September 6
Wow time flies when you're insanely busy...Ally's dad left for 2 weeks for work. He is the only person in the family that drives. Since we live so far out of the city, and we have Spanish/french classes at 7:30-9 at night every Wednesday we had to come up with some plan as going home that late was not an option. Luckily Ally's grandparents have left on a vacation and are allowing us to stay in their house (which is right in town!) with her aunt for the two weeks Ally's dad is gone. Friday the 27 my work had an anniversary party. The kids put on a show of the history of Santa Cruz, mostly through dance. It was so great and the best part is we got to go home early! The weekend of the 28 we all had a community project to do. We took a bus about 30 minutes outside of town to a centre for abandoned children with disabilities. We weren't given a lot of information on what we would be doing or on the type of disabilities the children had. We were definitely not prepared for working with children most of whom couldn't walk or talk. We were each assigned a child to wheel around outside in their wheelchairs. We were told to talk to them and that we were there to make them feel loved. The kid I was paired with couldn't move much and couldn't talk at all. Which was fine, I couldn't talk (at least in Spanish) at all either. At first I tried to talk to him using my limited Spanish, but then gave up and decided just to sing to him instead. He seemed to like some songs, but maybe thatch just wishful thinking. Then it was lunch time and we have to feed the children. Only about 3 of us ended up doing it , it seemed like it was too difficult for some of the girls to do. I almost didn't do it either, but I stuck it out. Then we were sent to another section where my group sat around and again tried to engage the children in conversation. At the end of the day I felt absolutely horrible. I felt we were completely unqualified for working with these children and the fact that we only spent one day with them, ever, made me feel like we had absolutely no time to get to know the children. I feel like this made it easy to create an us/them divide and made it easy for us to look at the kids as just projects and not as real people. I don't think any of the girls enjoyed the day and we went home pretty downtrodden. That night though there was a party at one of the girls houses. Not everyone went but it was really great just being there with a few of the girls. The week after I spent a lot of time hanging out with the girls in the program because I lived so close to town. I went to the Plaza a lot to eat some amazing ice cream (and so cheap too!) and we sat and people watched a lot. I also went to a restaurant with a couple of the girls and ended up eating Alligator meat! It was okay, a bit chewy and I wasn't a fan of it being deep fried, but at least I can say I ate it! Ally and I had a project to get ready for Thursday. We had to plan an entire educational day on Recycling. It was really stressful and Wednesday night we ended up in a fight, both saying things that we regretted (At least I know I regretted some things I said). The next day we presented our day. Ally seemed to get lost in the middle and I ended up translating everything into English, french and Spanish! It was really hard but I was pretty proud of myself at the end. Then we took a break for lunch. When we got back we were told our activity day was cut short because our (The Canadians) visas didn’t go through. We then had to go to the immigration office and wait for 3 hours filling out a few forms. It was exhausting. We then went and met our counterparts in the Plaza. We decided to go to Subway (yes, Subway) for dinner and then back to another girls house for a movie. It ended up only being around 5 of us Canadian girls going back in the end, and we didn’t even finish the movie! I started panicking when i thought i didn’t have a way home (I didn't want to take the bus since it was already past 10) and I couldn't call Ally because my phone had fallen out of my pocket in a taxi earlier on that day. Luckily one of the girl's cousins drove me home! Friday night a few of the girls went out but I stayed home because I was exhausted. I was in bed by 8:30! Saturday we were told we were going to help paint houses for Habitat for Humanity. When we got to the site however we were told it was too cold to paint and for the concrete to set to build. So instead we went around the village picking up garbage. Lucky for us it had rained the day before so there were huge pools of swampy muddy water that we had to pull garbage out of....I decided to make the best of it though and got pretty dirty cleaning up. I guess a few of the kids in the village thought I was pretty funny. I was making actions and grunting a lot when picking up some of the heavy stuff. 4 or 5 kids started to help me clean up and half way through the day one of the girls (Daniella) gave me a beautiful necklace that the women make in the village. I didn't know if it was a gift or not so i told her it was beautiful and tried to give it back to her but she told me it was a “regala” which means gift (sorry if my spelling offends)!

After helping clean up me and Ally went home and the supervisors came over to do a checkpoint talk. It was really enlightening. I found out the family thought that I was unhappy (at some points I have been but definitely not because of the family) and that I didn't want to do things with the family. I was pretty confused about that because I have done almost everything the family wanted to do except when I was sick once. It ended up being a pretty emotional discussion with me trying to explain that if I've seemed unhappy it is because of the culture shock and the fact that I miss home. I also explained that I find it hard to interact since I still have a lot of trouble with the language. I felt pretty misread and not at all understood but I think now the family realizes that sometimes I do need time to myself to think but I do really want to do things with them. Also, I have been making more of an effort to interact which I think was the biggest issue. Things were a bit tense between Ally and I after that but I think things are getting better, especially since I've realized the halfway point for the Bolivia part is next week!
Sunday we visited Ally's family since we've been living at her grandmothers. I sat outside and started to draw some pictures. 3 or 4 of her little cousins came over and watched. They loved the car I drew and asked if I could draw them a Jeep! After that I went and played soccer with my house sisters and a few cousins then back to the house to watch a movie with my house sisters (in Spanish with English subtitles, I think it helped me get used to hearing Spanish more)!
One thing that made me so incredibly sad was the fact that their cat just died (I think they said something about someone feeding it chocolate). That was sad enough but the fact that the cat left behind 5 little 1 month old kittens was even worse (well 4 now because the dog sat on one and flattened it...). I don't really know what to do in this situation. At home I would have taken them to the SPCA or taken care of them myself by feeding them milk but here its more of an ethical issue. On the one hand you could feed them milk and help them survive (I'm pretty sure there's no SPCA here..) but then that would contribute to the immense amount of un neutered and un spayed animals here. Plus you wouldn't be able to know what quality of life they could live here since most animals are left to fend for themselves and many have diseases. On the other hand you could let nature take its course. I hate that I have to make this decision. If they are still alive when we go back to Ally's on Friday, then I will probably feed them milk, even though I do believe in the long run it's probably worse. Its hard to just go along with everything in this new culture. Coming into this program I told myself I wouldn't push my views on people and therefore may not be able to act on my views (unless it involved a human life/human rights/me directly). But to actually do that in practice is a LOT harder than I thought it would be.
Monday was work as usual. Tuesday we had work in the morning and then we were supposed to have theatre classes in the afternoon but they were cancelled. Instead we made signs for an activity we are doing in the Plaza on Friday. Its a global “flash mob” thing about violence against women called Women in Black. We are all dressing up in black and holding signs with statistics on violence against women and passing out petition. I'm a little nervous about doing it although it is a peaceful silent protest, I'm just not sure how people here/authorities here would react to it.
Wednesday we had work all day and then Spanish/French classes at night. I feel like I'm learning absolutely nothing with the prof. I feel as though there is no direction in his teaching and that he is just skipping all over the place. I think I need to buy a grammar/exercise book to work on some Spanish alone although I definitely don't have time.
I've been waiting for my university books to come for my online courses. They were supposed to be here a week ago and still haven’t arrived...not sure what I will do if they don't come. I need to take these courses to keep my scholarship. I know Ill figure something out, I just hope I do soon!