getting all cuddly with the entrance decorations. The balloons here and in the other photo above it were the proud work of a morning of turning purple and passing out.
Please tell me why this evil, pink-bellied monster is an appropriate one-year-old birthday decoration?!?!?!
I got stuck in a clown sandwich by the end of the night. I´m putting this up because I FINALLY have a photo of my other sister, Boria, the 24-year-old, for you all, but, unfortunately, she is a clown. This is the only photo I have of her, but don´t worry, it shows her good side (Just kidding, but for the record, she fortunately doesn´t speak English).
The other part of the festivities included the mini-mountain of food that my family prepared: two gigantic cakes, empanadas, traditional Santa Cruz cheese rolls, enough traditional Bolivian candies to make any kids´teeth fall out, a variety of banana breads, dulce de leche tarts, other sweet breads and muffins, and some chocolate chip cookies that I made to sport my good ol´Uncle Sam pride (chocolate chip cookies are so rare here that I was unable to find chocolate chips...the scandal!!!). I blame all this food on the reason why I was unable to hold my own in limbo with the kids...a near-disaster considering the skirt I was wearing and the 80 people present. Boria, the clown sister holding the limbo stick at the time, later told me that, as I fell to the floor, she didn´t know if she should try to grab my hand or my skirt. Though no worries, nothing happened.
After this weekend of preparation and then a party full of food, clowns, musical chairs, and many, many people (but unfortunately for one little girl, no dwarfs), I was exhausted and ready to go home.
My Aunt Carmen later asked me how I liked Santa Cruz that weekend, because I hadn´t yet been there. I responded by telling her I really liked her house.
Needless to say, I didn´t mention to any Bolivian that their one-year-old has no chance of remembering probably the second-biggest party of their life. But it was fun for the rest of us. :)
Only in Bolivia...
...can a first birthday party take 3 months to prepare for and seem as important as an (American) wedding.
I say American wedding because Bolivians put even more effort into their weddings than their children´s first birthdays. One of my cousins was having her first birthday while I was here, so the family bussed it down to Santa Cruz, the tropical paradise (or for me, inferno) 10 hours away from Cochabamba. Although I didn´t get to see a bit of Santa Cruz while I was there, I did get to experience a full-on Bolivian first birthday celebration, which, it turns out, is a really big deal here. My Aunt Carmen, the grandmother of the baby, spent a full month up until 3, 4, or 5 in the morning every night, and she, along with her daughter and the mother of the baby, made everything from porcelain invitations (for 80 people!) to handmade goodie baskets (for 80 people!) to homemade artwork. To give a bit of a taste for what the party looked like:
My cousin, Andrea, and her now one-year-old baby, Yara, in the middle of a mess of dressed up kids. You´ll notice a Snow White in the middle of the bottom row...this little angel refused to play any of the games the entire party because she ¨was waiting for her dwarfs to arrive,¨and when they never did arrive, she promised us that she would call their cells and see what was wrong. No, really.
This is me, getting all cuddly with the entrance decorations. The balloons here and in the other photo above it were the proud work of a morning of turning purple and passing out.
Please tell me why this evil, pink-bellied monster is an appropriate one-year-old birthday decoration?!?!?!
I got stuck in a clown sandwich by the end of the night. I´m putting this up because I FINALLY have a photo of my other sister, Boria, the 24-year-old, for you all, but, unfortunately, she is a clown. This is the only photo I have of her, but don´t worry, it shows her good side (Just kidding, but for the record, she fortunately doesn´t speak English).The other part of the festivities included the mini-mountain of food that my family prepared: two gigantic cakes, empanadas, traditional Santa Cruz cheese rolls, enough traditional Bolivian candies to make any kids´teeth fall out, a variety of banana breads, dulce de leche tarts, other sweet breads and muffins, and some chocolate chip cookies that I made to sport my good ol´Uncle Sam pride (chocolate chip cookies are so rare here that I was unable to find chocolate chips...the scandal!!!). I blame all this food on the reason why I was unable to hold my own in limbo with the kids...a near-disaster considering the skirt I was wearing and the 80 people present. Boria, the clown sister holding the limbo stick at the time, later told me that, as I fell to the floor, she didn´t know if she should try to grab my hand or my skirt. Though no worries, nothing happened.
After this weekend of preparation and then a party full of food, clowns, musical chairs, and many, many people (but unfortunately for one little girl, no dwarfs), I was exhausted and ready to go home.
My Aunt Carmen later asked me how I liked Santa Cruz that weekend, because I hadn´t yet been there. I responded by telling her I really liked her house.
Needless to say, I didn´t mention to any Bolivian that their one-year-old has no chance of remembering probably the second-biggest party of their life. But it was fun for the rest of us. :)
Only in Bolivia...
...can you be monkey-loved in the middle of a tropical forest.
One weekend, after going to Santa Cruz with my family, I went with the FSD interns and a couple of friends to the Chapare, a tropical rainforest about 4 hours away from high-altitude, desert-y Cochabamba. This place was so beautiful!! One of my friends we went with happened to be an excellent Bolivian frog-ologist (forgot the name in English) that had done pretty extensive research in the area, and the result was that we had connections all over the place. We got to go on a night hike to see a tarantula devouring a cockroach, got to explore bat caves and get within a couple feet of fruit and VAMPIRE bats, got to explore caves with countrywide-famous birds called Guarachos, which, to me, no matter the fact that this is the only place in the world you can see them, are still really ugly; and to camp in National Parks and in university research areas, where we snuggled uncomfortably into our hot and humid tents after being told that, if we slept outside in the fresher air, a bug that enjoyed to crawl up noses and infest brains would happily do just that. Here´s one photo from one of the hikes, plus the vampire bats:
We also "had the privelege" of getting up at 4:45 AM to hike to an area to see wild parrots. Unfortunately due to our lethargy at such an unpleasant hour, our inability to get a taxi willing to drive us to a small village where they were unlikely to be able to find people to drive back, and the donkey-worthy stubbornness of my fellow intern, Evan, to find a river crossing where his delicate feet would not get wet (just kidding, amigo :) ), we didn't get to see too many parrots.
To cross the river without getting wet, Evan spent a good amount of time bushwhacking through the rainforest for 30 yards or so, an impressive feet if you saw how thick this vegetation was (for conservationists out their yelling out in indignation, rainforest vegetation grows back to exactly how it was 10 years later...ooo, impressive!), and was now at a loss as to how too continue (the vegetation was too thick now) and had decided to start hanging from several vines above the river to see if this helped him magically cross the water (I think that is what he was waiting for...there isn't really any other explanation for what he was doing).
Before he did this, however, he had to get rid of the pineapple that we had brought along on the hike and sportingly carried for a few hours, and he felt the only way to do this would be to chuck it across the river to his friends waiting with open arms, no matter how impatient we were getting with his silly shenanigans. He spent a few good minutes wrestling with the foilage, trying to get a good angle on the throw, and chucked it...right into the river. I panicked to see my favorite fruit swept away from us by rushing water, and on the instinct that any pineapple-obsessed person possesses, jumped into the river and rescued it. As I got back out, Evan was still hanging from his vines wondering what he was going to do next, and we heard a macaw call, and looked up, and saw the last of the parrots, a beautiful green and yellow blur of eagle-sized birds, fly above our heads. Evan, to state the obvious, did not get to see them )and a few seconds later, was wet up to his knees as he conceded defeat and jumped into the river to cross it). All in all, we probably only saw 20 parrots or so, and only 2 species of an amazing amount of species that live there. However, at least we got to eat pineapple. ;)
THEN, we went off to what could well be my favorite place in the world, which had LIVE, UNCAGED MONKEYS!! (I don´t know why I had to stress that they were alive just now, but it is a perk.) The place is called Parque Nacional Machia, and for a few hours we hiked around the place while monkeys wrestled at our feet, jumped on our heads, and tried to sneak things out of our pockets. THEN, because we had been walking for several hours in a tropical rain forest and had sweated a pretty amount, one monkey JUMPED on me and began to lick my neck for a solid minute! I feel that a play-by-play in pictures speak louder than words:
To cross the river without getting wet, Evan spent a good amount of time bushwhacking through the rainforest for 30 yards or so, an impressive feet if you saw how thick this vegetation was (for conservationists out their yelling out in indignation, rainforest vegetation grows back to exactly how it was 10 years later...ooo, impressive!), and was now at a loss as to how too continue (the vegetation was too thick now) and had decided to start hanging from several vines above the river to see if this helped him magically cross the water (I think that is what he was waiting for...there isn't really any other explanation for what he was doing).
Before he did this, however, he had to get rid of the pineapple that we had brought along on the hike and sportingly carried for a few hours, and he felt the only way to do this would be to chuck it across the river to his friends waiting with open arms, no matter how impatient we were getting with his silly shenanigans. He spent a few good minutes wrestling with the foilage, trying to get a good angle on the throw, and chucked it...right into the river. I panicked to see my favorite fruit swept away from us by rushing water, and on the instinct that any pineapple-obsessed person possesses, jumped into the river and rescued it. As I got back out, Evan was still hanging from his vines wondering what he was going to do next, and we heard a macaw call, and looked up, and saw the last of the parrots, a beautiful green and yellow blur of eagle-sized birds, fly above our heads. Evan, to state the obvious, did not get to see them )and a few seconds later, was wet up to his knees as he conceded defeat and jumped into the river to cross it). All in all, we probably only saw 20 parrots or so, and only 2 species of an amazing amount of species that live there. However, at least we got to eat pineapple. ;)
THEN, we went off to what could well be my favorite place in the world, which had LIVE, UNCAGED MONKEYS!! (I don´t know why I had to stress that they were alive just now, but it is a perk.) The place is called Parque Nacional Machia, and for a few hours we hiked around the place while monkeys wrestled at our feet, jumped on our heads, and tried to sneak things out of our pockets. THEN, because we had been walking for several hours in a tropical rain forest and had sweated a pretty amount, one monkey JUMPED on me and began to lick my neck for a solid minute! I feel that a play-by-play in pictures speak louder than words:
Unfortunately, no matter how much fun it is to have a very forward not-so-gentlemanly monkey attack you with kisses in the middle of the jungle, my joy was a little bit hampered by the conservation conversation (ooo, wouldn´t that be fun to try to say out loud after three months of talking almost all Spanish) I had shortly after. The way this park is managed, monkeys are more than accustomed to human presence (bet you couldn´t have already gathered that from the photos), and the result is that any sickness that a human has poses a major exposure risk to the monkeys of the park, or, possibly, to a whole species of monkeys in the Chapare. We spent a chunk of conversation debating if the benefits of environmental awareness and protection that came out of such close contact with the rainforest outweighed this risk to the animals...we still don´t have a solid answer.
Well, that´s about it about this last month! In other news, I have pierced my ears for the first time ever in my life because of the gorgeous earrings down here (my family and I went on a family piercing trip). I also discovered about a month ago how much of a sense of humor that my host family and I share, which is pretty much down to a tee, and have now found that I prefer to spend my time at home nearly rolling around on the ground laughing and more or less seeing how much we can lovingly insult each other, instead of going out (wild, I know). Also, I´m feeling really lucky to be coming home to visit my family for Christmas, so if you want to get together, shoot me an email or call my home phone (or my Bolivian cell phone, if you really want to burn the bucks)! And thanks to all of you who are donating!! I´ve gotten some really great emails from some of you, and it has been so inspiring!!
That´s about all! I hope all is well and hopefully I´ll be seeing a good chunk of you all (my, what an image) soon!
Cheers,
Sarah
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