it was two weeks long, and i can´t remember what we did each day. i didn´t write down antything in my journal. i should have, i guess, but i didn´t really have time or energy… each night i was pretty tired, and didn´t feel like reading writing anything even though i brought many books and notebooks.
the first day getting to yanayo was tough, as i have already explained in the earlier post. super long day of driving. and we were too tired to set up our tents, so we slept at german´s house. the next morning i awoke with a bunch of bites on my legs, just under my socks. i thought these were flea bites, but now i think it´s something else… i´ve had them for the full two weeks, and they spread throughout my body. it´s an allergic reaction, perhaps, to the “mara” plant, as german suggested. i´m trying to wait it out… trying to let it pass on it´s own, but if nothing happens in the next week, i suppose i should go to the doctor. i wonder if it could be something like chickenpox or whatever… though i already had chicken pox as a kid…
the first week in yanayo was pretty hectic. jeff and i surveyed the road from yanayo to tuquisa for the first could of days, which were scorching hot. we got sunburned…. i burnt my ears pretty badly, and now they are peeley (if that´s a word) and blistery. nonetheless, it was really nice to be able to walk around outside and see the spectacular mountain views. everything was green because it was the rainy season… it almost looked tropical, with the lush vegetation covering the landscape. and yet you would see the cactus around everywhere, reminding you that this is actually a semi-arid place, where the hills would turn dusty and brown in the dry season.
jeff and i had a difficult time figuring out the distance from yanayo grande to tuquisa - we really didn´t have topo maps or any good guidance as to the length of that section of the road. later on we found that it was 7 kilometers. but, by using the GPS, we figured that we had done about half of the road or just a little less during the first two days of work.
most of the road seemed “fixable”. the truth was soil that the road was build on was very unstable. it´s very crumbly stuff. but with the right measures and engineering, you could prevent a lot of erosion. drainage ditches, dry walls, gabions, and even some cobble stoning could help most of the road. but wherever there was a major river crossing, things seemed a bit daunting. the whole road was falling apart basically. some parts have a 120 ft fault going down the middle of the road, lengthwise… the whole slope/side of the road could slide down at any moment.
while jeff and i were doing the road, donee and susan occupied themselves with meeting, politics, with interviews/questionaires, spriometery tests, and stove fixing. busy, busy…
the meetings were about trying to coordinate work with the communities/villages, the government (represented by the mayor (alcalde)), EWB, and other players. meetings were often long and inconclusive, but they were necessary to try to get things moving along. i had the opportunity to sit in at a couple of meetings. they ones that i had attented were held at the local school building. people from the village were called in by several blows of a goat horn. an hour or two later, enough people gathered at the school to begin the meeting. the men gathered around in the circle. the women sat off to the side… they didn´t really participate in the discussion, they just listened in. the theme of the day were written on the chalkboard.
interviews
that they had for the communities of yanayo grande, yanayo chico, and cueva pata. there were tons of questions in spanish, so getting through each person took a long time. it took even longer because we need a spanish-quechua translator to help us communicate with the locals, most of whom did not really speak much spanish at all. usually the men would know more spanish than the women because the men would sometimes go to the big cities to sell their crops or produce, so they would need to know spanish. the women on the other had would mostly stay home.
spriometry and lungs
stoves
plastiforte - irrigation and water in bolivia
coming back - food, cloves, coca
lunar eclipse and thunderstorms
working on the road again - tuiquisa to the ”highway”
rural life, food, conditions, camping, soups, potatoes, rice, tea.
goat meal - last supper
caught in the canyon, road to taconi
ride out of yanayo - leaving a day early, piling rocks, chat with guido.
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