Todo es posible, nada es seguro

Everything is possible, but nothing is certain. One of the San Miguel guides said this often last year and I think it is a nice saying to describe the last week and a half.

We had a very busy week in which we had our first teacher training. That went pretty well. Teachers were enthusiastic and our Spanish was ok. It is much harder to give a training in a language you don't speak fluently and it improves the quality a bit as well, but we had a very interactive training in which the teachers had to practice different interactive teaching methods so it was a nice division of doing things yourself and listening to us. We are proud on ourselves that we managed to accomplish this.

The rest of the week was a bit harder. We planned a lot of meetings but they were all canceled. Some examples: The first meeting with 1 school was canceled because the teachers had another training, so we planned a second meeting for the next day which was canceled because of the amount of water in the school (it had been raining for 2 days) and the third meeting was canceled because the teachers didn't have school in the afternoon. Other canceled meetings and trainings included no electricity so no use of laptop and projector for the training, no meeting (by now the raining had almost stopped) because it was still drizzling and it was cold so the lessons were canceled, no training because the school mentioned earlier didn't show up and we had too few participants. The second attempt was canceled because the school building was also used by the morning school (2 schools share the same building) to celebrate Mother's day. This would include a lot of music and as we mentioned before, when Bolivians turn on the music, it will be on maximum volume. Not a good idea to have a training at a distance of 50 m from the music with open windows.

The good part is that teachers are used to canceled meetings and it is usually no problem to plan your next meeting very quickly after the canceled one. The movement of the teacher training from the afternoon to the evening in a different school was a suggestion of one of the teachers and everybody who was there in the afternoon, came in the evening as well.

Next week, we will try to have the same meetings and hope for better weather. It has been raining for 3 days and as soon as it starts raining, hibernation begins. Everybody stays indoors and everything is canceled without further notice. This is a national habit and there is nothing we can do but accept it. Just sit, wait and join in (or do other useful things in the meantime).

It is quite cold now, it is overcast for 4 days in a row and the temperature dropped to 18 degrees. Dutch people would think this is very normal, but we are by now so used to 30+ degrees that it feels like winter. With our open windows in our house (only mosquito netting) the wind blows through the room because our curtains are too small. We hope the sun will be out soon, both for the temperature rise and the continuation of our project. Since I forgot to post this blog and it's on my computer for 3 days, I can now mention that the weather is back to normal.

We will try to extent our visa with one month so that we can stay till the middle of August. Their winter holiday is in the first two weeks of July and interferes with our program. With extending our time here we can continue with our program after their holiday. This includes a little break to go back and forth to La Paz which also gives us the opportunity to visit the library of Conservation International. This organization has done a lot of environmental education project in the surroundings of Rurre in the past, so maybe we can find some useful educational material. We already noticed that a lot of educational material has been made by different organizations, but everybody tends to forget this and the materials end up in a library and nobody knows it exists. We gave ourselves the tasks to put interesting educational material on a website so at least the schools in Rurre have access to it.

The water quality improved by the way. We now have water when it rains and there is only very little sand in it so I guess they fixed something.

We end with this nice picture. The municipality is changing part of the electricity. In the Netherlands they would replace the old wiring. Here, they just build poles and wires on the other side of the road. They are now putting the wires in place and sometimes the trees are in the way. So what do you do: you just put up your ladder against the leaves of the tree and hope it will be stable enough. In this case, it was.