July 9

The following was written by Grael (pronounced Grail) from Iowa and Sara L from Pennsylvania. Taken from our group journal :

Today we worked until 3:00 under the hot winter sun, and then ventured to La Feria, a huge market as crowded and chaotic as a Bolivian “street”. We searched for, and found, plenty of Bolivian foods and juices and treated ourselves to some good old American comforts . . . aka OREOS. As far as products for sale, we found everything from shirts and jeans to furniture and movies. Many of us bought 4 DVDs for only 10 Bs (7 Bs, or bolivianos = $1.00 US)! We just hope they are in English.

On a more personal note . . . FLOOD!! Well, ahh . . . so we (Sara and Grael) had some dirty clothes, right? Well this brought more problems than what you would think. Basically, they (host family) gave us some soap and showed us the washing sink. So Grael started scrubbing her very muddy pants while Sara took a shower in the next room. Mid-scrub, Edgar (19-year-old) walks up with his earphones in and gives a smirk. He just laughs and says, “Learn?” Grael looks at him and smiles with a quiet, “Si.” He pulls a cover off an object that he had been leaning against. Grael takes a glance and gasps. What do you know? It´s a washing machine!! Grael bangs on the bathroom door too excited to even talk to Edgar. So to make a really REALLY long story short . . . Sara finishes her shower as Edgar tries to tease Grael into washing her clothes in the sink. Finally, all becomes good and all the dirty clothes get into the machine and turned on. So Grael jumps into the freezing shower. As she is drying herself off she looks down at her feet to find water spilling over onto the floor and under the door. Grael freaks out, drops her clean clothes in the water, throws on some clothes, then runs into the room where you come in. Sara was just about to write something deep and meaningful. Well we told the grandma water was spilling out, then watch as Edgar uses a squidgy thingy to move the water into another drain. After more teasing, Edgar finishes and Sara and I take our clothes from the washer and shyly walk to the clothes line. By the way, their clothes line is located in a big court yard in the middle of all the many families houses. After several minutes of a little confusion and a lot of embarrassment, most of our clothes were hung. But not without Edgar walking by while hanging our underwear and Sara making the comment, “We have known each other a week and we are touching each others butt clothes! WOW– what an eventful evening!

Even thoughthere was a TON of embarrassment and feeling terrible for the water, we enjoyed this experience a lot. We feel closer tp our family and learned a little bit about washing clothes.