A day in the life of Youth Venture Bolivia

Our typical day looks like this:

6:00-7:00
Get up and get dressed

7:00-8:00am
Walk to your bus stop (which is just somewhere along the road where the bus will pass by at some point), catch your bus, or get a ride to the daycare with your host parent

8:00-9:30am’ish
Wait around until everyone is at the daycare and breakfast is ready. Eat breakfast, which usually consists of (hot) tea with some sort of bread, or some sort of rice dish.

9:30am’ish
Walk to the building site (about a 5 minute, or so, walk) or stay at the daycare, depending on what your job that day is. Work all morning with breaks here and there, usually because we are not sure what we are suppose to do next, or we are having trouble communicating with the Bolivianos who are giving us instructions.

Noon’ish
Go back to the daycare for lunch. Lunch usually consists of some sort of soup, some sort of chicken or beef dish with rice, some sort of salad (sometimes salad means tomatoes, peppers and carrots cut up and served on a plate), and water to drink.

After lunch until 2:00
Siesta! Some take a nap for their siesta, some kick around the soccer ball, and others just hang out and chit chat or write in their journals.

2:00
Get back to work. Notice there is no “‘ish” here. Usually at 2:00 on the dot, the guys get back to work which means it’s time for us to get back to work.

4:00’ish-5:00’ish
At some point we finish working for the day. It may depend on the weather, if there is a good stopping point in the work, or if certain work needs to get done that day. At this point we go back to the daycare with an afternoon snack waiting for us. This normally consists of some sort of bread or maybe a plantain or yuca dish, along with (hot) tea.

5:00’ish-6:30’ish
Catch the bus home, or get a ride with a (host) family member.

At this point the schedule varies with each girl and her family. Most likely they get home, shower, eat dinner, hang out with the host family or go to an internet cafe, and then go to bed.

This schedule may vary from day to day, of course, and it is different on the weekends. But this gives you a little bit of an idea what we are doing on a daily basis.