July 15
Successfully washed my clothes by hand for the first time in my life yesterday. Now today (at around 5 pm) they’re fairly dry from hanging. I feel like a real rugged man now.
I felt significant again today. In the morning Ariel (the little boy with the heavy accent who has taken to me, and I to him) and I worked on adding, subtracting, and comparing numbers (greater than, less than, etc.). Subtracting ended up being much harder for him than adding, which I guess makes sense as I try to remember back to my elementary school days. We worked through those struggles fairly easily, but then when we finished he wanted to play chess. The struggle was real. I think I explained at least 20 times that pawns can only move forward, except in the case of taking the opponent’s piece diagonally. Granted, chess is a fairly complicated game, but I just can’t bring myself to let him learn the game wrong. If he had said, “Let’s play make believe with these chess pieces on this chess board!” then I would have had no problem. But even though I corrected him a thousand times, he always took it well and never got angry. It was really impressive. My philosophy is that one should never go easy on anyone in any game. Life isn’t going to go easy on them! Plus, the feeling of finally beating someone of your own merit after losing so many times (having to learn and get better each time knowing that they’re not going to cut you any slack), is one of the most deeply satisfying feelings ever. How dare I rob anyone of that?
In the afternoon I worked with Eddy Luis, who really struggled with the same worksheet that Ariel did. He almost never spoke, and when he did it was a barely audible whisper. I wasn’t sure if he just had never learned how to do this, and thus was despondent due to feeling incompetent, or if he was just having a really bad day. I felt my impatience waning at several points, but God reminded me that I had deliberately ignored His instructions a billion times more than Ariel or Eddy had ignored mine, and that helped a ton. He slowly started to get it, and by the end when it was snacktime, it took significant coaxing to tear hiim away from the math worksheet!
July 16
Today was La Paz’s (the whole department, not just the city) birthday, so it was a day of no work and many festivities. Samuel, one of the AISEC friends who picked me up at the airport, came over at around 11 and took us to where the main party was in El Alto. We walked for at least a mile, if not two, and passed by at least 20 different marching bands complete with dancers (usually either completely male or completely female) with traditional garb (the women’s dress was super fancy and expensive). People would just pee all over the sidewalk, it was kinda gross.
Later we went to Samuel’s house and watched Thor (which was really good) and Gulliver’s Travels, in Spanish of course.
July 17
A thousand more piggy back rides and rocketship blastoffs today. Taught a couple of kids how to play checkers.
It’s interesting that although Bolivia does have regular bottles for beverages, also popular are packets or plastic bags for juice or yogurt, especially among kids.
After classes were over, I helped cut carrots and potatoes for a special dinner with two local friends, and then we went to play Wally, or indoor volleyball where you can use any part of your body to get the ball over the net, as well as the side walls (but not the ceiling or the back wall). It was so much fun!! At one point Victor, the director, kicked the ball and it went through an opening that led to the second floor. I was dying. We played for a good hour and a half or two hours.
July 18
Wow, one month to go. So much has happened in these past 11 days, yet they’ve passed so quickly.
Just washed dishes with Oscar. We definitely need to start rinsing or at least doing some type of pre-wash before we put dishes in the dirty dish tub so that it doesn’t take dynamite to get the residue off later. It was fun though. I put my library on random and ended up listening to two songs that I’d never listened to all the way through before- Running From the Devil by the Ohio Players and Love Is Right On by the Emotions
I usually help with the medium-age group for the first half of each shift (morning and afternoon), and then the tiny tots for the second half. In the morning class of the tiny tots we have a Fernando and a Fernanda, which caused me quite a bit of confusion before I realized what was going on.
Tonight we kick off weekend 2 by heading to the place I have most wanted to visit since I learned where I would be doing this internship: Lake Titicaca, the largest freshwater lake in South America and the highest navegable lake in the world. It’s super cool to be so close to so many places that I learned about in my Ancient Civilizations of the Andes class first semester.
Well, my last post was of the photos that accompany the blog if you missed it. I would love to hear from you on what you’ve been up to, so shoot me an email!
-TJ
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