Now that Carnival is over, everything is much more relaxed and I’m slightly less paranoid about walking down the street. So life is good. Especially since I’m loving my training classes. Last week we planted a garden of tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, cucumbers, cabbage, lettuce, beets, carrots, and beans. The only unfortunate part was that I had to pick up piles of cow poop with my bare hands to mix into the soil. That’s right, bare hands. Poop. Yuck. But hey, it was kind of old and dry, I’m not sick as of yet, and we have a gorgeous garden, so it was worth it. By the end of the three months they say we’ll be able to eat some of the veggies! We also made a compost pile next to it, which was really fun. And I wasn’t even poop girl for that project. I just dissolved this sugar stuff and mixed it with yeast to feed all the little microorganisms. To give you a mental picture, I was wearing this huge, extremely ugly sun hat that all the women wear here because the sun will just burn your head right off, and sitting next to a pig sty filled with 12 3-day-old piglets and their mom. I also occasionally had to use one of the several machetes to cut more grass for the compost pile. Machete and sun hat makes me just about as Bolivian as I can get.
On Thursday my group traveled to Pacona, this tiny town about 3 hours away in the middle of nowhere. We had to take land rovers because we basically had to off-road it over half of the way there. It was insane. We crossed rivers, drove over huge piles of rocks from landslides, and blazed right through thick mud. Just the ride alone was well worth the trip. But once we were there we learned how to make biofertilizers and natural pesticides. It was really fun. We spent one night there, in a nunnery in fact. They blared these horribly loud organs every hour on the hour. And the worst part was that the organs were broken, so they started out nice and happy, and then after about 2 minutes they warped into this demonic sound that no one seemed to notice except for us. So for 5 minutes every hour on the hour we listened to satanic organ music. But hey, that’s just part of the fun I guess.
There are about 400 inhabitants, but I personally saw about 10. We worked in the garden and green house all day Friday (in between eating this HUGE meals like every 2 hours) and then headed back Friday afternoon. But get this, we found out there were Incan ruins close to Pacona, so we convinced our instructor to take us there!! It was amazing!! We had to walk a ways to get to the starting point because the car couldn’t ford this huge river, but that was even more of an adventure. I crossed the sketchiest bridge I’ve ever seen in my whole life and lived to tell about it. And the ruins themselves were pretty neat. I mean, it’s just a pile of rubble, but you could still feel something spooky/creepy/awesome about it. And there was also a huge beautiful waterfall we had to walk under to get there, which was amazing.
So after spending an hour or two there we finally headed back (at 5:30pm!!). I was starving even then, but little did I know how long I was going to have to wait. We told our host families that we would be back for dinner, so we couldn’t stop along the way to eat (not that there was anything even remotely close to us). Finally around 8pm we got into Cochabamaba and would have been home around 8:20 except that there was a blocade up for some reason, meaning that the roads into our community were closed!! We sat in a big line for a while, then the driver jumped the curb and starting driving on the sidewalk to try to get out of the line. We then jumped over the concrete divide and starting driving in the opposite direction of traffic trying to get to a road further ahead. It was crazy. Once we finally turned down a road (no one knew where we were, not even the drivers), we just drove around and around trying to find back roads into the community. We asked everyone we came across, but most of them were drunk. It was such an adventure. Finally around 9:30 we got into our town and I was dropped off at home safe and sound. I’ll certainly never forget that fieldtrip!! And I’ll also never underestimate the strength of a land rover!