Oranges, Laundry, and Jesus Christ

I spent most of the day yesterday (Sunday) with my host family. It might have been the most domestic I have ever been! Maybe I will get married and buy a picket fence one day, who knows. 

First, I helped my host mom make breakfast. My host family doesn't really eat anything for breakfast, but they drink juice and tea and there are always plates on the table but nobody uses them. I juiced 40 oranges in their handy juicer to make 1 liter of orange juice (Cray, right?). Nobody mixes their juice with water here, so the orange juice is really thick and pure (but I like it!). We also juiced carrots for carrot juice. After breakfast I washed my clothes. My host family has a washing machine, which is really rare in Bolivia, but it's a little different than the states because you put your own hot water into it. While my clothes were washing, I picked oranges from their orange trees for the next day's orange juice. Ignacio and I also watered the plants in the garden (although Ignacio was more so watering the ants on the sidewalk than the plants). I hung my clothes to dry and then I went to lunch with my host dad's family! His parents have a sweet apartment in the northern part of the city and they are super, super nice. He even has a cousin who lives in Fremont, CA who was visiting and we bonded over the Bay. 

For lunch we ate a potato soup, then a pork stew, then a plate of rice and corn (corn kernels here are like 12 times bigger than kernels in the States, fun fact.) It was delicious! I found out that part of my host dad's family is Mormon, which I thought was super interesting/weird because I didn't realize there was a Mormon population in Cochabamba. 

Then, we met up with some FSD folks and CASM (my new abbreviation for Cynthia, Annie, Sarah, Manuela) and went to El Cristo! 

My favorite two year old. 

Jesus. In all of his glory.

On the way to the top of the mountain/hill where the Christ is, we stopped, looking out over the south of Cochabamba, and Mauricio from FSD explained that much of the people in the South do not have running water or electricity. Next to the mountain, however, there was the Cochabamba Country Club with a giant pool and golf course. The juxtaposition of those two images was pretty powerful. 

Southern Cochabamba -- the lake in this picture is very contaminated b/c it is used as a sewage receptacle for a lot of the southern neighborhoods.

After the Christ, I went home and watched a scary movie with my host dad (The Lady in Black) and went to bed semi early.

Today was my first official day of work, but it was a little weird because part of it was orientation and a lot of it was waiting for orientation to start. I talked with the director of communications at IDH, though, and found out that the organization has a pretty nice Sony HDV Cam AND the full package of Adobe programs and Final Cut. I'm hoping that I can spend a lot of my time editing footage for them to create commercials or informational videos for their website. 

Lastly, we went to a meeting from 6:30 - 8:30pm with the new volunteers from local high schools who are going to have weekly meetings to prepare for their positions as medical volunteers at the SIDAexpo in September, which is essentially a giant annual workshop/festival/event that addresses HIV/AIDS in Cochabamba. 

One of the directors of IDH told us that in 2006 a newspaper in Bolivia got a list from the Department of Public Health of all of the people in Cochabamba with AIDs or HIV and printed their names, addresses, and professions in the newspaper... Talk about fucked up discrimination.