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.