Spanish is like dancing.

Written a long, long time ago.

Learning a langage is like learning to dance. There's a rhythm to language, a tempo, a pace. Fluidity comes with practice. There is structure, there are rules and technicalities, but there are always exceptions. Everyone has their own twist- a different accent, an extra R or a missing S, an added hip roll or fancy arm placement. In learning a language, you get used to your partner, listening to their words and picking up on their nuances. In dancing, you listen to your partner's body and learn to follow their subtle movements. It's easier to speak with some people than it is with others. Some dance partners will make it feel easy; chemistry is natural. Others take more time, or it's just not there at all. I find few things are more rewarding than busting a move on the dance floor with a partner that's right there in the groove with me. Walking away from a successful conversation in my second language brings the same sense of accomplishment.

I hope I can keep up this tempo in the States,
K

Traveling with Soul

Written Thursday, July 21

I imagine when I go home that I might have to describe my trip to family and friends. In all honesty, I could probably pick a word, any word, and describe part of this six-week adventure with it. eye-opening. exhausting. exhilirating. embarrassing. tearful. challenging. crappy. wicked. wonderous. wild. prayerful. peaceful. More often than not, I imagine I'll just end up saying, "It was good."

How do you describe something life-changing? How do you use words to describe things that can only be felt, and seen? How do you describe a soul? This trip has a soul. It's been dwelling within me for years. It was given life by stories of friends that studied abroad in college, by friends that speak Spanish, by Mad Hot Tap-dancing Spanish-speaking fourth graders, by the students at International High School in Paterson, NJ and their cacophany of Spanglish in the hallways, by the one Spanish teacher who wouldn't let me sit in on her class and told me I wouldn't be much help anyway, by the Salseros in Milwaukee that make me want to sing along to every salsa song, by my bi-lingual brother, by mis companeros, by Wesley and Jonathan, by my professors, by Dr. Haley's encouragement, by the Spanish textbooks that have collecting dust on my shelf. And by countless interactions and memorable moments in Cochabamba.

In Quechuan, there is no equivalent translation for, "Como estas" or "How are you," in the way we ask in English and in Spanish. The Quechuan greeting translates to something like, "How is your soul? Tell me, really." I hope that I get to talk about the soul of my trip.

Love and painful transitions,
K


PS I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Dekalb as I'm posting this and woman next to me is speaking Spanish to a man she called, "professor," and I corrected her in my head after she spoke and then the professor corrected her saying the same thing I said in my head!! EEkk!! I know some Spanish!!)

Peacin' Out

I knew this was coming. Two weeks ago, one of the students mentioned that everyone was going to have to give a 'despedidia,' or farewell speech, in front of everyone at the Institute, and that we would have a week to work on it with one of our professors. On Monday, when the schedule for despedidas was posted, I found out mine was on TUESDAY MORNING. I had a minor freak-out, and then started thinking about ways that I could get out of it. As always, I found my answer in dancing.
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I decided, since I don't like public speaking, that I was going to tap dance my despidada, and Jonathan was going to translate for me. It went something like this:
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Me: Flap step ball change heel brush step, etc.
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Translation (spoken by Jonathan): Yo prefiero bailar frente a grandes grupos de personas mas que hablar, por eso, Jonathan va a traducir para mi.
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Me: Scuff heel step, waltz clog, etc.
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Translation: Quiero comenzar agradeciendo a todos en el Instituto por darnos la bienvenida con tanto carino, y hacer de este un lugar comodo, no solo para estudiar, sino tambien para crear companerismo.
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Me: Cramp roll, heel dig, stomp, etc.
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Translation: Quiero ampliar un especial sincero agradecimiento a mis profesores. Por su capacidad, y su pacienca sin limites. Por ayudarme como una estudiante y como una person. Por compartir su idioma, su cultura, y sus vidas conmigo, y permitirme compartir mi vida con ustedes.
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Me: Traveling time step.
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Translation: Cuando yo regreso a los estados, voy a continuar estudiano y seguir trabajando con estudiantes Latinos. En este modo, ustedes seguiran siendo una parte de mi vida, y para siempre en mi corazon.
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Me: Step brush hop step brush hop step step (x2), step brush heel step brush heel step step, heel brush step heel dig (x2), periddiddle (x4), over-the-top.
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Translation: Muchisimas gracias.
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And in English...
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I prefer to dance in front of large groups of people rather than talk, so Jonathan is going to translate for me.
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I would like to begin by thanking everyone at the institutue for welcoming us so warmly and making this a comfortable place not only to study but also to gather in fellowship.
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I want to extend an especially heartfelt "thank you" to my professors. For your expertise and your endless patience; for caring about me as a student and as a person. For sharing your language, your culture, and your lives with me, and allowing me to share my life with you.
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When I return to the states, I will continue to study Spanish and continue to work with Latino students. In this way, you will all continue to be a part of my life, and will forever be in my heart.
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A million thanks.
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And so went my despedidia. It went over very well. I'm trying to be humble about it, but I think it was pretty baller.
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Love and shuffles,
K

The Amazing Race

Sometimes in life, I pretend I'm on the reality TV show, "The Amazing Race." In the latest episode, our tasks were to: participate in an Andean ritual, ask for directions on the street to a burger joint, break a wine glass in a hippie hangout, find your professor in a wild street fiesta and join her for a drink, and dance with the locals and have you picture taken on the dance floor. Mission accomplished. On Friday after classes, everyone from the Institute was invited to participate in an Andean ritual, meant to bring harmony to the cosmos. In Andean culture, more specifically according to the Aymarans, there are three "worlds" - humanity, nature, and spirits. We are all connected, and no group is better or has superiority over another. What affects humanity affects nature and vice versa. The ceremony consisted of a number of sacrifical offerings, including candy, llama wool, small objects representing health, relationships, education, the Institute, etc., flowers, and a real llama fetus. Calixto, the Andean priest that conducted the ritual, used elements of Catholicism and at one point invited us to pray in whatever language we wanted. I found it interesting that Calixto is both an Andean priest and a Deacon in the Catholic church, and that he is able to reconcile what seems to me to be contradicting beliefs. When asked if Andeans are monotheists or polytheists, he said he could not answer that because it's a different worldview. Andeans are neither mono or polytheists; God is one, but God is also many, in everything. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. The most difficult part of the ceremony was watching the burning of the llama fetus, and I don't think I need to explain why. I think the main idea of the ritual- to recognize and reconcile the relationship between humanity and nature- is pretty awesome, and I admire how much respect the indigenous culture has for naturaleza. Afterward, I was "interviewed" for a Maryknoll promotional video, which I think you'll be able to find on Facebook eventually.
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After wandering around and asking some locals for directions (my New York style approach scared the poor girl to death), we found the popular burger restaurant we had been craving all day. Having to ask for directions on the street was one of those little victories....I was happily surprised that the women we asked actually understood what I said, and I rejoiced even more over the fact that I could understand what they said. It was defintitely a GCD. On top of that, I had my exit interview on Friday afternoon in Spanish. The Institute will use my recorded session to determine what level of Spanish I am in, and compare it to my entrance interview from five weeks ago. After the interview, the professor, whom I had never met before, asked me how long I had been studying Spanish, and that surely I was practicing regularly in my job before coming to the Institute. This is not the case, so I took that as a compliment to my speaking ability. I should get my final results next week.
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After a good burger, we stumbled upon a small pub full of hippies, to my delight. I'm pretty sure we got charged for breaking a wine glass (it was accidental, and only because the conversation was so exciting), and I finally learned the word for "napkin." There's something about napkins and toilet paper in this country. They treat them like gold and seem to ration them in restaurants and other public places. Beatriz does this at home, too; there are never any extra rolls of tp around, and I always have to ask for a napkin. I wish I knew what this was about. I've learned to always keep a few spare squares in my pocket, just in case.
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After the hippie hangout, we discovered a crowded street festival, full of street food, carnival rides, cookie vendors, and a live band. It was right outside of the Carmelite convent, and the Carmelite church was open for the faithful to pray. I'm led to believe that the church is not open to the public very often, and when Jonathan saw that the doors were open, he lit up like a kid seeing a candy shop for the first time in his life. As well he should have; the church was absolutely beautiful on the inside, and adorned with archway after archway of flowers, welcoming waves of the faithful. It's unclear whether the fiesta was celebrating Saint Carmen, or the founding of La Paz, or both. Making our way through the crowds, one of the professors from the Institute spotted us and bought us a hot, milky alocoholic drink topped with cinnamon called pancha. It was delicious. And with the number of cookie vendors at the festival, we had to buy some, even though it's never advisiable to buy food off the street. Meh, I'm building immunities.
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Here's why I love dancing (Part II!). While munching on our cookies, a band struck up in the middle of the fiesta, and about a dozen people started dancing, with scores of on-lookers around. It took me a few minutes to work up the courage to get out on the dance floor, but we eventually did. We were dancing sort of on outskirts of the dance area, until a woman sort of waved us over to where she was and motioned that we needed to join the line. I hadn't noticed that everyone was dancing in pairs in a straight line. (Jonathan later joked that it was about the only thing in which we have seen Bolivians be organized.) The woman kept talking to us about how to dance and she was acting a little loca. We were just happy to be joining in the fiesta. I can only imagine what on-lookers were thinking about the two comparitively tall rubias dancing among all of the locals. After the song was over, the loca woman came over to us, poured us each a cup of beer, and wanted to take her picture with us. Two other men came over and wanted their picture taken with Jonathan. We're probably floating all over the interenet by now, or at least a topic of conversation at someone's dinner table. The two gentleman chatted with us for a while; it was so great to strike up a conversation with some Cochabambinos, even if the situation was a little weird. So we got a free drink, met a loca mujer, chatted with some cool dudes, and felt famous for half a second when we posed for photos. All because we started dancing.
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Dancing moves people, figuratively and literally. It's an outward expression of emotions that can't be spoken in words. Little kids that can't yet speak spontaneously bop about all the time when music starts playing. Dancing brings friends together. It brings strangers together. It brings communities together in joyful and sorrowful occasions. It makes people smile. Our bodies have a natural rhythm; I'm convinced we are meant to dance. And I'm so glad I took the risk and danced in the middle of this crazy fiesta. It was the perfect way to end the night, and the perfect way to kick off my last week in Cochabamba.
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Love and empanadas!! (I'm going to learn how to make them!),
K
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Whirwhind Weekend

Written Monday, July 11th
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When you live in the country with the "highest navigable lake in the world," that surrounds the island where the Incans think the world began, and you can make a weekend trip happen for under $150, you have to go.
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On Friday, I joined thirteen other students from the Institute for a weekend adventure to La Paz and Copacabana- the original Copacabana, not the beach in Brazil. We kicked off our mini-vacation with a short 35 minute flight to La Paz, home of the highest aiport in the world, and home of Hotel Espana, the most quaint (in a 1920s kind of way) and rustic (in a, "we dont have heat even though it's 30 outside" kind of way) hotel I have ever been in. It brought me back to a Grusenski family vacation when we stayed somewhere in California on the second floor of an old saloon, where the three Grusenski girls slept in one full-sized bed, and the communal bathroom was down the hallway. Except it wasn't California, and I was freezing. The thought of taking off a layer of clothing made me shudder, so I ended up wearing all of the clothes I packed for the weekend to bed, including my jacket.
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Other than the cold, I liked the little I got to see of LaPaz. El Prado, the "Times Square" of the city, was decorated with green and red lights, the city's colors, in anticipation of the upcoming annual festival that celebrates the founding of the Bolivia's capital. Large groups of men and women were practicing different dances in the crowded streets. The city seemed more cosmopolitan that Cbba, and had less of a visible indigenous presence.
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Saturday we had a 6am wake-up call for our 3-hour van ride to Copacobana. It was incredible to see a different side of Bolivia outside of a city. The main road leading out of LaPaz was lined with brick buildings that seemed to be either tiny functioning tiendas or abandoned buildings, with nothing behind them but mountains. This seemed to go on for miles and miles. In places, you could see small clusters of adobe homes- communites, far removed the city and any amentities. Beyond these tiny pueblos were only snow-covered mountains.
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My favorite part of the trip to Copacobana was El Estrecho. During our van ride, we (and many other buses, vans and cars) had to cross Lake Titicaca at a narrow point to get to Copabocana. If we didn't cross the lake here, we would have to go all the way around, which, I can only guess would have added hours and hours to the trip. So we stopped at El Estrecho and I traded one Boliviano for three squares of toilet paper in the public bano, and another Boliviano to pile into a small boat with a few dozen other passengers. Our vehicles were loaded onto very small, flat boats or barge-type things. One student described the vehicles as bobbing on a wine cork across the lake, which is an accurate visual. Apparently in the past, they allowed passengers to stay in their vehicles and bob across the lake within them, until either something terrible happened, or someone decided it was a bad idea. The group, and our vans, made it safely across the Lake.
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We arrived in Copacobana mid-morning and made our way to a privately-chartered "boat" that would take us to Isla del Sol, or Island of the Sun, about two and a half hours from Copacobana. While all of my companeros enjoyed the views from the top deck, I decided to spend some time tap dancing with Iron and Wine in the "main cabin" during our ride.
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The Incans believed that Isla del Sol was where the earth began, and I don't think I've ever been to a place where it was so easy to appreciate Pachamama, or Mother Earth. After walking through a tiny pueblo, complete with mules and wild pigs strolling around, we took a 45-minute hike to Incan ruins on the south of the island, through commnities of a few homes and a few sheep. The views were spectacular, unlike anything I've ever seen. It's no wonder the Incans had such a profound respect the earth. And there we were, 17,000 feet above sea level, with the ruins practically to ourselves, surrounded by a massive lake which could have been an ocean, standing on thousands of years of history, and I kept thinking, "WHAT am I doing here?!" Who am I to deserve this experience, to be standing on top of the world, soaking in the sun, soaking in God's glory. So I danced, of course, because that's what I do when I'm happy and sad and everything else. And then Jonathan and I ran around like kids in a playground, except I was very aware that my playground was and still is part of ancient history. My only regret is that we didn't have more time to spend on top of the Island. Writing this now from Cbba, I feel so far away from Isla del Sol, maybe because it was so peaceful, so untouched, and so isolated from the rest of the world. I wish my soul felt that way more often-peaceful, isolated from the craziness of the world, but grateful for everything surrounding me. Those feelings come easy these days, but I know it will be more of a challenge in two weeks when I return home.
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Back in Copacobana, we settled in to our five dollar per night hotel (including a free endless supply of tea, bananas and oranges, a complimentary breakfast, and a no water in the shower!), before heading out to find a place to for dinner. With all the restaurants in town, I think we picked the worst one. It was a total disaster. I ordered the local specialty, trucha, or trout, which was good but not filling. The rest of the group was unhappy with their meals and the service and it was just an awkward experience altogether. Less than an hour later, we were in an Italian place down the street ordering pesto fettucine. I ended the night huddled under several blankets, sharing a bottle of wine ("Tienes una cosa para abrir esta?") and watching movies with Spanish subtitles. Just my speed :) So it all worked out in the end.
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On Sunday, I attended mass at the Basilica of the Virgen of Copacabana. It turns out that the famous Copacabana in Brazil was named after the Virgen of Copacabana in Bolivia, after a chapel was built there in the 18th century. Devotion to the Virgen is incredibly strong in Copacabana, in Bolivia, and throughout Latin America. One of my professors explained that in indigenous culture, the concept of duality is immensely important. For example, a man cannot exist as a contributing member of the community without a woman, and vice versa. (Evo Morales, the President, is "La Gran Contradiccion," because he is not married; He says the pueblo is his "other half"). So it makes sense that in Bolivia, where seventy percent of the population is indigenous, the Blessed Mother is so important, because God, as male, absolutley cannot exist alone or separate from Mary. At least that's my understanding from class.
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After the mass, in which the entire congregation applauded the Virgen Mother, we witnessed another interesting local ritual. Dozens of cars line the streets in front of the Basilica every Sunday for a special blessing. The faithful can purchase firecrackers, strings and bouquets of flowers, bows, and plastic hats from local vendors to decorate and attach to their cars. Dominican friars carried buckets of holy water to each car, sprinkling it on the heads of the drivers and their families, on the tires, under the hoods; some Bolivians even sprayed their cars with champagne and beer. In my opinion, this could stand as a testament to how crazy the driving is in this country, where red lights are simply suggestions.
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That afternoon, we ate lunch as a group in a rather swanky restaurant, and I tackled my first whole fish. Other than the eyeball staring at me while I ate, it was a great meal, and the perfect way to end a fabulous weekend in hippie-vibin' Copacobana. There were lots of little shops and cafes and restaurants, lots of backpackers, and lots of dreadlocks. Needless to say, I could have hung out there for several days drinking tea, eating trout, and meeting travelers. I'm looking forward to going back someday.
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Love and Romans 12:12,
K

Me le presento...

Written Friday, July 8th

Four weeks down, two weeks to go. PHEW! I think I've made some pretty good progess in the last 14 days. Allow me to introduce you to the team of experts that has been helping me along the way.

Judith.
Judith gets me out of bed in the morning with her rolling Rs. I've never heard anyone roll their Rs so beautifully and with such a contrast of force and grace; she inspires me. In fact, last Friday, for the first time in my life, I rolled an R. I have witnesses. It was great. Judith helps me with my pronunciation and rhythm. We read the Gospel together.

Teresita.
Teresa knows her stuff. She also knows when I DON'T know my stuff, and challenges me in my areas of weakness. I pretend to be upset about this in class, but she knows I'm just joking, and I know that it's good for me. She uses lots of words that I don't understand, and while this is sometimes frustrating, I'm also learning the most vocabulary from her.

Viviana.
I have Viviana for my last class of the day, and together we laugh our way through grammar exercises. Today she asked me if I had a novio, and when I responded, "It's complicated," she said in Spanish, "I'm a love doctor. Tell me everything." So I made up stories about my complicated boyfriend to practice my indirect object pronouns. He never buys me flowers on Valentine's Day. (No me las compra.) Que triste.

Mario.
Mario is my culture class professor. Every week we have a culture-related lecture, and the class prepares us for the topic. Mario grew up in an indigenous community, and was the professor that led the group of students up the mountain to celebrate the Andean New Year. His stories about being raised in el campo are pretty incredible, and his philosophies about community provide a stark contrast to the individualism and materialism that pervade the culture of the United States. He is born to be an educator, and he brings a ton of energy and enthusiasm to the classroom. If I had to pick a favorite of the eight professors I've had so far, he would be it.

Getting to know these four professors has been the best part of the last two weeks. Monday brings a new week, and four different professors, and they're going to have a hard time topping the experiences I have had with this stellar team.

Love and conjugations,
K

That's what I said, but not what I meant.

So here's something that happens a lot- I say something, but I don't really mean it. And it happens all the time with language-learners. Students at the Institute love to swap stories about things that they have said, but didn't really mean. For instance, embarazada could seem like a cognate for embarrassed, but it actually means pregnant. Arboles penes does not mean pine trees, as one student learned this week (this has become a running joke among most of the professors). Instead of telling Beatriz that I eat a hamburger and lots of desserts on the Fourth of July (Un hamburgesa y dulces y dulces y dulces), I just told her that I eat dozens and dozens of hamburgers (Un hamburgesa y doce y doce y doce). I also told her this morning that the fish I ate was like salmon, which sounds just like the Spanish word for semen. She got a kick out of that and told me to check my dictionary. And my favorite blooper so far was ordering a coffee and with "crema" on the side. I thought I was ordering cream for my coffee, but instead, I was ordering a plate of whipped cream. Of course I ate it. It was glorious.

Love and inappropriate cognates,
K

Cravings.

Written Wednesday, July 6th

Raw vegetables. Blueberries. Cesar salad. Hummus. Craisins. Feta cheese crumbles. Mac n cheese. Frozen zebra cakes. Mmm...

Why I Love to Dance, Part I

Written Sunday, July 3, 11pm

Here in Bolivia, as life goes everywhere else, I have good days and bad days. Today was both.

There were two main reasons why it was a bad day. For one, it was a BCD, or a "Bad Communication Day." They happen from time to time for me, and I think, for everyone in an immersion situation like this. I think BCDs are common when you're sick, tired, or just not feeling with it. You're brain is overwhelmed and circuits just aren't firing right. In contrast to GCDs (Good Communication Days), I typically end the day feeling like I learned nothing, or even went backwards. Sometimes, a GCD can actually turn out to be a BCD, which is what I learned today.

The root of my current BCD actually goes back three weeks when Beatriz was trying to tell me about how the whole clothes-washing situation works. She showed me this little basket next to my bed and motioned that I should put my clothes in there. Now, I didn't ever expect her to actually wash them, I just figured that was my personal "hamper" and that I would get to the clothes when I needed to get to them, and she would show me how to do that when I asked. So imagine my surprise when two Mondays ago I came home from class and all of my clothes from the basket-all of them- are strung out on the line off the kitchen. And then it happened again, the following Monday. So I'm thinking, that was a GCD- put the clothes in the hamper, and they get washed.

(I just want to preface this part of the story with the fact that I always offer to do the dishes. Like, every day. And Beatriz lets me wash them about 10% of the time, which is uncomfortable, but I'll take what I can get.) So today, while B. is washing the dishes after lunch, I handed her my little glass jar that I use for water in my bedroom, and asked her if she would wash it for me. Then she turns to me and says, in Spanish, "This is not a hotel, this is your house!" Woah, woah, woah. BCD ALERT! Something bad is about to happen. So we have a conversation about washing things, and I'm not sure what all was said, but I'm committed to trying to wash every single dish that I can for the next three weeks. Because I do live here, and whether B. knows it or not, I'd actually rather wash the dishes than not wash them, and I'm not sure what sort of impression she has of me for having to tell me that this is not a hotel, but I know it can't be a good one.

And then she lays it on me. It's the underwear. She starts talking about washing my underwear. I'm a little upset, and a lot embarrassed, and clearly having a BCD but trying to turn it into a GCD because I'm afraid if I don't, I'm going to misunderstand her and something worse is going to happen. She's talking about how she washed my underwear, and clearly this is not typical. I know for sure that she hasn't done this for students in the past because she said when she washed my intimates, she just, "Offered it as a sacrifice to God." WHAT?! Did I really hear her say that? Yes, the experience was so awful, that she simply took it on as a sacrifice to the Lord. I'm laughing hysterically as I'm writing about this now, but this afternoon, I literally hung my head and covered my face with my hands, I was so embarrassed. After apologizing profusely for putting my underwear in the hamper, and in an effort to make this a GCD, or at least a GC-moment, I asked her why she had not told me this before, and she said that I was young, I probably didn't know any better, and my mom never taught me about these things. And then she repeated the bit about it being a sacrifice to God. I apologized for another five minutes, and then quickly scuttled off to my room to take all of my underwear out of the hamper.

The second main reason I had a bad day was at the giant 100-year anniversary of Maryknoll party at the Institute. It was an enormous gathering of a few hundred people. When I got there, I was feeling very illiterate, surrounded by all these advanced students, Lay Missioners, professors, and native Bolivianos. If you know me, you know that at times I love to work a crowd. It's part of being a WOO; it's part of who I am. I love meeting people. But I couldn't BE ME in the way that I wanted to be at this party. I couldn't just nuzzle up to a group of people and join in on their conversation. I felt defeated. So that was what I had a bad day, part two.

But then, the band struck up. And it wouldn't be a Bolivian party without dancing. It began with a performance of an indigenous dance called, "Tinku," which is modeled after an ancient ritual in which two people would dance/battle until one of them died, and their blood was used as a sacrifice and fertilize the earth. This actual practice is now illegal, but the dance seems to be very widely known and practiced. The dancing quartet of two men and two women was phenomenal. The Institute offers dance classes every Wednesday, and we actually learned a bit of Tinku last week, so it was fun to show off our steps. There were two other dances. One made very little sense and was crazy-all-over-the-place, like everything in Bolivia (including Communion, which is always a free-for-all during mass). It reminded of that scene in my Big Fat Greek Wedding when they're going in a circle doing that traditional Greek dance. Except there where circles inside of circles, crossing other circles, running around outside of the tent, lines and lines of people just being whipped around the whole place- it was absolutley exhausting. The third dance actually seemed to have rhythm and rhyme to it, and it's called la Cueca. The gentlemen line up on one side, and the ladies on the other, and everyone is holding a panuelo- a napkin or a scarf. There's some foot-stomping, some twirling, some guiding of the ladies around in a circle...it was pleasant to watch. Especially to watch other students who claim they either don't like to or don't know how to dance :) "Everything in the universe had rhythm. Everything dances".

A little bit of dancing always seems to negate any frustration I'm having from a BCD, so overall, I would definitely say it was a good day.

Dancing the amoebas right out of my system,
K

Happy Brithday, Maryknoll.

Written Wednesday, June 29

Today marks the 100th Anniversary of the foundation of Maryknoll. I feel blessed to be a student at the Institute during such a commemorative occasion. We celebrated 100 years of service with cake and congratulations, and this weekend will be a special mass with the Archbishop, followed by a fiesta! I'm all for fiestas. I hope there's dancing.

I talked to a lot of people about my trip before coming to cbba (that's Cochabamba's abbreviation for itself, I think). I got some mixed reactions- some positive, a few negative, and lots and lots of, "Why Bolivia?!?" Why would I want to learn Spanish in the poorest country in South America? Why woud I go to a place with a deep history of political unrest, a controversial president, and a drug problem? The answer is Maryknoll's Language Institute.

The Institute was founded in 1965 with a unique mission: to teach Spanish, Aymara and Quechua, and to do it in a sociocultural context, for missionaries to work with the poor in the LatinAmerica. It evolved over the years with changing times and opened its doors to laypeople, like myself, who have the intent of working with Spanish-speaking populations in other parts of the world.

As I learned about Maryknoll this week, I've come to love and respect the Mission. I like their definition of a missionary, "One who is destined to go to a place where they're not wanted, but needed, and where they are destined to stay until they are not needed, but wanted" (Sort of sounds like being a Hall Director). The point is for missionaries to go and empower communities to establish their own churches, inspire local leaders to promote good,learn to speak for themselves and know their rights, and then leave to another place and do it all over again. (It smells a little Freirian to me! I'm lovin' it!). And you have to give credit to a religious organization that is willing to "roll with it" and change its style of mission based on the needs of the populations with whom it seeks to lift up, as Maryknoll has done over the past 100 years. For example, in Cochabamba, the focus changed from rural campos to the city, and the Institute opened its doors to the laity.

I love it here, I love that I came here for Maryknoll, and I'm so grateful to be here to celebrate her (yup, I'm making the mission feminine, although in Spanish, she's actually masculine, but this is my blog, so whatever...), yes, her birthday. I'm also grateful for the exposure to the Mission, and for the deepened respect I have for Katie Coldwell, my former college roommate and a current Maryknoll Lay Missionary in Brazil, dedicating at least three years to living and working among "los mas pobres de los pobres," the poorest of the poor. Maryknoll has accomplished a lot in 100 years, and I will forever be inspired by the work that She does.

Love and fiestas,
K

Beatriz.

Beatriz is a lovely woman. Every day, she wakes up at dawn to have my breakfast waiting at the table. It's always something different; I never know what I'm going to have. Her lunches are delicious, and usually include lots of vegatables, which I greatly appreciate. She accompanies me while I eat dinner, and patiently corrects my Spanish. She tells me about her younger days, when she used to go out dancing. She changes my sheets and washes my clothes every Monday, and hangs my intimates on the line in the room off the kitchen. She brought me tea in bed when I was sick, and didn't get too upset when she had to call the plumber to fix my toilet (apparently I was pressing the button too hard). She fed me marshmallows when my hands were busy washing the dishes. She asks how I'm doing, how my classes are going, what my weekend plans are, and she also respects my privacy. She calls ants "uncles," beause she can't remember the english word for them. When I told her I refer to her as my Cochabamba "mom," she reminded me that I only have two mothers, the one who gave birth to me, and the Virgin. She sings when she cooks. Lovely.

And these were all the things I was trying to remember about Beatriz when I thought I had Amoebas, the most common parasite contracted in cbba, which brought along horrendous stomach cramps, a fever, chills, nausea, and of course, diarrhea. I tried to remember all of these things about Beatriz when she told me the redness in my stool was probably just from the beet salad we ate two days ago. And that I couldn't possibly have a fever if my hands felt cold. And that the diarrhea was because I had two cups of coffee that day. Right.

When I finally felt good enough to pull myself out of bed in the 22nd hour of my illness, I walked over to the lab, received my analysis, and was grateful to find out that I actually had several parasites festering in my instestines, that it wasn't just beet salad, cold hands, and coffee. 24 hours after my first antibiotic, I'm feeling much better. And I still think Beatriz is lovely, even if she doesn't always know best.

Love and snow on the mountains,
K