An Eventful Week in Chuqui Chuqui

We are officially a third of the way through our placement! It feels like we have been here for longer: Our little casa feels more and more like home each week and our hosts more and more like family. Week four in Chuqui Chuqui has proven to be one of the more challenging ones: Four volunteers contracted salmonella and other bacterial infections making work and progress quite slow at the beginning of the week. 

On Monday we took a walk to the village’s water source, which provided incredible scenery as we trekked up the dried-out riverbed. We met with the man in charge of the water supply system in the village and hope to help with access to clean water by investigating new water sources.

Tuesday involved more workshop planning, and on Wednesday the healthy volunteers helped picking tomatoes in the fields, which is proving tougher as the heat increases through October. In the afternoon we took a drive with our Bolivian volunteers to a fish farm and helped remove unwanted algae at the bottom – not the most enticing body of water, but it felt great to get our hands dirty and help out! I am continuously amazed at how robust the buses are that transport us around the countryside. They carry as many people as physically possible, making their way up impossibly steep hills, rocky, uneven terrain and across the occasional river, if it is in the way. Our Bolivian hosts and volunteers continue to show their kindness by providing us with cold drinks, boiled potatoes and their delicious sauce Llajwa. On Wednesday evening we returned to find our ill volunteers back home. It’s wonderful to have everyone back in the village!

While the increasing heat toughens working conditions, it provides the Bolivian countryside with the most amazingly tasting fruits like fresh mangoes, which the Bolivian volunteers catapult from the trees, and our host mother provided us with the BEST pineapple any of us have ever tasted. We hope November will bring more passion fruits, oranges and papayas; it will be hard to return home where nothing tastes quite as fresh!

On Thursday an International Service staff member came down from La Paz to support our work: As expected we are a little behind schedule compared to other ICS groups in Bolivia, as we are the first volunteers to start and establish a project in the Sucre area – we have done a lot of planning and discussing with local partners and people in charge and we are ready to start the more sustainable work with the community.

As part of the personal development aspect of ICS we discussed our interests and strengths and were each assigned a mini-project to work on. Jess and Ra’chel have decided to run the English classes; Moisés, Jamie and Ariel are to investigate improvement possibilities we might be able to support the local school with. Eamon is about to start a running group, and I teamed up with Máxima to run some cross-cultural music classes. We also hope to provide some nutrition and health workshops and are always looking for areas of improvement in the community to see how we can help out.

One of the main problems our village faces is rubbish disposal – there are basically neither rubbish collection nor recycling resources, so the locals currently only have the option to burn their waste.

Day to day life in the village involves a strange contrast of resourcefulness and waste – halved tires are used as mangers for the animals, crates are used as tables and food is rarely wasted.

However, as the rubbish is set on fire on the dried-out river bed, the smell of burning plastic is hard to get used to.

So on Saturday we plan to collaborate with the rest of the community to help with recycling collection and a general cleaning of the village to prevent Dengue Fever as well.

Our British-Bolivian team grows closer each week and any argument is easily solved with a good chat. The Bolivian volunteers are keen to share their culture with the British team members and it is amazing how easy it has become to communicate, even with a lack of Spanish, whether it is through a communal cake baking session, a game of football or by teaching us a song on the Siku, the national Bolivian panpipe instrument.

By Megan Walker