I´m spending most of today recovering from the pilgrimage to Cotoca (walking through the night and on into the 40+ C daytime heat), so I figured that this would be an opportune time to work on a long-overdue blog entry. As you can see, the one-week hiatus turned into a one-month leave from blogging. At the beginning of the month, I had too little to say. Then, after the initial week break, I found that I had too much new information to organize. After I spent some time brooding over said information, I realized that most of my concerns weren´t things that belong on a public blog. In short, here´s what´s going on at the moment: I volunteer at the city´s center for cerebral paralysis every morning and train at Tahuichi every evening (in February my team may have the opportunity to be Tahuichi´s first sponsored female team to the all-South American tournament in Peru). I spend all of my free time planning and preparing for future travels/volunteer opportunities, doing my best to find smaller adventures around town, and manage a social life that´s now spread over the exchanger community, the soccer community, my family´s social circle, the volunteer community, and the kids from school. This keeps me quite busy, but I still feel a gnawing lack of purpose in wiling away my second summer vacation.

I´ve tried to start this blog entry more than once, but simply haven´t had the time or energy to write anything worthwhile. After a while, it gets harder to reflect on interesting little cultural differences as I begin to focus on the larger scope of my exchange and find myself tangled in the management of my day-to-day life and future plans here. My English is in a rather sorry state at the moment and ´tis the season of scholarship applications, which are vying with the blog for internet time. My friend Erika has generously procured an English copy of the Odyssey for me that I´ve been tearing through for the last few days, but even so, I´ve had to rewrite most of the sentences in this entry multiple times just to make them understandable (I had to spend a minute or so ignoring all of the words with an entender base that came to my head before I was able to remember that word). Another reason for my silence was my aversion from filling the blog with negative material. November was difficult. A strong bout of homesickness caught me by surprise in the aftermath of the election, which was followed by some severe ups and downs in terms of culture shock during the following weeks. Some of my frustrations at this point reside with the local Rotary club (a few interesting stories for when I get back). The rest can be simply identified as the rocky final steps in adapting to a new culture. Yes, Santa Cruz is a shallow city, obsessed with appearances. The society section, filled with photographs of the rich and wasteful, accounts for half of the local paper and 80% of local TV programming. Yes, this society is full of bluster, a lot of talk and no action. Pura boca, meaning all mouth, is a phrase that I keep running into everywhere. People talk about the referendum passing as if it were the apocalypse, they get freaked out when ¨thieves¨ are burned alive in one of the pueblos a few hours from here to test-run the new communal justice system, and then they go back to making carnaval plans as if the world were just one big party. Everyone was enraged in September, but whatever happened to those martyrs up in Pando? Did they give their lives for the cause just to be forgotten? ¨Autonomia, karajo¨ (Autonomy, damn it) - that´s the battle cry, but does anyone know what that actually entails? What a stupid phrase to die for. Promises are never kept; people call themselves Catholic, chastise you if you won´t profess a strong belief in they´re faith, and then not only lie themselves, but ask you why you don´t like to lie. One of the volunteers at the paralysis center told me that it may be hard at first, but that I mustn´t feel sorry for all of the poverty-stricken beggars here because their just lazy. I´ve had ordinary people going about their business drop what they are doing and approach me with the most pitiful and needy faces that they can conjure up, asking me for money simply because of my obvious gringa-ness (For that I´ve adopted the policy of never giving money to anyone – I´ll usually package up any food that I don´t eat and give that away, or sometimes even buy food for particularly poor-looking single mothers and their children, but I never give money outright). Yes, most people here are prideful hypocrites. Yes, the city is full of trash and sick stray animals (and not just garden-variety cats and dogs either; horses, cows, donkeys, roosters, peacocks, boa constrictors, etc. all find their way into the mix). Yes, it´s brimming with poverty and booze. These are all elements of the culture that have to be absorbed with the good things here. I just have to stay focused on my part, and the purpose in my being here at this point in time.

It probably doesn´t help that the exchangers have been collectively mulling over all of this negative energy. I have an excellent family here, all of whom I love dearly, and therefore much more cause to be happy than some of the others. Adjusting to a new household hasn´t been easy, but I don´t think that the process could be any smoother than it´s been. There are still plenty of awkward moments, but they are all cancelled out by the conversations at lunch time and the family basketball games at night (my family has a friendly but very intense rivalry with a neighboring family, so my host dad is happy to have a tall gringa on the team). My older host brother, Tonin, came home from school two weeks ago, and things have been much more chaotic and ever since. Every other word out of his mouth is a cuss, he drives like a madman, plays jokes on the parents all the time, and does a good job of brightening everyone´s mood.  On the whole, I´m still having an good time. The food is good, I´m keeping busy, the political situation is guaranteed to be relatively stable until January, and there are travel opportunities on the near horizon. Every now and then something will annoy me, like when my dad spent a half-hour last night running the new car indoors with the garage door shut – something that really bugs me because there´s no door or wall separating the garage from the rest of the house and the door to my room leads directly into the garage; I´ve told him as much. (Yes, we got a new car. After 20 years of saving, my host mom is selling her blood-testing lab downtown to help pay for the new Land Cruiser that will be carrying us through Argentina and southern Bolivia this holiday season.) But, differences in opinion over the dangers of carbon monoxide aside, life is good. I´m really connecting with the kids and adults at the paralysis center and enjoying the increased intensity of soccer practice. Whether I´m spooning mush into Carlito´s mouth, wiping the drool off of Juan Mario´s chin, trying to get Hugo to understand the concept of multiplication, or dancing with Sonia in her wheelchair, my time at the center is well spent. I get satisfaction in helping to create happiness for people who have no other alternative in a place where it is culturally impossible and often economically unfeasible for them to thrive. One of the teenagers I work with, Pau, is originally from Ethiopia. He can´t speak, but he understands English, Spanish, and Swahili. I like talking with him about what he remembers from his time in Africa, even though the conversations are pretty one-way and the responses consist mainly of yes/no gesture interpretation. He says that Santa Cruz gets much hotter than anything that he experienced in Ethiopia, which is good to know because I really want to go to Ethiopia someday, but I´m not sure that I could handle much more heat than what we have here. I come home from Tahuichi these days absolutely drenched, because none of the sweat evaporates. It´s hard to differentiate sometimes between the feeling of a bug crawling on your skin and the tickle of so many drops of sweat sliding across it. Practice has gotten more grueling as we prepare for the coming tournament. Unfortunately, I´m not sure whether I´ll be able to go, after having taken so much time off to travel with my family and Rotary. I still glad to train with the travelling team, even if I don´t ultimately get to travel, because they´re the elite of the Tahuichi program and I have to improve quickly to keep up with them.

I´m sorry to say that the blog will experience another three weeks of emptiness. Maria, my host family, and I leave for Argentina on Monday. We will spend Christmas and New Years in Tarija and then return to Santa Cruz in the first week of January. I now have a new camera, so I should be able to post plenty of pictures when I get back. Many apologies for my long absence. Love you all. Chau y besitos.

Well, it finally happened. My camera has been stolen. I was kind of expecting this, which is why I bought the cheapest available model before coming here. Almost everyone I know has been robbed at gunpoint at least once, so I´m just grateful that that hasn´t happened to me yet. I´ve actually had pretty good luck so far, considering that I made it past the two-month mark without a single theft. Usually I try to stay as aware of my surroundings as possible, in an effort to diminish the chance that I might encounter such a situation. Although, in this case, I´m partially to blame for my own misfortune. Lately, I´ve been a little careless with the things in my room. Sunday night, when I got back from Samaipata, after I had already uploaded my new pictures, I left my camera on the nightstand instead of locking it up when I dropped off to sleep, totally exhausted. I was still extremely tired early Monday morning when I had to wake up and go to Tahuichi, so I completely forgot about the camera on the night stand. I got home from school at about 9:30 on Monday night, and I didn´t think once to look for the camera to make sure that it was still there. Finally, on Tuesday, a number of the other exchangers came over for a Rotary meeting at our house. When I went to look for the camera to show them pictures of the sand dunes, it was gone. The nice thing about having very few possessions is that it doesn´t take long to search through everything in your room to be sure that you haven´t simply misplaced something. I don´t really care who took it, but I would be overjoyed if I could only have it back. According to Ibet, there have been a fair few people in and out of the house since Sunday night. The fact that someone took the risk to steal it means that they probably need it more than I do. Because of heavy taxing and tariffs, all advanced electronics – from computers, to cameras, to cars – cost a third more to double what they would back home. If I can remember right, I bought my camera for around eighty dollars, more or less. The cheapest legitimate digital camera here is about $300 US. Some of my friends were telling me about an almost entirely black market (markets here can be judged by their percentage of hot or knock-off merchandise, I haven´t seen a single one that would receive an all-clear rating) not far from school where I could go to buy someone else´s stolen camera for a reduced rate. I have to decide what to do soon. I´m going to need a camera if we go to Noel-Kempff in the next few weeks (an increasingly uncertain prospect - howler monkeys and river dolphin are tempting, but you have to have a really good guide, and even then you never know what you´ll run into. Dr. Noel-Kempff Mercado himself died when he accidentally ran across one of the large Cocalero opperations tucked away inside the park, and a number of guides died when they got lost in rainy season last year. Plus, none of us can afford to cough up very much money), and I´m certainly going to need one for Christmas in Tarija.

Camera aside, I figured that it would be appropriate to make this entry about some of the legends and superstitions here, in the spirit of Halloween. It was great spending this past weekend in Samaipata, because the little town is absolutely full of ghost stories. From the various construction workers who died building the cabañas, to all of the dead Spanish colonial and revolutionary soldiers supposedly haunting the hillside where they fought their last battle, Samaipata´s history and spooky atmosphere made for some good Halloween anticipation. It was also nice getting out of the Santa Cruz heat for a while. We hiked up the mountain Saturday night to watch the sun go down and the stars come out. I had the most wonderful nap just lying on the grassy hilltop; the wind was strong enough to keep all of the bugs off of us, and it was so peaceful that we couldn´t bring ourselves to move until it was too dark to see our way down anyway. It got really cold at about 11 o´clock, and we didn´t want to worry Teresita, so we had to figure out how to wind our way down the rocky slope in the dark. I was actually a little proud of the system that we created to get ourselves down. It turns out that I could see the best in the dark, so Alejandro would use the light on his cell phone to give me a flash of the terrain immediately ahead, then I would scout my way down in the dark (a lot of crab-walking), Christina would follow using my same hand and foot holds, and Alejandro would do the same after her. Luckily we had passed all of the little cliffs and challenging rock formations by the time the cell phone battery died. We were all having quite a lot of fun by the time we got back to the cabaña, so we decided to get some wood, Sprite, newspaper, chips, and rum together to make ourselves a true campfire. The wood was pretty damp, so we had plenty of time to tell some good stories while the fire struggled to life. The stories that Christina and I had were all stolen from movies, secondhand camp stories, or little personal superstitions. Alejandro, however, made sure to teach us the basics about the local legends here. The most common mythical figure in these parts is undoubtedly El Duende. Everyone here is familiar with the little man, no taller than a very small child, with the giant head of a young boy, who leads wanderers and stragglers astray to eat their faces. Legend has it that if you´re ever walking alone and you listen hard enough, you can hear him whistling. Sometimes, if you´re unlucky, the whistling will get closer, and if you whistle back El Duende will appear and take you away to eat your face. Another one of my favorites is La Viudita. La Viudita is the malicious spirit of a devastatingly beautiful widow. She comes to drunken men when they are on their way home at night and leads them unwittingly to a graveyard where she either spooks or kills them. El Carruaje De La Muerte is also good. It´s just a good old fashioned carriage that runs around carting people off to hell. I think I might´ve already mentioned Jichi in a previous post, but Bolivia´s own version of the Loch Ness monster (based on real man-eating anacondas) is a good reason to stay out of the rivers and lagoons; as if the candirú weren´t enough.

Something that I forgot to mention earlier about the ruins of El Fuerte is La Chinkana. Back in the day, El Fuerte was the second most important ceremonial center in the Incan empire. On the whole, it´s a very spiritual and mystical place. But over the past few weeks, La Chinkana has begun to intrigue me more than anything else. The first time I visited Samaipata, I didn´t even walk down the little trail through the woods to see what Ricardo dismissed as just a boring hole in the ground. But as I discover more and about it, I find myself fascinated. La Chinkana was almost certainly created by nature. Nobody knows how deep it is because nobody has seen the bottom. A while back, it was discovered that there were side passages leading off from the main vertical chute a few yards down. A team was sent down to investigate where they led, but once they got down there, they were so scared of what they heard that they poured cement barriers across the passage entryways, sealing them off permanently. To this day, no one knows where the passages lead, how deep the main chute is, or what the purpose of La Chinkana was for the Incans. The most common archeological speculations are that it may have been form of prison/torture, a complicated well system, a network of communication tunnels, a place to throw the dead, or a gate to the underworld. I´m still a little amazed that with all of the resources that go into archeology and anthropology these days, no one has reopened the investigation of La Chinkana. If I were an adept spelunker, I would take the opportunity to explore La Chinkana in a heartbeat.

I think that´s all I have to say for now. Apparently Morales and crew decided to kick out the DEA (for alleged espionage or something ridiculous like that), more about that on MABBlog. School wraps up next week. I´m hosting a little get-together for all of the exchange students, so we can watch the votes come in on election night on CNN here. I´m excited to have some more time on my hands to jump into Tahuichi and the Rotary projects 100%, but I´m also a little sad because I just finished adjusting and building a life at school for myself. Que ustedes tengan un Halloween muy feliz, chau with love!

I´ve gone a while now without a proper entry, so I feel compelled to write something for this week. Suffice it to say that I have kept myself very busy lately. I´ve done a lot of thinking and reached some important personal conclusions. I now feel much more certain about the propósito in my life, and I´m starting to see the direction that it ought to take.

The big news this week: I voted! I got my ballot via email, printed it out, filled it out (all of it, including both school referendum questions), then, because my host dad´s office didn´t have any envelopes, printed out another sheet of paper with the free election mail template on it, folded all of it together hamburger-style, and stapled it shut. Nobody seemed to know the best way to ensure a timely delivery to the US without hefty expenditure on my part. So, a little more than two months into this exchange, I finally decided to pay the American Consulate a visit. The moment was epic. There I was, after having taken a half hour to get through the tight security, still a little sweaty and dirty from Tahuichi, waiting in line to speak with someone, holding my homemade envelope, staring up at the giant portraits of Bush, Cheney, and Condi, and thinking to myself ´At last, your time is almost up! ´ The lady at the desk took my envelope without question and dropped in the pile of other homeward bound mail. I now feel a small sense of accomplishment that, despite being thousands of miles from home, I still managed to cast my vote in the most important American election in fifty years.

Yesterday I went to a Rotary meeting and met with one of the Peace Corps volunteers who was evacuated and then returned independently to finish the project on which he was working. It was interesting talking to him, because unlike us, he had a good long-term perspective about the situation here. He had been a basic sanitation engineer, drilling wells out in the Chiquitania (the frontier to the north of Santa Cruz that contains a number of small villages like San Javier and Concepcion). He said that the Corps had been ordering all volunteers to leave their posts and congregate in the large cities every few weeks, which made it hard for the volunteers to earn the trust of their respective communities, rendering them ineffective in their projects. He was a little disillusioned by the red-tape and diplomatic function of the Peace Corps, but otherwise highly recommended the experience. I have a great respect for the Peace Corps and how they represent our country.

This is certainly a very interesting time to be in Bolivia. I don´t think that Evo, Alvaro Garcia and Co. quite realized what they were unleashing with this movement toward socialism. The Masista marchers have left Santa Cruz and made their way to La Paz (good for me, not so good for capitalism here), where they are congregating in even bigger numbers (120,000 last I heard -they´re calling it a "party" even though the people are armed and looking anything but festive; the city of La Paz is effectively paralyzed right now) in the center of town, surrounding the Bolivian congress. The new constitution will be passed, and Bolivia will be transformed, there´s no denying that outcome. The poverty-stricken indigenous base of the MAS party has taken things into its own hands. Evo and crew must deliver the promises that they made because, at this point, their lives as well as their political visions lie in the balance. It´s impossible for me to accurately gage how things really stand here, because Cruceño attitudes toward the central government reforms range from apathetically pessimistic to melodramatically apocalyptic. Everyone here agrees that this is a major turning point in Bolivian history. Some say that Bolivia is going to become even more destitute and communist than Cuba (although I´m pretty sure that it´s already more destitute - on the bright side, almost all of the doctors around here are Cuban, so at least Cuba has good healthcare), while others see socialism as the only viable way to finally create some economic balance so that healthy markets can begin to flourish after so much corruption and injustice. Check out MABBlog for a thorough and up-to-date account of the situation.

We´ll see what happens. January should be really interesting.

My trip to Concepcion was unbelievable. The Chiquitania is so rich with culture and tradition, I felt really privileged to be able to see some of it. It was a really good bonding experience for all of the exchangers, and I think that we are all a little addicted to travel and adventure now. I´m currently working on plans to see the Noel-Kempff reserve and maybe try a backpacking trip to Peru.

Last Saturday I went to my school´s Ex-Promociones party. In Bolivia, instead of class reunions, every year the Promo (graduating class) throws a giant party where the Pre-Promo (rising seniors) and all previous senior classes are invited. Every class dresses in coordination, and the party lasts until dawn. My class had a playboy theme where all of the girls dressed up as playboy bunnies with pink blouses and ears to boot, while the guys all dressed in matching pimp outfits. It was like a really good college Halloween party where alumni and professors are all in attendance (all the tenured teachers are invited). There´s nothing like watching a drunken fight between a boy in your class and a thirty year-old man with your religion teacher. In general though, everyone had a lot of fun, staying up through the night and dancing until their feet hurt.

Earlier today, I was wandering around outside my host dad´s office when I found an entire market devoted solely to illegally photocopied books. I´ve picked up most of my English vocabulary through reading books, starting with plot-heavy page-turners and working up to the classics, so I figured that I might try doing the same in Spanish. However, I don´t know anyone here who likes to read. Whenever I´ve asked friends or family for help in this regard, they´ve proceeded to dig up old copies of the Bible or Don Quixote. I was so excited that I didn´t even try to negotiate a good price with the nearest book vendor, I happily paid 38 Bs (about $5) for ¨A Sangre Frío¨ (In Cold Blood, which I thankfully haven´t read in English) and a biographic novel about the Siddharth Buddha. Tomorrow I´ll spend the morning beginning work at the clinic for paralyzed children, and I´m skipping school in the afternoon to run around in the sand dunes outside the city. Mucho cariño y besitos! Special thanks to all of the family and friends out there who´ve been commenting, I really appreciate the digital support from afar.

This week seemed to pass quickly. The government and opposition continue to play cat and mouse, which I think will be the case until the constitutional referendum in December. At this point, there isn´t a great possibility for anything other than one outcome: Masistas win. I think the people here are just going to have to accept whatever changes find their way down from La Paz, which I know will be extremely difficult, but this country can´t really afford to obliterate all of the democratic progress that it´s made since 1982. Not that democracy necessarily chose the best possible candidates in this current administration. All I can say is that I´m glad our presidents and vice presidents have usually been family men without drug trafficking and bank robbery on their resumes. I picked up an interesting tidbit in history yesterday – in the century and a half from its independence until its rebirth as a democracy, Bolivia has suffered 200 coups and counter-coups. That makes an average of about one and a third coups per year.

I was hoping to go to the festival in Valle Grande this week commemorating Che Guevara´s life on the anniversary of his death, but the road is blocked. So I have a nice week ahead here in Santa Cruz. I guess I can always just ask my host grandparents about Che – they were actually living in Valle Grande when he was cooking up his freedom fight and probably remember the day the CIA and Bolivian Special Forces killed him. Speaking of politics, I´m really excited to watch the presidential debate tonight. There´s a TV that gets CNN in the lobby of the hotel where we have our Rotary meeting tonight, so it should be fun to sit around with the other exchangers and engage in some good old American political banter. Homesickness has taken an interesting turn. It´s general consensus among the exchangers that we are going to have to do something in December, because all hell is going to break loose for a while after the referendum. During that time, I hope to be on my way to Argentina with my host family, so that eliminates some of the worrying. The idea of returning home early is extremely unappealing. I´m not sure that I´ll be ready to go back when this year is up, much less after only a few months. There are definitely a lot of things that I miss about the US so much it hurts. I miss washing machines, plungers, screw drivers, graphing calculators, freedom from insects, processed food, insulated buildings, orderly traffic, trash cans, public restrooms, lots of open space without barbed wire fences, the relative certainty that your taxi driver doesn´t sell people into the sex trade, real law enforcement, the lack of amputees wandering around, being able to carry something worth more than fifteen dollars out in public. I miss the material wealth of the states somewhat, and the security and certainty that comes with it. But I also feel really guilty about the fact that I have to retreat back into that prosperity next year. What have I ever done to deserve it all? There are people here, really good people, who couldn´t even begin to understand what I have back in the states. Sometimes this place feels like the land of hand-me downs. So many things here were once shiny and new in the states, from cars to clothing to appliances. We put a lot of focus on our possessions back home, but here nice possessions usually are much costlier and harder to come by, so the focus is put on people. Society is very social in all regards. You share your food and drink with a friendly stranger you only met a minute ago, never go more than a few minutes without physical contact with another person, but all work that once used any type of machine is now delegated to another human being. It seems that there is an ample supply of people here, but not a whole lot of things to go around. There are so many people without anything other than the other people in their lives. There are so many mothers with nothing but sons, so many workers with nothing but family and friends. Then there are people with possessions and reasonably comfortable lives, who are certainly better off, and have the luxury of being able to own things, but the level of materialistic wealth still doesn´t even begin to compare to American standards. I can´t help but fall into a question of m