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!