My apologies...

To the teachers that I have had whom I've really enjoyed without showing it. It's really easy, when sitting and listening to an interesting lecture or point of debate, to nevertheless maintain a blank face - that's simply its resting state. It's really easy, when listening to an interesting lecture or point of debate, to nevertheless put my head down in a piece of paper and doodle to my heart's content (I just like to be using my hands!). But you should know that I was engaged and interested, even when I was doing those things.

I started teaching the brass section of the orchestra in Plan 3000 at the end of last week. Thursday was my first time doing it - sectional rehearsal was from 5:00 pm to 7:30. I wasn't really sure where to start, so after hearing them play through a piece once, I just went back to where I started - intonation and technique. This involved a lot of down time for the kids - sometimes we would do exercises without even playing the instruments, or exercises focusing on the trombones and not the french horns, or the other way around. When I was talking to them, or when they were sitting with their hands idle, all I could see was blank faces looking back at me. I could see they were all paying attention - they were very respectful. Yet I didn't think they were enjoying it, or even finding what I was saying engaging (or grammatically correct, for that matter). I know that teaching technique and intonation isn't the most fun thing in the world, but it's really important as a basis for playing something, especially something as difficult as the 1812 Overture (one of their current pieces). All I could think about as I was introducing these concepts was, "I am so boring. I gotta find a way to make this more interesting."

They surprised me though - at the end of the sectional, when they were all packing up, they all gave me big grins. As I said thank you to them, they all responded very gratefully. As we all walked out together, they kept coming up to me and asking me about myself, expressing their discontent that I was only staying for 2.5 weeks. You confuse me. Are you just being polite, or did I actually do better than the level of "hmm... I would compare you to Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but I think that would be offensive to him"?

Then I remembered being a student in that type of situation. No matter how engaged I felt inside, I would often look up at my teacher with the same blank stare - even if I was happy to be where I was, it still took a lot of energy to smile, and I was lazy (still am). So for that, I apologize.

To sum up, teaching's been pretty good so far I love the kids and am learning a lot from them and the various interviews I've started doing!

I played trombone today!

Oh Trombone, my old friend. It had been awhile for us. But the stars aligned today as we made sweet, sweet sounds together. I was excited from the start, but you just sat there casually, brass glistening in the sunlight. I knew you were playing hard to get, but I was ready for your games from the start. It wasn't long before I had you in my arms again, and oh how magical it was.

It was my first day visiting the orchestra I'm working with today. I was supposed to start on Monday, but they got stuck in a rainstorm on their way back from Santiago, Chile, so I had to wait. But I'm pretty excited! All of the kids are extremely nice, and the director is an amazing man. More to come as I do more work with them.

Other than that, I haven't been doing much this week. Just getting settled into Santa Cruz life. I wish I had more to say but not much has happened. Short post this time around!

Oh wait - last night I went to see David Guetta live for 15 dollars. It was awesome! A huge dance party in the soccer stadium, with some awesome music. Not only great songs, but since he's a dj, he did a lot of sweet improv over top of them. Fireworks, LCD lights behind the stage - it was all pretty fantastic. Jealous? This seems to be a theme. You might want to look into that.

Only 3 weeks left and then I'm finished! Hard to believe.

My Independent Study Project

So for SIT programs, every student spends the last month of the semester doing an independent project of their choice that relates to what they have been studying throughout the semester. As of this past week, I have figured out what I'm going to be doing for mine! Here's a little info on what I'm going to be doing.

I'm going back to Santa Cruz (for more information on the city, see "Coa", a post on the blog of Matt Taylor. What? Did he just reference himself? Yes, he did.), where I will spend 3 weeks working with a youth orchestra in an area of the city called Plan 3000. This orchestra is meant to be an outlet for high school kids after school so that they are not on the streets, where they can easily find trouble and possibly find a reason to drop out of school. I will be playing trombone with them, helping teach trombone if they need it, doing whatever other things they need me to do for them and making a video about the orchestra. My video is the way I'm going to present my project - usually, students write 25-page papers in Spanish, but we have the option to make short documentaries, which I thought would be cool.

The reason that Plan 3000 could use this type of outlet for its students - Plan 3000 is one of, if not the, most under-developed and poor areas in Bolivia (one of the 8 poorest countries in the world). Basically, 25 years ago, 3000 families were displaced by a huge flood in Bolivia. The government moved them to an area outside of Santa Cruz which, at the time, was just a jungle, with no roads or way of reaching the outside world for resources and help. After placing them there, the government left them completely on their own - 3000 families who had lost everything in the flood were left to fend for themselves.

Somehow, they managed to build a small city out of what they had, which is now a part of Santa Cruz (with 300,000 inhabitants). However, with a population made up of migrants, they don't possess a lot of money, and still lack running water for the most part.

I leave to start my project on Friday, so I'm getting pretty excited!

Coa (Ko-a. Phonetic pronunciation. Like in a dictionary!)

Last Friday, our group had a coa at the house of one of our academic directors with his wife. A coa is an Andean traditional ceremony - it is performed at on the first Friday of every month. It is performed differently depending who you're with (and whether you're in the city or the countryside), but in general, you burn coca leaves with various other spices as an prayer for a safe and healthy month.

You may be saying to yourself, "but Matt, last Friday wasn't the first Friday of the month - it was the 22nd! What sort of tomfoolery are you up to?" (tomfoolery? yes, tomfoolery. fantastic word.) Well, the reality of the situation was this - our academic director, the one who's house we were at, has been in the hospital for the past month due to issues with his pancreas. The day before the coa he received life threatening surgery, so we did the coa for him - to ask for safe and healthy recovery. And it's getting better - he's out of intensive care now! So, hopefully he'll continue the upward trend.

The next day we went to the city of Santa Cruz for a 5-day excursion. Santa Cruz is in the tropic lowlands of Bolivia, so the climate was much different from here in Cochabamba, or La Paz or Potosí. Here are some highlights from the trip:

There is a national park that we visited that possesses more species of birds that the entirety of the U.S.

Bolivia has 1,000 species of moss - more than all of the Americas combined.

There were mango trees everywhere - I ate 5 mangos in one day, for free, by taking them from trees around the area.

The Guaraní, an indigenous nation from the lowlands, was the only group to resist conquer by both the Incas and the Spaniards. They had an advanced form of guerilla warfare.

For much of the trip, we were visiting small towns and national parks outside of Santa Cruz. I can count the number of paved roads available for the people of these communities on one hand.

The indigenous communities of the lowlands make up about 5% of the population of Bolivia. Consequently, they are often marginalized - even by andean indigenous groups, sometimes.

That's all for now!

Potosi/Sucre

My latest excursion! Kind of like two sides of the same coin - both are full of history, but with different lasting effects. I only had about a day and a half in each city, which was kind of disappointing, but here's what happened.

Potosi - the highest city in the world! (I don't know by what measures this is true, but someone made some system and Potosi came out on top. It's like 14,000 feet high, so, you know, that's a lot.) This city has a lot of history - it was at one point the 2nd largest city in the world (1600s), and, at that time, it supplied Europe with pretty much all of its wealth in terms of silver from its mines (something like 16,000,000 kilos of pure silver came from this city over the course of 50-100 years). This is probably the most heartbreakingly beautiful city I have ever had the chance to see or hear about. It is rich with beautiful architecture, but riddled with economic strife - Europe and the U.S. squeezed its silver and tin mines for all they were worth, leaving nothing to the people who live there now. I got the chance to visit the mines, which are still active, actually - but that story is a little long for this post.

Another thing I did while I was there was visit a school created for the children of the miners (who might not be able to send their children to school otherwise). little. children. are. so. ADORABLE! It was a lot of fun getting to hang out with them, and I hope that if I have some time free later in the semester I can go back and visit the school.

Sucre - like Potosi, this city is rich with architecture from the 16-1700s. Unlike Potosi, this city is rich in money. It attracts a lot of European tourists due to its clean-cut beauty and museums, and is also sometimes called the "intellectual center" of Bolivia, since it has the oldest university in Bolivia (and the supreme court). We got to visit an indigenous music group there called Los Masis - they tour around the world playing their music, and have also founded a school for children to teach indigenous music. I didn't really get the opportunity to do much else there besides visit some museums, due to lack of time.

It would have been nice to spend more time in each of these cities to learn some more about them, but I guess the program wants us to do concrete schoolwork too? I dunno.

Something...

Something Old: Last Saturday night, the SIT students all went out to celebrate our friend's birthday (it was also my Mom's birthday! Yaaaaay!). We first went to a cafe/bar to get her a cake and drinks, and then decided to go to a club afterward. Everyone began to enter the club - it is important to mention here that, because there are 20 girls and 3 guys on my program, our group was heavy in numbers for girls. So, as I get to the front and am asked to show ID, I am told that I can't go in the club because I'm not 21. Apparently a lot of clubs in Cochabamba require girls to be 18 and guys to be 21 to keep the ratio at 50-50 or something, according to my Bolivian friend. I decided to just call it a night since I was tired, but as I turned to go, all of my friends who had just gone in (I was literally the only one who was not either 21 or a girl) came back out, saying that they would be happy to find somewhere else where we could all hang out. However, as our group of 13 or 14 girls and 2 guys began to exit the club, the bouncers suddenly had a change of heart, and out of the kindness of their souls decided to let me go inside. Wasn't that really nice of them?

Something new: I just bought Final Cut Pro - for 23 dollars. (For those of you who don't know, it costs 1000 dollars in the U.S.) Jealous? Well, don't be - it's not a very becoming trait on you.

Something borrowed: I just started learning how to play the charango - it's a small, mandolin-like instrument with 5 double strings (How many strings is that? 10! 5 times 2 equals 10!) that sounds beautiful, and is very popular here. I'm currently using my teacher's charango until I get my own.

Something blue: It has yet to rain since the first day I got here. Kinda nice, but at the same time, the farmers have to wait a month longer than usual to plant their crops.

As of today, I've been in Bolivia for one month!

I wasn't sure if you were aware.

Village Stay

I spent 4 days in a small rural village on the coast of Lake Titicaca in the Altiplano of Bolivia - Tocoli, at an altitude of around 13,000 feet (or higher. It was on a mountain and different levels). Really interesting, really fun - got to learn a lot about Andean culture.

Expectations - going into it, I thought that I would be working all day in the fields, with a family that speaks only Aymaran (an indigenous language of Bolivia, and also a national language), and that I would have a comedy of mishaps occur throughout the duration of my stay.

Reality - Comedy of cultural mishaps, for sure. However, I had a father and son, both of whom spoke spanish. By father, I mean 25 year old. By son, I mean the most adorable little 3 year old ever. Also, since we´re coming out of the winter here, the crops weren´t ready to be planted yet, so there was little to do in terms of cultivation - so instead, we did a lot of hiking, and walked with the animals as the grazed. It was absolutely gorgeous, climbing mountains overlooking Lake Titicaca.

In general, in this village, all of the food grown stays within the village for subsistance. Many families have other hobbies with which to make money on the side (my host dad made women´s shoes), but in general, they live off of their land, with little outside money coming in. However, most children now in the village have the opportunity to go to high school (though it´s a two hour walk each way, and they don´t have cars), and even university (since it´s free if it´s public), which has recently caused the younger population to move into the cities, leaving the community to its older members and very young children. One way that they are trying to deal with this deteriorating situation is by creating ecotourism in their community. Our program staying there those 5 days was a preliminary stage towards launching a new program, in which they bring outsiders into their community for an exercise in intercultural exchange.

Food - I ate potatoes for every meal for 4 days straight. That´s what they grow here, and that´s what they eat. However, there are more than 20 different varieties of potatoes and potato-like crops that they cultivate, so we ate types of potatoes you ain´t never heard of before.

Never play a game of soccer at 13,000 feet, unless you live there already. Just advice for life.

La Paz

Dude. So much to say about La Paz. I´ll stick to the highlights, though.

Sunday - visited the ruins of Tiwanaku, where there existed a civilization that lived with a stable society for more than 2700 years before the Incas. It was ridiculous how skilled they were at engineering.

Monday - great day. In the morning, I learned all about Aymaran (indigeous) religion, which is really cool. Then we went to meet a painter who is world renowned for his Andean-inspired art - it´s vibrant, colorful and very reflective of Aymaran religion.

In the afternoon we met with a member of the World Bank in Bolivia - the thing I took away from this meeting was that I really need to read up some more on the World Bank before I can decide how I feel about them, and how they operate right now (I really don´t know much about them).

Tuesday - In the morning we went to the University of El Alto (in a city that is 80% of indigenous descent, and really cool) and met with the students to do some cultural interchange. A little bit uncomfortable at first since we were introduced by a professor as students from "the capital of the world" visiting students from "one of the poorest, backward nations in the world" (created a lot of sterotypes which we had to try and break down). It all got better when they started teaching some of us how to salsa - in front of everyone! Then we showed dances from the U.S. - that was funny, and definitely made us all feel more comfortable.

In the afternoon, we visited another artist - this guy was also incredible. He is both a student and a master of many disciplines of art - not only with paintings, but as an architect and cook as well. He paints what he feels when he feels it, and has the amazing capacity to master any type of art - he´s a jack of all trades, and it was amazing to see the diversity of his work.

Yo Mama compliment of the day: yo Mama is so cool, she makes the Fonz look like Erkel (is that how you spell it?).

Yom Kippur in Cochabamba

This is just a quick post for those of you who might be interested to hear about Jewish life in Bolivia.

I went to the synagogue (the only synagogue) in Cochabamba for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - the building was beautiful.There was a guard outside the synagogue, which I figured would happen - Jews are not particularly welcomed in Bolivia (though I understand it´s the same in many other countries too).

When we got inside, a lot of people would greet us (us being my friends on my program who are Jewish, and a friend I met who´s living in Bolivia for the year. Awesome guy.) - good evening, shanah tovah, etc... However, the interactions did not really extend beyond that. Everyone just went to their seats, talking with their family or close friends with whom they came.

The service for Rosh Hashanah lasted about an hour - for Kol Nidrei, it was two hours. There were no more than 55 people there, and at least 60% of the people were above 60 years of age. A man I met from Peru who´s studying medicine here (one of the few below 60) said that most of the young generation has moved to other countries, where they practice Judaism in larger communities. A lot of people were talking to each other during the service - the Rabbi had to hush them a bit. They sang the prayers pretty softly as well - a little above a mumble.

The Rabbi is from Buenos Aires, and comes to this synagogue once a year for the high holidays - otherwise, the congregation runs Shabbat by itself. Also, I was told that usually between 12-15 people go for Shabbat. The Rabbi´s singing is best characterized as Baroque - lots of ornamentation (probably more than necessary). He would try to get the community to be more lively during the service, but he didn´t try very hard. I didn´t understand much of his sermon, unfortunately (Spanish!), so I can´t say much about that.

Overall, it seemed like there was simply a "lack of" - of energy, for sure, but also presence in general. When I return from my 10-day trip, maybe I´ll have the opportunity to check out weekly Shabbat services and see the difference.

Bicentennial

Tuesday was the bicentennial of Cochabamba! It was pretty cool. I didn't have class, there was a military parade, all sorts of music in the city - a lot of stuff happened over the weekend for it too (like a chocolate festival). Unfortunately I had a fever on Saturday and Sunday so I wasn't able to partake in said events much.

Another cool thing to happen this week: SIT took us to a small town outside of Cochabamba called Tarata - beautiful, peaceful place. While there, we talked to an 85 year-old man who maintains a large and gorgeous farm (with an amazing house as well). He's 6 feet tall, and is still able to do some manual labor even though he's 85! One of the interesting ideas he mentioned was that, as people have urbanized in Bolivia, they have forgotten the type of intelligence that comes along with working in the field. He said that there is an emotional, irrational connection that people develop with nature when they cultivate the fields, which involves a different type of intelligence - an ability to instinctively understand and react to nature. Along with this comes an appreciation for nature - something which many Bolivians have lost, he believes. (Or at least this is what my friend and I gathered from the Spanish we understood.)

My host mom and sister have begun to teach me the Charanga! It's a small, ukulele-type instrument, except it's double-stringed, 10 strings in all.

Another cool thing about my program: one of the academic directors on my program is also a documentary film maker, so one of the perks of my program is that, instead of writing papers, I can experiment with making videos, which has been pretty fun so far. On Sunday I'm leaving on a 10-day trip to La Paz and to do a rural village home-stay, so hopefully I can get some good video down while I'm there!

Tonight is Yom Kippur, so I will be going to services - I'll try and get a quick post tomorrow in describing what it's like going to services here.

And finally, a yo mama compliment! Some of you may know what this is, some of you may not. They're pretty much what you think - an adaptation of "yo mama" jokes in a way that compliments mothers instead. So, for instance:

Yo mama's so sweet, she gave me cavities in all of my teeth the first time I met her.

Abrazos!

Sì! Que bueno!

I´d estimate that 50% of the words that I have spoken thus far have been one of those two phrases. During orientation, I thought I was at least at the level of "terrible" when speaking spanish - but no. My approximation of my spanish speaking abilities right now is "extremely terrible".

Until last night, I wasn´t really able to communicate beyond saying what my tasks were for the day, or if I was hungry, or what my interests are academically - I guess that last part is a consequence of learning spanish in a college setting. But then, for an entire hour last night, I had a non-stop conversation with my host mom about all sorts of things - it was awesome! It may not seem like much, but being able to talk for an hour after only being here for a week felt pretty good.

But it´s been a week! For me, it´s been a long week. I wouldn´t say that it has felt like two weeks or a month, or any extended period of time - it´s felt like one week. But it´s been one mentally taxing week. Every second has been devoted to absorbing my surroundings - learning spanish, learning the lay of the city, learning about the people I live with and study with, etc... Everything I experience requires a lot more processing than usual, and so it seems like each moment is accented with much more thought, subconcious and conscious.

Positive note: Cochabamba, as a city, places a lot of importance on food, and eating all the time, and eating well. I think that´s just great.

One last thing: I think that, because I don´t always know which words I should use to communicate my thoughts to other people in Spanish, I speak with much more animation here than I have in the past with English. It could also be the nature of the culture, or of the Spanish language itself. I´ll let you know what I discover as I learn more Spanish, and learn more about Cochabamban culture.

I´m in Cochabamba!

It took a little while though. We got delayed in La Paz for 12 hours. Luckily, the academic directors of my program are awesome, and arranged a tour of La Paz for the day!

I was a little tired from an overnight airplane ride of little sleep (on top of Wilderness for the two previous weeks), so I slept on the bus ride around the city. But we stopped at some cool places. La Paz is an amazing city - it is extremely expansive, and is covered from end to end in rooftops. Except for a few areas, there aren´t really any open spaces within the city - just street after street, with new places to discover and things to see.

We arrived in Cochabamba, where I will be staying for the most part for the next 3.5 month, last night. I fell asleep immediately. This morning we began orientation, which definitely helped me to begin feeling more comfortable about living in a completely new city.

Due to the limited amount of time I have on this computer in this internet cafe, I think I should stop it there. I promise longer and better posts in the future, but all I can say right now is, I´m finally here, and excited to start the semester.