Our Volunteer Week in Cochabamba

Hola,

Our week volunteering proved to be quite interesting. Not necessarily the volunteeraspect of it, but other parts. The Saturday after the homestay we moved to our hostal,Buenos Aries. The first few nights of our stay we´re descent. It is a hostal afterall, so it was not as nice as a hotel would be.

When we got back from volunteering on Tuesday. We were all dirty from painting and reallyin need of a shower. I told Caleb he could shower first since he is a much dirtier personthan me. About 1 minute after he went into the washroom to shower he came out, and informedme that there was not water. Shocked as I was, I didn´t quite believe him, so I decided tosee for myself, and yes, in fact he was right, there was no water. So we made our way downto the reception desk to tell them about our situation, and they told us that there shouldbe water in the next 2 to 3 hours, and if not then we should for sure have it in themorning. Haha, well you can just imagine how impressed we were with this predicament we found ourselves in. So we went on our way to phone Tyson and Carolina, just to let them knowabout our situation. They were quite shocked, because in the two weeks that the Elevation team was down and staying at that same hostal they never experience such problems.

Well, after the phone call we headed out for dinner, since there wasn´t going to be waterfor us to shower for at least another couple hours. We dined out at a wonderful Irish pub called Na Cunna, run by a friend of Tyson and Carolina´s. We had an amazing dinner there, and on our walk back we discussed what we were going to do if there wasn´t water, but alsothought that maybe we should not worry about that until we knew for sure. Well, we got backand went up to our room to shower, and would you believe it, there was NO WATER!!!

At this point we were pretty annoyed with this hostal. Not just because of the water situation,but also because of the paper thin walls. I forgot to mention that the night before neitherof us slept well because our neighbour to the right left his TV on full volume the ENTIRE night. We´re not sure if he slept, and if so how he slept because Caleb could understandthe Spanish television shows, even with his blankets pulled over his head. Anyway, not to worrywe did manage to clean ourselves up before we went to bed, with a 2L bottle of water...yes, notthe greatest experience!

Early the next morning we get up to see if the water is running. And what do you know, it is. Butthe water is not the most pleasant colour. It´s more of a yellowish colour. This of course weexpected since the water lines had clearly run dry. We went on our way that morning off to volunteer and got a call from Carolina, offering for us to stay with them for our last couple nights, since we had had such a bad stay at the hostal. We graciously took her and Tyson up on their offer. So our last couple days in Cochabamba we spent with them.

Despite the challenging time we had with our stay this week, we did have a great time volunteering at the orphanage and painting. We got a lot done and only ended up painting 3 days, when we thought we would be painting for 5! I guess you could say that we´re pretty amazing and that´s why we finished so quickly. Oh yeah, but did I mention that we were painting with a professional painter? That may have had something to do with us getting done so quickly...just maybe! ANyway, that was a great experience. While we didn´t really get to know the kids in the orphanage we did get a lot of children coming up to us asking us if we were painting. It was pretty cute. The one day when I was painting I made a friend. He just sat there and watched as I painted. It was pretty great. Unfortunately my Spanish was and still is not as good as I would have hoped it would be, and I could not converse much with this child. I was able to ask him his name and how old he was though!

Since we only painted for 3 of the 5 days we thought we would be painting, we spent our time on Friday going to visit the orphanage that Tyson and Carolina work with. THey have a very nice home set up for the girls who live there. We met a number of the girls, who were very excited to meet us, and when they realized we had a camera they went a little camera happy, kind of like my dear friends at home!!! Needless to say, we have a great collection of photos of us with the girls, that we will definitely share when we´re back.

Being our last night in Cochabamba, Tyson and Carolina took us out (with the kids) for dinner at GLOBOS, which is a restaurant chain in Cochabamba that is known for its spectacular sundaes, and not its speedy service! It was a great experience, and definitely a good business idea for someone in Canada. What could be better than a ice cream parlour that sells a multitude of different sundaes? Some sundaes even came with alcohol in them. It´s brilliant!

After dinner it was back to Tyson and Carolina´s to pack for the bus we needed to catch to La Paz at 10:00PM.

Stay tuned to hear about our many more adventures!
Emily