Work and Celebrations

Mark has been working on taking the sponsorship photos that go on the Ninos Con Valor website. Below you'll find two of them. If you want to sponsor a child, you can go to their website at www.ninosconvalor.org .

Becky hanging out with two of the youngest kids at Pedacitos del Cielo. It looks like they're having a serious discussion but most likely they're just singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". The 3 year old in front of Becky knows the song in English thanks to another volunteer, Tia Megan. He likes to look intently at the face of the person singing so that he can lip sync the words. The other little man is doing a farm animal puzzle. He's 2 years old.

OXOXOX

Another sponsorship photo. How could anyone say no to this cutie?

Some days we take the boys out for a walk. Today we had a car/tricycle train in the park.

We went with our host family to a party "Festival de Valle Grande". Our host family is from Valle Grande which is close to the big city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

Every year the girls look forward to picking their outfits and dressing up for "Moda Loca" a fashion show/party before they all go back to school.

The top and back down again..... 16, 519 ft!!!!

After all this time blogging, I still don't know how to upload in chronological order. Oh well. This is Andrew from Massachusetts on the way back down.....

View from the top.

Ryan from L.A. reading "The Brothers K" at the top of Mount Tunari.

Carolina and Sergio, both from Cochabamba.

Sergio, Carolina, Anna, Ryan, Andrew, Owen, Victor, Becky, and Mark. We made it!

On the way down, it was hailing and snowing. The temperature was around freezing and it was windy too. From where we started, it was sunny and in the 60's.

On the way down......

On the way up......

For some of the way up, one of us was definitely crawling on hands and knees. I'll let you guess who that may have been.

On the way to climb Mount Tunari. (Bolivia. January 21, 2012)

Our trufi driver Victor and a typical Bolivian trufi. You can tell that normally his destination is Quillacollo but today the 8 of us (a combination of friends and other volunteers from Sustainable Bolivia www.sustainablebolivia.org ) rented his trufi for the day. Victor ended up hiking with us instead of waiting in the trufi.

Llamas!!!!! Sergio, one of the guys who went on the hike with us, reminded us that Bolivia is mostly Amazonian rainforest and that although the stereotype of Bolivia usually involves images of llamas and mountains, most of Bolivia doesn't look like this. We'll take his word for it :)

About an hour outside of Cochabamba by trufi.

!!!!!!!! MARIACHI !!!!!!!

We have been hearing music from the open window of our room. Sunday we decided to check out the source. Just a block from our house is a restaurant with folkloric music on Friday nights till 2am and Mariachi on Sunday afternoons.

A Sunday BBQ in our backyard (January 15,2012)

Becky, Gigliana, and Gustavo.

Flowering trees in the backyard.

Cow!!!!

Mark and Gustavo.

Mark as photography teacher and miscellaneous

Parking violation? The man in the picture is the little man's padrino (which is similar to a godfather). In Bolivia, people are assigned to be godparents of various things like for example, you can be the godmother of someone's wedding dress or wedding cake. In this instance, he was the godfather responsible for the little man's gift for King's Day which is on January 6th.

An explosives company called Maxam invited all the kids to a celebration of King's Day (celebrating the Wise Men.... most kids receive a gift on King's Day) and while we didn't see any explosives, we did get to see some clowns. Only 2 out of 33 kids freaked out when the clowns came out. Not too bad.

We climbed up to Parque Tunari one day. This is the view right as we entered the park.

View of Cochabamba. To the left you can see the Statue of Cristo that overlooks the city.

Mark teaching a photography class. They learned about different perspectives and spent some time practicing. They thought they could fix his hair while they waited for their pictures to be downloaded for viewing. Most of the kids think he looks like Leonardo DiCaprio.

Mark taught them how to take action shots.

Happy 2012!

This is in Lincoln Park. This sweet Bolivia woman saw the little boys playing and offered to buy them all ice cream.


I (Becky) want to post some more pictures soon of our everday (i.e. public transportation we take, streets we walk on, views of downtown, etc...) so I´ll try to do that soon.
We spend the weekdays in between the girls´ home and the boys´home and our host family´s house. Mark will begin taking Spanish classes this coming week and in the meantime he and I have been working on verbs and various phrases that are commonly heard in our day to day here in Bolivia. On the weekends, we hang out with our host family and sleep in. I usually take advantage of the cable TV to watch a movie. Mark has been editing photos of our time in Spain as well as putting together a video that Niños Con Valor can use to hopefully get some more sponsors for the kids. As one of Mark´s self-imposed Spanish writing assignments, he described his average day here in Cochabamba so I thought I´d include it below.
¨Me levanto a las ocho y quince y desayuno después. Tomo té negro y como pan con mermelada y frutas con yogur. Vivo cerca de la casa de niños. Está veinte minutos a pie. La casa de niñas está más lejos. Tomo un taxi por diez minutos. Llego a voluntar a las nueve donde juego con las niñas el volíbol, fútbol, y rompecabezas. Al mediodía voy a la case donde vivo con una familia para almorzar. La doña de la casa es una cocinera muy buena. En la tarde, cambio a la otra casa y a veces necesito editar fotos y video. Antes que viajé a Bolivia, fui en España y caminé el Camino de Santiago. Es una peregrinación como hasta Roma o Jerusalén. Cuando tengo tiempo libre, me gusta salir con mi esposa en la ciudad para beber un café o algo y a veces me gusta mirar una película.¨
Translation: I get up at 8:15 and I eat breakfast. I drink black tea and eat bread and jam and fruit and yogurt. I live close to the boy´s home. It´s about 20 minutes by foot. The girl´s home is a farther away. I take a taxi for 10 minutes. I arrive to volunteer at 9 where I play volleyball, soccer and puzzles. At noon, I go home where I live with a family to eat lunch. The mother of the house is a very good cook. In the afternoon, I change to the other house and sometimes I need to edit photos and video. Before I traveled to Bolivia, I went to Spain and I walked the Camino de Santiago. It´s a pilgrimage like the one towards Rome or Jerusalem. When I have free time, I like to go out with my wife to the city to drink a coffee or something and sometimes I like to watch a movie.