Construction in Bolivia

Jobsite goalposts are a necessity for the regular soccer games

My trip to Bolivia last week did contain some official business, quite a bit actually.

NPH Bolivia will be moving to their new site in January, during the summer school break for the kids. They began construction in July of last year and have almost completed their dining facilities (the punchlist is shrinking). They are also continuing construction on six houses which each hold 16 kids in four bedrooms and two caregivers in another. Another four houses will be following next with their schedule depending on funding.

I visited the property with their project manager, Pascal, who is from Belgium, and it was wonderful to be back on a construction site.

I nostalgically sniffed the fragrance of cut metal drifting on the breeze (my first construction job ever was a school, so steel studs were a code requirement and the burly construction worker who cut them was so thrilled I gave him a nickname he didn’t seem to mind that it was the Steel Stud Fairy).

So many things were comfortingly familiar. They keep an organized site. They have reflective torch down on the flat roof of the Comedor (dining building). They’re in the middle of cleaning construction dust off of everything. And they have a beautiful finished product.

Like Nicaragua, there are some differences too. When the cows get too close to the houses, they’re chased away by workers. The workers sleep in the homes they’re building (it’s easy to make sure they’re at work!). And sometimes they bring their kids to work.

The buildings and homes which are nearing completion are the beginning of a new chapter for NPH Bolivia. There is much more to do on the construction site in the following years, a school, a hospital and offices to name a few. But the work that has been done so far has created a strong foundation for the future of this home (ok, yeah, that was a cheesy pun!).

This porch wraps around 3 sides of the Comedor

Home Sweet Home!

I Forgot about the Equator

A flowering tajibo in a field of grass and giant ant hills

The equator isn’t very important to me. Sure, the world would be very different without it, but that’s true for lots of things I don’t think about.

When I left tropical Nicaragua for Bolivia, however, it became a lot more important. With Bolivia south of the equator, it’s winter right now and really cold. I had thrown a fleece in my bag at the last minute and wore it constantly the first few days.

Bolivia is known for its high Andes, similar in part to Peru, they share the largest high altitude lake and the mountain range. Its eastern lands, however, have much more in common with Brazil, sharing the Amazon rainforest. It also contains extensive desert climates as well in its southwest section. Santa Cruz is in the semi-tropical rainforest section (hence my lack of cold weather planning).

A view of the skyline near Santa Cruz. It doesn't get much less Andes-like than this.

Darkness fell during the long highway drive back from my first visit to the new home site out in the rural countryside. In the distance I could see occasional small pillars of smoke lit from underneath by fire. I asked Pascal what they were. He replied that they were either cleaning sugar cane fields after a harvest, or they were burning rainforest for more planting space.

I was stunned. Burning rainforest for farmland is something that only happens far away. But here it was, close enough to see through the night. Thoughts about soils lacking nutrients in tropical ecosystems (they’re generally held in the plants themselves) and therefore making poor farming land drifted through my head. Visions of an Indian woman, missing several of her front teeth, hair in long black traditional braids and layered skirts desperate to increase her income by the smallest margin followed. This wasn’t a random stereotype; this was the picture one of the girls at the house had shown me of her mother.

The soil is frequently sandy with a hard clay laying underneath, those are cow hoofprints and the pasture is definitely not high-efficiency

Bolivia is currently in the middle of a crisis. Developed countries hardly know how to make ecologically balanced economic advancements. How could we expect a nation where education is substandard at best for most of the population to navigate the troubled waters alone?

The rewards if successful are as astoundingly immense for the world as the tragedy will be if the wilderness and the people with it are lost. But how do we help without colonizing with our capital and our culture?

Similar to Bolivia’s future, there are no easy answers.

One way is to educate ourselves. Read. I stayed up late into the night just before I left finishing William Power’s Whispering in the Giant's Ear it was so compelling. Contribute to organizations which are already succeeding (for example the Trees for the Future link to the right). Support the US rejoining the Kyoto Protocol which Bush withdrew the US from. There are as many ways to help as there are undiscovered species in the Amazon, in other words, more than we'll ever know.

The Real Reason to go to Santa Cruz, Bolivia

Before I get to the reason I went to Bolivia last week (construction work), I want to show you the REAL reason I do the work I do.

NPH Bolivia started just over two years ago. It began as a family of 11 in one weekend; they now house over 40 kids (and are planning on growing to around 500, eventually). They have the full range of babies to young adults living in the house and address the variety of challenges that comes with this diversity of ages, backgrounds and abilities.

My first day there I was greeted with cries of ‘Tia!’ (Aunt! The title used for all female staff, Tio, or Uncle is for all male staff). Hugs, questions and long explanations about nothing in particular usually follow (especially from the younger ones) and tugs toward the swings.

The kids learn how to behave from the adults that care for them and it’s clear from their warm, loving welcomes for me that everyone at NPH Bolivia works hard to create a caring environment for these kids who come from such tough backgrounds.

Eduardo contemplates what trouble to get into next

NPH Bolivia Futbol Team (Tios and kids both play)

For the younger ones, a race devised by Tia (and volunteer from Austria) Judith to tire them out, and it works!

The Place to Eat

I imagine one of the better ways for you to understand my eating situation (which is really important to me because food is very important to me), is to see the kitchen I eat in.

Because I live at the offices, it’s generally only adults that eat here and Eva cooks for us six days a week. I’ve come to love chayote with queso (it’s a vegetable kind of like a seedless zuchinni), tamarind refresco (juice flavored with tamarind) and fried plantains (basically a French fry).

We cook with gas and only have stove tops, so there’s no baking in this kitchen, but there is lots of frying! Generally, more is considered better and so you can never be cooking with enough oil. Fortunately for me, Eva doesn’t always cook like that.

Sometimes when there is a large group, or not enough gas, the beans will go outside to cook over a wood fire. It’s not that common, so sometimes the wood is a little wet and they throw diesel on it to get the fire going.

Pinto Gallo roasting on an open fire

Eva cooks dinner immediately after lunch and then leaves in the afternoon when she’s finished. Because refrigeration isn’t strongly integrated into the culture, the food sits out for several hours (with lids tightly closed) before we have dinner around 7.

This is one of the reasons it’s so important that the food is completely fresh. If the food is even a couple days old, no one will eat it. In the States, it was no big deal to take two day old leftovers out of the fridge, microwave it and have it for a quick dinner. Here, even if you immediately refrigerate the leftovers, that doesn’t mean it didn’t have several hours (or days) previous at ambient temperature to develop bacteria. So instead of keeping foods at safe temperatures before and after cooking (because you never know what the person who had the food before you did), the culture is simply to eat it as soon as you have it.

Generally, they won’t put their utensils on the tabletop, they cover their cups with their tortilla to keep off the flies and they’d rather lift meat to their mouth and take it off the bones with their teeth instead of with their fingers. These new hygiene rules I’ve learned simply by watching, they’re definitely an unconscious part of the culture.

I’ve had a great time trying so many new things, especially fruits and vegetables (but no noni please!). After this week in Bolivia with their foods, I’ve realized I’ve become so accustomed to it over the past few months, even I’m looking forward to having rice and pinto gallo beans when I get back!

The Kitchen

My Turn to Wait

Because I'm only in and out for meetings, this is my impression of Managua, traffic

I always hesitate to write about being stressed out for multiple reasons. First, because I believe I’ll eventually look back on this and think ‘I was stressed out about that?!’ Second, because I don’t want to be a big whiner while other people get to deal with much much worse. Lastly, because it’s never fun to visit a site where the person posting bums you out.

But if you want to know what life is like in a developing country, this is an important part of it for me. Nicaragua won’t change and I won’t change, at least not to the degree I would need to to not be stressed out by this part of the culture.

An example. Yesterday, I had a couple of meetings in Managua. Marlon decided to come along because he is feeling out of the loop about what is going on with the project.

All kinds of traffic

This means we share a car and driver. No problem, we’re headed to the same meetings. This also means that Marlon will want to stop by one of the houses we rent for older kids and check on them. I understand having done this routine with him and Raul countless times. And not only does it mean that when a situation arises at the house that he needs to deal with, that I have to wait, but that it is culturally appropriate for him not to bother with telling me what we're doing (or that plans have changed, or give a approximately close estimation to how long it's going to take).

Now, if this were an isolated issue, I would grin and bear it. After all it was only four hours of my life. Or if this were an issue with Marlon, I would find some way around it. But this is a cultural issue, it happens with nearly everyone nearly every day. Granted, I’m not usually trapped two hours away from my office and the work I need to do. But we all depend on each other in professional situations. It’s these relationships that make it work (or slow you down).

I am unflinchingly American (or Developed Countrian) in my love of schedule and adherence to factual information. But I also wasn’t ignorant of how these things tend to slide this way and that before coming here. Sure, sometimes it means my hopes are dashed that we will accomplish things as quickly as I sometimes think we can and maybe it will mean an eventual stomach problems from grinning and bearing a little too much (or swallowing the prickly ball as my sister describes it), but there are good sides to this too. Now I just have to remember what they are….

Lake Managua

Sister Phyllis

Sister Phyllis’ ‘home’ is technically Kennydale Hill, near Renton; she went to WSU and taught school in Ellensburg. When I arrived and said I was from Seattle, inevitably people would respond ‘So you know Sister Phyllis!’ Initially, she was in Italy with a pequeno having surgery, so I didn’t meet her until about a month ago, but I’ve gotten to know her since then.

Sister’s 50th anniversary of taking her vows is on June 23rd. She’s taking a vacation at home and going camping at Mt Rainier with friends she’s been doing this with for many many years (with a bottle of wine).

She used to work at Miacatlan in Mexico. She remembers the days when they would sometimes only have beans to eat for more than a week, the days when they were really struggling.

One day, long ago, Sister Phyllis walked with 95 little boys under the age of 10 to the entrance of Xochicalco. It’s about 5 km from the orphanage and each one carried a small packed lunch. When they got close to the gate, she told them all to stay behind and hide. Then, she approached the gate and in her nicest, sweetest manner told the guard there that she had several children from the local orphanage and could they please enter for free? They didn’t have enough money for the entrance fee. He looked at her and hesistated, but eventually agreed to let them in. So she called out and 95 little boys appeared. They spent the rest of their day exploring their own culture in a way they couldn’t have without her.

She has a story for every situation, and then some. She arrived in Nicaragua for the first time in April of 1982. She felt such hope in the country, there was progress in education and economics among the poor for the first time in a long time. But a few months later the US embargo began. She would sorrowfully tell how a baby died at their convent because they couldn’t get medicine, not even aspirin.

Sister Phyllis has experienced real tragedy through the people she has cared for as most of us will never know. But she also is always the first with a joke, a funny story or to give thanks for the kindness of others. I hope I’m that happy when I’m her age (and still camping!).

Happy Anniversary Sister!

A Taste of Home (or an Approximation Thereof)

My diet here is generally dependent on what others are eating. I’m fortunate to have someone cooking for me six days a week. But that also means that I don’t get what I want when I want it. Which, having been an American with a well paying job, is what I’m used to.

So, although I am grateful I have enough to eat on a daily basis (and that it generally tastes good), I decided to take matters into my own hands for a moment and attempt chocolate chip cookies.

In the kitchen, we already had butter (well, margarine), white sugar, salt, vanilla (sort of, it actually has a little almond extract/cherry taste to it as well) and eggs (lots of eggs, always eggs, completely fresh and (strange to me) never refrigerated eggs).

Then we went to Pali, the local grocery store for the rest of the ingredients. Here, I picked up wheat flour, found that no one in this part of the world knows of brown sugar and looked for chocolate. Apparently solid chocolate does not exist in Rivas either (I since saw a Hershey’s bar an hour away at a gas station in Granada). So under plan B, I found some hard candies, similar to butterscotch, that I could
break into little pieces. Unable to let go of the idea of chocolate, I bought a Snickers bar to add somehow. I toyed with the idea of more, but at almost $1 per bar and three people who had grown up in the orphanage with me, it felt a little extravagant.

The most rare and exotic of ingredients we had yet to find – baking soda. This was one item I didn’t know how to substitute. Fortunately I did have a translation bicarbonata de sodio. After much searching, I bought a little baggie of it for 27 cents from a lady selling vegetables on the street.

That evening a thunderstorm was getting ready to rain on us which meant it was unusually hot and humid. Not prime baking weather, but I was determined. So I mixed the ingredients as my teenaged helpers wandered in and out of the kitchen mostly playing music on my computer (I had the recipe I was more or less (or less) following on my laptop on the counter).

I set the oven in Maricela’s house (about a 2 minute walk away, but the only oven on the property not powered by wood) to about 175 degrees Celsius. When it was hot, the flat sheet of metal used to make tortillas with the golf ball sized drops of batter on it went into the oven.


When they came out, they were no longer they. Beautifully golden, they had all puddled together in one big cookie, it smelled delicious. I think due to the heat of the thunderstorm and my use of margarine, there was no hope. I had chilled the dough for an hour trying to avert this, but it was not to be. My favorite recipe (which would have survived this heat) is from a friend’s mom from college, but if you thought finding chocolate was hard, try Crisco!


Fortunately, that, of course didn’t affect the final taste and texture much and the reviews were all favorable (Rico!). Jayden, the lone American employee, informed everyone that they were, in fact, very genuinely American cookies.

American Cookies San Jorge Style

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup (1/2 pound) butter, softened
1 ¼ cup granulated white sugar
1 Tablespoon fake maple syrup
1 Tablespoon vanilla
2 eggs
½ package crushed Dulce de Leche candies
1 frozen chopped Snickers® bar

Beat butter, granulated sugar, syrup and vanilla in large mixer bowl. Add eggs; gradually beat in flour, baking soda and salt. Crush candy with your favorite finish hammer (I only brought my favorite framing hammer and it tends to rips the bag to shreds with the waffle face); chop Snickers®. Stir both into batter. Spread onto tortilla griddle and put in oven at 175 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes or until cooked to your liking.

One other note, I’m leaving for Bolivia on Sunday for work. I’m not sure of the internet access I’ll have, or what my schedule is like. I’ll be back in touch at the latest at the beginning of July!