Sunday, September 9, 2007

HOLA

We have been in Bolivia for two weeks and already so much as happened. But
most of it has been great.

Currently, we are living with a host family in a small town ("Pueblo") outside of the larger city of Cochabama. Our host mother, Doña Miriam, cooks our food,
helps us with our Spanish, and makes sure we are heading in the right direction when we leave the house. Our host mom is a widow with two great kids that are 8 and 9. The kids have helped us with our homework and taught us Bolivian games.

But we really don´t have much time for games. We have classes 6 days a week. Our
language classes are every morning for 4 hours and we have technical and culture classes each afternoon, expect saturday. The classes are a lot of work, but the teachers are great. We only have one other person in each our our language classes.

There are 20 other volunteers in our group and we are all going to be doing Business
Development or Ag-Business Developement. Most of the volunteers range from 22 - 30, but the other married couple is in there 50s.

Our life in Bolivia has been a rollercoaster. We have experienced almost every emotion possible: excitment, fear, sadness, frustration, happiness, you name it.

But, this country is beautiful and the people are so welcoming and generous. Every
morning, we wake up to the sun rising over gigantic moutains. We go down stairs and our family has breakfast ready. Then we are off to class all day. When we return to our house exhausted, our host mom has dinner ready and our brother and sister greet us with hugs.

This weekend was our pueblo´s fiesta for the Virgen of Guadalupe. We "gringits" learned the dance of the llamas and danced in the fiesta all night friday and all day Saturday. We rented costumes from a nearby town- we looked awesome and it was fun.

Anyway- life is good, we miss you all, and please send us updates.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Glad to hear you're getting acquainted with the people, and the society itself. We want pictures!

J