She told me another really good thing that I will try to put on here before too long.
ASK A VOLUNTEER
E-Newsletter | October 2009
Q: In what ways do the people of your host country prepare for the annual harvest or celebrate its conclusion?
A: On the northern coast of Peru there are many different agricultural products; each region therefore celebrates at different times. However, each region does celebrate similarly. A nationally famous musical group is invited to play a concert, families save their money to buy the best meat possible, and soccer tournaments are held. During these fiestas, family members from throughout the country will come back home to be with their countrymen for the most lively week of the year.
Matthew West, Community-Based Environmental Peace Corps Volunteer, Peru
A: In Morocco, fall is located somewhere between fig and apple season. Here in the south, falling temperatures usher in the harvest, and the fruits are delicious and fresh. Dates are a special treat, earning the honored place in Moroccans' hearts as the first food they eat to break the Ramadan fast, which fell in September this year. People prize them as southern treasures, and when traveling north they are collected and given as gifts. Each town claims to have the best, and Erfoud, a small town from which camel trekkers embark, even boasts an annual date festival. There is no doubt though, that the sweet brown fruits have the power to satisfy any sweet tooth and keep you coming back for more.
Rachel Weiner, English Education Peace Corps Volunteer, Morocco
A: Halloween and fall do not exist here. I’ve been told that there used to be a “Harvest Day” where people would go to the churches to sing and celebrate, but that these celebrations are now rare.
Mandy Ward, NGO Development Peace Corps Volunteer, Uganda
It dawned on me today that this is the moment when PC Begins: it's not getting here, it's not meeting your town, it's when you get the rest of that junk out of the way and you get to focus on the other people. You're settled, you're halfway comfortable, some work is lined up, you don't have to think so hard about what you have to do, survival, but more on what you wish to do and would like to see happen in your town.
The other thing I'm glad about is this, how for the first time in my PC career I'll soon be a PC Sophomore. No longer the freshman, but after this 2 week training in February, 2 weeks until March when the next group comes at the beginning of the month. Then I will, after 2 years and some months, no longer be the newbie. So that makes me happy. The reason I never was this in Bolivia after 8 months there, was because they canceled two different groups of people. Even if we weren't evacuated, that is so extremely disruptive to the work projects people have that would not have been continued. Ultimately, every work job was suspended, but hearing first how one group was canceled, then a few months later hearing how a second group was canceled, we were frightened and we remained the freshman class.
I said this with a girl Christa, driving to my town and she going an hour further down the same road to her town. She's been here a year longer than me. Will she become a senior when this group comes? No, we decided. You aren't a senior until you meet the people that will be replacing you, the final 1/8th of your time here, where you wrap up what you did, you say goodbye, you hang out until someone else moves into your room and you get to introduce them to the town.
I promise, I have photos of my town. But they aren't shrunken small enought to upload
I was the intrepid one that climbed down into the ditch to take the panoramic photos and they replied by taking a photo of me!
There is an especially good photo where I am getting my hair cut.
I stop the man, le couiffure Mustafa, and I ask him to take a photo, 'because this is the first time I had more hair here (my beard) than here (my head)'. But its on my camera so I need to get it transferred to here, maybe later tonite.?
The last photo is the one and only 'open-up' Christmas present that I had this year! Just got it an hour ago from the post office and I was happy, no customs taxes or anything!
Today I might teach 3 hours and I might teach none. I'm seated here in the Dar Chebab, it's my place where I can find peace and quiet to do work. It's so strange, from the beginning I knew this was both where I'd work and also where I'd have the chance to get away from the home. Then I got sick and didnt come here. The strange part is that during that time I forgot how this was a place where I'd be able to focus, be by myself, not have to hide in my room where I try to work but am too easily distracted. And the family would be beneath my window in the courtyard calling my name and thinking that I was asleep 16 hours a day (in this culture, noone goes to their rooms except to sleep).
Take yesterday. I woke up then stayed in my room for two hours. I finally decide that the coast is clear, and so I try to take a chair to the roof to the furthest place up there, where noone can see me unless they come onto the roof. And it's there that looks out over the palms. But next think you know, I go back to get my book and am ambushed by Islan, the 5-year old. Haa. And it's impossible to explain that I want to be alone.
So we look at my magazine in my hand and she turns to each of the 130 pages, pointing to the king in each photo, saying malika!The past week I enjoyed playing with her, Osama and a visiting 5-year old named Mathiu from France, who took his parents here (or vice versa?). We tried an hour or more each day to have a three person juggling show, one to the next and so on. Never quite got it but it was great fun!
But finally I gave up trying to study above the gorgeous oasis, and instead I retreated to my room. Then her parents interrogate her for having bothered me, which I felt responsible for—i didnt know the words to explain, leave me alone, in a nice way so I just let her roam around the roof with me but then she sees the red-and-yellow ball in my back pocket and grabs it.Suddenly, 'shuma!' and pow, corporal punishment still exists out here where I am. SO now I've lost 2 hours, I feel extremely horrible like as if I colluded in fooling her in and instigating her punishment, and then trying to make my lesson plans again, I have to put in ear plugs because she is crying loudly and horribly for 20 minutes.
The point of this story, I suppose, is that I've reembraced my Dar Chebab. It felt good to walk around here, thinking of what might happen here once things get started, picking up the pieces of plastic that become unwound from the chairs, sweeping and opening the windows.Hey! Visit from my Mudir. Asking if I'm in good form, la bas, no problem? Yes, yes, nope. But like I've said before, even the best days here leave you tired, confused, unsure, wondering if you can make it or if its just a temporary success. Now I'll spend half an hour, prepare some things and see if any of the girls come to my girl-only class (I do this because 1) the girls can't come to the night class and also in the afternoons in the adjacent classroom simultaneously as my classroom there's a women's only literacy class, and noone wants any guys to come at this time). ::::::::: Update, apparently Islan came looking for me. It's 530, decided my lesson was crap so I'm redoing it, now focused on ¨¨myself/yourself and, by myself yourself¨, but watch out, 'themselves' and 'by themselves' is tricky! But I saw a girl that I knew, when I walked outside the door to look and see who was there. The girl is the good friend of Islan But you can never be sure, 4 year olds look alike. I went back inside. Then I heard, Islan! Islan! So, I came back. But Islan had already walked too far up the hill to hear both of us as we tried to get her attention. So I stood there and watched her as she walked up the giant hill, feeling quite tired.The next blog post I do I think I will focus on : Spending a day in my shoes. It will be fun! Im happy because after tomorrow is .. pizza night! And an especially good thing is that I found the Sandwich Gouda cheese here in Nkob! That is amazing! It's expensive, 15 D's, but OK. The man had a stack of 7 or 8 of them. So I can use some of the cheese tomorrow and I won't miss a day of my grilled cheeses that I make with my panini/wafflero.
Lastly, I might have 2 different women's English classes now. One is the normal one, girls from school. But the other is the women's literacy group, that got up from what they were doing and came to the other side to sit and listen to me teach. There was one girl that answered everything, Fatima, and she surprised me when she came up and spoke with the most fluency of anyone in Nkob. Not thinking or translating or anything. She said her problem is she knows English but just needs to expand her vocabulary.
I might find find a book for her to practice with, since that's the surest way to gain vocab skills.
It really pays to look at the books PC game me for teaching English thoroughly. Because at the back I found a section called: If you are not sure which is right. And it's brilliant. It saved my lesson tonite! The book has 130 lessons, a lot, and I can't do them all. But this has a multiple choice sentence, and if you don't know the answer then it tells you: ¨Missed it? Then look up chapter 72.¨ And they are grouped together, so tonite I will pick a section, put up the multipe choices for each question, then the sections they get right I will skip and the chapters they still need I will do. It can all still go horribly wrong, but at least this way I have a system.
I had a good week, the first week since I felt better after the 3 weeks of having a parasite. I went to spend New Year's with people from my group, which I haven't seen in six weeks. There's a snow advisory now for a lot of Morocco, and we received an email from our security person telling us to be wary when traveling. I'm lucky to have a hot shower here. I live at a Casbah that's been converted into a hostel, so there's a hot shower available any time I want one. The only thing is that it is done by natural gas, so you have to turn the water to a very low pressure for it to heat up very warm. Still, many PCVs only have a cold shower or a bucket bath, so this is a great thing for me to have. In place of moving out on my own like most PCVs, I've moved into a bigger room but still with the same family. The room is big enough for the bed, desk, a living room-type space and in the corner a table with an electric eye to cook. But even with the hot shower, you can believe that on nights like tonite when it's very cold, I remember Franklin and sitting in the hot tub talking with you. I wish I could magically fly there for an hour or two, enjoy some Franklin Pizza Co. and then get in the hottub for a bit. I've been here four months already! Starting the 11th. It seems like it's gone fast, but when I remember everything it's not surprising. It's been a very full four months: the weekend in Philadelphia, flying to Casablanca, taking the bus with everyone to Rabat and the beach resort where we spent the first week, then the long hours of training, crammed into a small room and trying to learn Arabic. Two months of that, then moving on to my town Nkob, plus various weekends in different cities along the way, going to Rabat a couple of times (a 12 hour trip from where I am to the PC office), twice in Marrakesh, twice in Ourzazate, twice in Zagora, and twice in Agdez, as soon as I go there tomorrow. Plus getting all of my things from place to place, buying the new things to help furnish where I am, and I've read about 20 books since I've been here, or more now. I'm very close to all the people in my region, though I've only seen them briefly. The problem is that they all left for Christmas! Some went to Tennessee (one guy near me went to school at Vanderbilt), others went to Paris. One girl's mom became badly sick so Peace Corps flew her home for free for a month to be with her. So she is coming home this weekend and tomorrow I will take a taxi to the town (it's the closest one to me), and have a chance to cook and eat good food. I have a can of red beans that I will take, hoping to maybe convince people that some chili is the perfect thing to eat in the Winter time. And I'll try to make waffles for the first time with my waffle maker that I bought in Marrakesh. I've used it already, but to make sandwiches. You press a button and you can change the plates inside for a grill, for toasting sandwiches, or for making waffles. But as happy as this week was, getting to eat real food again after 3 months of being sick, on a Bread-Rice-Apples-and Toast diet, something I ate yesterday affected me badly, and I was even more sick than before. But luckily, though this was more violent it was also shorter. I threw up a dozen times, and I was stuck in the bathroom on the floor, waiting to see if I'd throw up or have diarrhea next. But this was only from 6 to 8 PM, and apart from being sick a couple of times through the night, now I feel nearly perfect again. The worst thing is just not knowing why, i ate different things all day but am not sure what it was that did it. Knowing that my host family would come to check on me, I got out of my bed to go hide my peanut butter. They blamed my first 3 week illness on my having eaten peanuts, so now that I was healthy and I began eating peanuts again (I never really stopped, but this week I didnt hide it) I was afraid that I'd never hear the end of it if they knew I had two jars of peanut butter. And they blamed this time being sick on my sandwich bread that I bought in Ourzazate. For work here, i've taught only 2 classes before I got sick the first time, and I was afraid being sick yesterday that I'd have to postpone classes even longer. My schedule is pretty simple. I have Spanish four days a week between the time students get out of high school and the time they eat lunch, 45 minutes or an hour. Then I come back at 3 and 4 to teach the girls English, since the normal classes are at night in the dark, and they are not allowed to leave their house at night. So while that is another 2 hours of teaching, it's really just a repeat of the English lesson the night before. Then I have an hour and a half to go cook dinner before my night lessons. So it's 16 hours or so schedule a week, though I also hope to have a class where I find a song in English that they all like, then we look at what the lyrics mean and practice singing it. My Arabic teacher knows a Cat Stevens song, Fathers and Sons, 10 years later because her English teacher taught it to her, so I think it will be a popular class. But it's hard to find a good time slot. I want to use my beekeeping skills, and I might try to get a PC grant that would allow me to go into the nearby mountains where they harvest honey, and train them in more modern ways to get the honey without destroying the nest.
Butch Cassidy's grave appears in San Vincente, Bolivia.
Noah Friedman-Rudovsky
The red canyons and parched planes surrounding the new Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid Memorial Museum might make you think you're in the Old West. But the electrical wiring and a searing altitude headache tell you this is not California circa 1900, but high-up the mountains in present day Bolivia. Here in the tiny town of San Vicente (population 800), the world's most famous outlaws are supposed to have been gunned down 101 years ago, days after robbing the payroll of a Bolivian mine. Offing the bandits would seem to have been sufficient revenge but area residents still think the dead gringos have to pay. How? As tourist bait.
"We want people to visit and see the history this town holds," says the museum's part-time curator Carlos Ventura, 25, who works three days a week as a public transport operator. The museum was opened in early November by Pan American Silver, the Canadian mining company that now operates the town's main source of income. With plans for guided tours and more, residents hope to bring much needed income into southern Bolivia, the country's poorest region. The small one-room adobe building is adorned with antique guns, enlarged newspaper clippings and black and white photos — a mix of historical images and publicity shots from the 1969 Paul Newman and Robert Redford classic, though Ventura has a hard time distinguishing between the two groups. (See the top 10 movie bromances.)
Pan American Silver representative Anival Arnes, who's taken a lead in the tourism drive, admits: "This is a project in germination." There's little publicity so far around Bolivia and visitors have to make their own way to remote San Vicente — a bumpy two hour ride from nearby Uyuni and Tupiza — unless they hook up with Tupiza Tours, which which leads tourists along the "death trail" of Butch and Sundance. Pan America security guards are wary of letting unannounced vehicles into town and locating someone to unlock the museum isn't always easy. (See the top 10 crime duos.)
Bolivia might be famous for its majestic salt flats and Andean peaks, but it also has a firm hold on "death trail" tourism. Thousands come annually to retrace leftist revolutionary hero Ernesto "Che" Guevara's final footsteps in south central Bolivia. Butch and Sundance tours have been around a while too. "Since 1992, we've provided tourists with the unique opportunity to follow the outlaws' last days," says Fabiola Mitru, founder of Tupiza Tours. For under $150, you get a private one-to-two day guided tour in a jeep of the era's historic mining mansions, the site of the hold-up and San Vicente, plus meals and lodging. (See TIME's 1960 cover of Che Guevara.)
"It was fascinating," says Seattle native Al Erlandsen, who spent a day with Mitru's outfit earlier this month. Like most travelers to the area, he knew about the outlaws' escapades in Bolivia because of the based-on-a-true-story Hollywood movie. But, he says, it was the element of mystery that made him want to do the tour: "I was intrigued by the conflicting reports of the bandits' deaths."
The tale is a winding one. Butch and Sundance, born LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh in 1866 and 1867 respectively, together with their Wild Bunch Gang found infamy via lucrative yet humane bank and train robberies at the end of the 19th century in the US. In 1901, with the Pinkerton Detective Agency on their trail, the outlaws headed to South America, lured by the region's silver wealth. (The movie places them directly in Bolivia but they actually spent five years in Argentina and Chile). On November 4, 1908 they hit up a Bolivian mining company payroll delivery, expecting half a million dollars but finding only a few thousand. Two days later they arrived in San Vicente but were recognized by locals and trapped in a house without sufficient ammunition.
"One of the gringos killed his partner and then turned the gun on himself," says an almost toothless 73-year-old Friolan Rizo, refuting the movie's final frame: a courageous dash towards a rain of Bolivian army bullets. "My father was there that day; The gringos had to be carried out dead from their hiding place," he says. No one else has roots a century deep in this transient mining town, so Rizo has become the local legend-keeper. His testimony led to a 1991 exhumation in the spot Rizo said his father helped bury Sundance. The remains ended up being those of German man named Gustav Zimmer. Despite that identification, Zimmer's bones are on display in the Butch and Sundance museum. It later became clear that Rizo's tale probably came from information he gleaned off a Butch and Sundance historian who traveled through San Vicente in the 1970's.
Others swear that the two survived the ambush. "If you believe all the stories out there, they lived for decades, in dozens of countries," says Dan Buck, who along with his wife Anne Meadows, author of Digging Up Butch and Sundance, are considered the foremost experts on the outlaws' time in South America and coordinated the San Vicente exhumation. "We aren't going to ever find out what really happened to them," he says, though he thinks that they probably died here.
San Vicente has no doubts about its place in history. "Welcome to San Vicente: Here lie the remains of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," reads the billboard at the entrance to the town. The cemetery, on a rise overlooking the jumble of tin roofs, now has a cordoned-off area to mark Butch's supposed grave. Residents held a centennial celebration last year and San Vicente's population doubled with tourists who came to watch Bolivians reenact the shootout — the DVD of which is now available, along with Butch and Sundance hats, t-shirts and key chains in the San Vicente town store.
Locals are beginning to resent Pan American's leading role in the tourism venture. "There's always conflict over who 'owns' outlaw legacy," says Buck, who adds, however, his approval of locals' new-found interest. When he first arrived in San Vicente, in the 1980s, no one seemed to care about Butch and Sundance, he says, and so "this is a great opportunity for the locals to make some money." Sixto Juarez, a 30-something miner who and wandered into the museum the morning I arrived, agreed: "At some point the mine will close. But this town's legacy will last forever."
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