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Thanks to the generous donations from our friends and family in France and Canada, we were able to give Christmas to children who wouldn't have had it otherwise, but our buying power here is kind of ridiculous, so we had money left over. One Euro is ten Bolivianos, and since there's no McDonald's in Bolivia, I can't site the Big Mac Index, but a half litre of fresh juice in a restaurant is .70 cents. A meal for two people of starter, main dish, dessert and drink is about 12.50 Euros. Not each, together. So needless to say, your donations went far. Christmas was covered and with the money left over, we decided to take each kid to the dentist and for a full medical exam. This idea came when one of the toughest, sweetest little boys that lives in the house couldn't sleep at night because of dental pain. We took him to the dentist and he had two dying teeth in his mouth and an adult sized abscess. No wonder he was whining with pain. This led us to thinking, if this is the kind of mess we can find in a four year old's mouth, what will we find in a teenager's? Indeed, when the dental visits started, the cavities and problems per mouth were almost always in the double digits... I suppose that is to be expected when one hasn't visited a dentist for five years and in the case of the little ones, never.
My mother always says "If something's worth doing, it's worth doing well." So with the wise words of my mother ringing in my ears, Nicolas and I decided to go the distance and take every kid to the doctor for a full physical, to the lab for blood, urine and stool analysis and, as previously mentioned, the dentist. Not a small task in itself for two people that only have at their disposal a van that only works if someone stands on the battery. None the less about two months ago we started taking groups of three or four kids at a time to the dentist. There is no possibility to make an appointment, you just have to be there first when the clinic opens at 8:30; and we usually are much to the chagrin of the other people in line behind us. We live in a suburb of Cochabamba that is anything but suburban. It's rural. Agrarian even. And the people are too. So we have to put up with complaints from campinsinos that wait while we bring our four kids to the dentist. Each visit costs about thirty Bolivianos for the four kids, so about three Euros or four US dollars. A dollar a kid.
As you can see from the pictures posted, we also managed to coerce the lab techs to come to the house to take blood samples. We were the lucky ones that got to coerce the poop from all the kids. Some didn't need much coercing and brought me cups so full of ca-ca that I couldn't screw the top on. I risked contaminating one of the samples when I almost threw up into a jar I was trying to close. Others, the smaller ones, didn't have the co-ordination necessary we figured to hold a cup under their bums and catch a terd, so some of our poo collecting efforts were spent doing the cup holding and anticipating the moment that the needed specimen would emerge. Not the activity that immediately came to mind when Nicolas and I decided to set off to Bolivia to volunteer, but whatever. There are worse things than poop. Like not getting an education for example. This is our current hurdle.
Nicolas and I are tired. We are not tired of the kids, quite the contrary in fact. Every day we love them more and more. We are not tired of the weather, or the food, or our Bolivian family. All of the aforementioned are great, and we will be sad to leave them behind, but the one thing that we are so sick and tired of is people who don't give a shit. I mean there are people everywhere in the world who just don't care, but the concentration is alarmingly high here in Bolivia. People throw garbage everywhere guilt free. Throwing entire bags of trash into a field or on the road is as commonplace as hailing a cab or buying a coffee. Nobody thinks twice about it, and witnesses to this total lack of education don't bat an eyelid. Another common occurrence that doesn't rouse the slightest response from any local I've ever met (with the exception of the doctor that works at the clinic we now frequent with project check-up well underway,) is the purchase of a $30,000 dollar car when you live in total squalor. I can't count the number of times that I have seen houses made of dirt with children grovelling in clothes that I wouldn't even clean my floor with for fear of soiling it further. Chickens are running in and out of a house that has no doors or windows and a woman is outside washing her hair in a bin of water because there is no shower in the house. The bin is not the only thing outside the house however. There is also a giant Hummer parked right outside the unlivable shack. I often see this phenomenon and think that it would be better to live in the car.
Parents who go to Europe and send money home to their families here would be shocked (or maybe not, I don't know) to see that all of their hard earned Euros have been converted into Bolivianos and put into pimping out a Toyota Celica with lights that shine from out of the bottom of the car, speed and fuel level meters that are in strange places on the dashboard and televisions that glare from the automobile's interior. A television is obviously not the most safety conscious of installations in a car, especially if you have every intention of watching it while driving. I'm totally serious about this last part. We often see drivers watching TV while maneuvering their vehicle and as un-culturally sensitive as this may be, this site invokes only one reaction from me: the thought that this guy is a fucking moron. The same term comes to mind when I see the Hummer outside the mud hut which resembles nothing more than a super sized, square bee hive buzzing with chickens and filthy, poorly looked after children. Unfortunately the walls of the home we work in doesn't keep this moronic behavior at bay. It has penetrated our perimeter and we have to work with it. The administrator of Bolivia Childrens' Mission is the female version of the retard that puts every last peso he has into his car.
I came in early on Tuesday of this week because it was the first day of classes. I wanted to put the girls' hair in pigtails and shine the boys' shoes for "Back to school." I arrived to find everyone still in bed. After waking up the troops I was informed that only three kids would go to school because the administrator hadn't registered most of the would-be pupils. The ones that had been registered weren't going to go because this administrator (AKA shit-for-brains Patricia,) said that if they didn't have new shoes, they couldn't go. Needless to say I was furious. The ones that were registered went with old shoes and outdated uniforms and the ones that weren't registered spent their first day of school revising their times tables and reading in an effort to make them do something educational at least.
Now I know that when you are a visitor in a county you should open your ears and eyes wide and shut your mouth tight, but I've never been very good at that last part and in spite of my mediocre Spanish, I lost it and told this primate of a woman just how incompetent she is. The only job she has in January is to register the kids in school and buy new uniforms and shoes. She started doing this the day after school started. My rage was further aggravated when I asked her what she had done with the money that the government had given her to buy the uniforms. Her aversion of my gaze tipped me off that something wasn't right. I finally coxed out of her that she had bought make-up and t-shirts for the teenagers. I wanted to hit her.
In December, this same woman came to the home at night, gathered all the kids in the living room while the volunteers where in bed and told them, that because she loves them more than anyone else that works here, she's going to tell them everything that is going on in the home. This was when the government was considering removing kids because the administration couldn't comply with the simple conditions they had imposed upon them. When the kids were good and confused because she had dumped a bunch of adult problems on them that they shouldn't even know about, she gave them candy and let them stay up until 11. The next day when we found out about it, we took this shit for brains woman into the office and talked to her about it. Her hours are 10am-4pm and she comes in with out permission from anyone and holds this secret meeting. Now the school business. Anyway, my language barrier didn't stop me from telling her that she should be fired and is by far the most incompetent person I have ever worked with. Anyway, that's our news and as much as we have learned from being here, we're looking forward to coming home in the Spring. Comment!
