I volunteered in Cochabamba, Bolivia for three months with a team of three other girls. We went with Tearfund, a Christian organisation for relief and development, that works through local projects in the many countries in which it works. We worked with one of their partner organisations; OESER (Organización para la Educación y Servicio a la Comunidad, in English, Organisation for Education and Community Service). This NGO runs a school (Nuevo Conocer, Spanish for ‘New Knowledge’) and nursery (Wiñay Kusiy, meaning ‘Grow up Happy’ in the traditional language of Quechua) as well as an HIV/AIDS education program and a factory which produces nutritious quinoa bars. We worked with all these programs at some point during our time as well as helping with other activities outside of the organisation. For example, we assisted in the cleaning and repair of homes after devastating floods in Tiquipaya.

First jobs:

Since the school term had not started when we arrived in January, we helped with some maintenance work such as painting classroom cupboards, laying carpet, sorting donations and repainting the school staff room. The staff gave us the chance to come up with our own ideas for the school and nursery during this time as well.

 Together with Jose, we came up with the project of planting grass in the nursery playground and spent almost a week weeding, removing rocks, laying compost and planting grass. This took a lot of effort, and at one point we made a mistake and had to start again. It was also not something we could immediately see the result of, since although we planted little grass plants all over the playground, these had yet to grow into a lawn by the time we left, and we initially had to try and keep the kids off the grass.  But it was something that in the long run was valuable work done and will be appreciated.

MIKUNIY:

The MIKUNIY quinoa bar project aimed to provide jobs as well as producing a nutritious snack for Bolivians, and generating income for other areas of OESER. However, the project was suffering from lack of staff after a large order, so we helped sorting oats, checking the bars and packaging. A few days later things were made worse when the machine that formed the bars broke and the bars had to be made by hand. With the supermarkets waiting for their order, we spent an afternoon making the bars by hand using plastic tubes to form the little cylinders.

I found learning the process of the bar manufacture very interesting, but sorting the oats was not. But I soon realised that the simple jobs like picking through oats when an order was due, or sorting clothes donations, were the jobs that were most useful.  When we later began helping in lessons and in the nursery, we were lending an extra hand and having fun playing with kids, but doing the boring jobs we were actually saving others hours of work and being much more helpful.

PATSIDA:

One of our priorities was to work with PATSIDA, which stood for practicing love in times of AIDS (Practica el Amor en Tiempos del SIDA). This took me far out of my comfort zone as we had to perform sketches as well as talking about HIV and AIDS in Spanish. We also had to act out a boxing ring and sing among other things! The others on my team were all quite confident, while I felt very embarrassed doing such things. However, I memorised my Spanish lines, and was able to perform to a camp of young adults, and to everyone attending a health fair we went to.

 Unfortunately, we were planning on also attending a carnival in Oruru with the Salvation Army, but this was unable to occur because the Salvation Army needed to stay in Cochabamba and assist with the Tiquipaya floods. An explosion during the Oruru carnival, as well as the floods, also postponed the carnival in Cochabamba. We had to get used to changes of plan, sometimes at the last minute. In the end we went to the Oruru carnival anyway (without PATSIDA) and experienced a unique part of Bolivian culture.

School and Nursery:

When term started again we were timetabled with different classes in the school and nursery. I had never really worked with small children before, and at first found it very challenging, mainly due to my lack of knowledge of Spanish. As I learned the language and got to know the kids, things became easier. I could understand when they told me they needed the bathroom, or that someone had called them a boy because their hair was short! I was also able to play with them, making up little stories with the younger ones, or playing ‘Sol, Hielo’ (Stuck in the mud; literally ‘Sun, Ice’). For some of the children, I just had to get to know them. For example, one of the girls who came from prison to the nursery used to cry every day. Once she got to know us, she’d play and cuddle us instead, running up to you when she recognised you.

We were also put in charge of organising ‘Suena Bien’ (‘Sounds good’) special Fridays for kids that had worked hard or been well behaved. These included doing crafts, watching movies and playing organised games and a ticket for ‘Suena Bien’ was good motivation.

Motivation was definitely needed in the English classes we taught. There was no local teacher of English; the volunteers ran it. The German volunteers who had come before us had come up with a curriculum but even the year 6 class was very slow in learning even the simplest of things, partly because they wouldn’t concentrate. To solve this, we found a song on YouTube, to the tune of Frere Jacques, which went over the colours in English and Spanish. We combined this with a clapping game, and suddenly learning was fun and the kids began to actually remember some of the colours.

Using games also helped me encourage the children in the after-school help sessions to complete their homework. For example, I did the homework too and raced the girls.

Tia Shirley and Comedor:

For most children, school ended at lunch. Some stayed on to go to the after-school homework or special support sessions that we helped with. And some kids couldn’t go home until we took them because they lived in prison with their mothers. The prison program was called ‘Tia Shirley’ (‘Aunt Shirley’ in English, named after the lady who started the program), so that the other children did not know the kids came from prison. This was to avoid teasing which might result from this. We acted as supervisors for these kids (from nursery age to year six) on the bus each morning to and from the prison. We also ate with them at lunch. This was known as Comedor (literally, dining room). The school food was not always that appealing, and even when it was it could be very difficult to persuade the kids to eat. Tactics included promising dessert, but this didn’t always work when dessert was a fruit like papaya or banana that they didn’t want either. Again, a game was the answer with the most troublesome boy, Bruno. It wasn’t even really a game. We simply made a tally mark every bite he took. He wanted to eat more to add to those marks. He was competing with himself! It worked even better when his sister joined in.

Host families:

During our stay we lived in pairs, each with a host family. My family were originally from Argentina, but had lived in Bolivia for many years. The household was initially rather large, as the couple and their daughter who normally lived there were also joined by their other daughter, her husband, and two young children, while they looked for a new house. The two little girls were shy at first but almost immediately accepted us, and would come into our room to jump on the bed or steal my smarties! The rest of the family was also very welcoming. When it was Sylvia’s birthday (my host mother) we were part of the celebration meal and sing along afterwards. We accompanied them on shopping trips, and they took us to see their work.

I found living in a host family for the first time very challenging. I didn’t know what I was and wasn’t allowed to touch around the house. The house was tidier than mine, and everything had its place and purpose. Food was laid out for each meal, and I never knew if something was needed for a future meal or could be eaten as a snack. The family also liked us to tell them exactly what we were doing, when we’d be back, who would be coming around, etc. This sometimes felt very controlling but was because they cared about our safety and knew more about the area than we did. For example, they said the hill we lived on was dangerous to walk up at night so we should take a taxi.

I felt very nervous going into the family knowing no Spanish, but picked it up very quickly. My host parents taught me words for different things as we came across them, eg, spoon. I also thoroughly enjoyed trying the Argentinian and Bolivian foods and drinks that were prepared for us, for example, stuffed vine leaves. A traditional Argentinian drink was mate, which the couple drank every day, but we also tried other interesting teas, cinnamon and lemon being my favourite. Other drinks could be rather odd, such as a hot celery drink and a warm, sweet quinoa one. Each Sunday they took us out for a meal, and we tried some of their favourite restaurants and the traditional Bolivian ‘charque’ of llama. No part of an animal is wasted, and we ate both liver and heart as well as trying pigeon. Intestine is also eaten.

Almost every meal, our host parents were there to chat to us about our day. We also talked about our separate lives, had some interesting politics and travel conversations, and got some good advice about which places to visit and what to bring when we travelled around Bolivia.

These talks sometimes carried on a little too long, resulting in us being late for various things. However, lateness was not a huge problem in Bolivia. Time was more flexible and relaxed, with people arriving all the way through church services, late to almost any occasion, and always walking at a very leisurely pace! This could be because they had spent time talking like us, but was also because a lot of people used public transport which could be a little unreliable. ‘Trufis’ were the most common type, like buses but very cheap: one Boliviano regardless of where you got on and off. We got to know many of the numbers and routes (I also found a very useful app for this), but sometimes you could wait a long time for your number to arrive, or you might take time getting to a new place because you didn’t know which trufis would take you there. Used to English punctuality, we once waited about two hours for the rest of the youth group to arrive so that we could go with them to help in Tiquipaya with flood damage. When Jose arrived, he explained to us that everyone had been told 9:00 so that they would arrive at 10:00 (by the time everyone had gathered and we’d left it was more like 11:00!).

There were also other cultural differences. For example, you would always kiss people when you greeted them or said goodbye. Occasionally I would get a little tired of having to go around kissing goodbye to everyone in the room, but it was actually made greeting much more personal and friendly than just coming into a room and saying ‘hi’ to everyone.

I learned a lot of Spanish by talking and listening, learned what it is like to live in a host family (although I still have a lot to learn), and learned a lot more about Bolivian and Argentinian culture. The most interesting thing was learning about each other.