June and July

Hi friends and family!

Since we last wrote, we’ve taken our 2 weeks vacation –

My (Andy) dad came down to do the manliest things we could find to do in Bolivia. This is a pretty extreme country, with plenty of “est”s in the guide book. We biked the World’s Most Dangerous Road, visited the world’s highest ski slope (17,500 ft), toured a still-working mine that dates back to the 1500’s, held lit dynamite in our hands, and boated on Lake Titicaca.

Cassie headed to the U.S. to celebrate to surprise her dad for his 50^th birthday. Continuing the surprise, they all headed on a family vacation to Breckenridge, where they golfed, rafted the river, and relaxed. She got to visit a good chunk of her extended family, and even said hi to the in-laws.

Last week, we were honored to host a group of visitors here in Moro Moro from Fresno Pacific University, a Mennonite affiliated school in California. This charming group of students is part of a Peace-building Institute put on during the summer, in which students take a couple weeks of intensive classes, and then go out and learned a bit about the world through service. They brought us a gallon Ziploc bag (the real thing), and prized as that may be, it gets better—it was full of almonds and cashews from California. The nuts didn’t last a week.

Just this last weekend we celebrated the annual July 25 fiesta in Moro Moro, honoring our patron saint Santiago (that’s him on the horse). We enjoyed watching the town go into a fury to ready everything. About half of the houses have received new paint or whitewash, and other improvements were hurried – getting electricity or a bathroom, new sidewalks. The whitewashing was pretty funny because only at a couple places did we see the sidewalk protected. You get a nicer looking house, but a terrible looking splashed-white sidewalk. Vendors come in from all over Bolivia to sell their wares, and for those without cars, it’s the time of year to buy new mattresses, pots, electronics, whatever you could need.

Cassie was sick in bed the day before the fiesta, and I was selfishly praying that she’s get better because we had to run a booth at the fair. The day before the fiesta I particularly enjoyed going out to breakfast in Moro Moro–the marketplace had little tarp-covered booths where you could sit and enjoy api (ground purple corn, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, and lemon served hot) and fry breads. At 8pm, mass was held for standing-room only crowd, and the priest knew when to shut it down when the brass band stood on the steps outside blasting their horns into the church. The fiesta went into the night with people eating potatoes fried over a dozen open fires and multiple mariachi bands in the plaza, and vendors selling every variety of wine, spirit and warm spirits with milk. I really enjoyed the tradition of the monstrous fireworks creations that were lit off at one corner of the plaza – the more sparks, spinning, and bangs, the louder the cheers.

In the morning, women cooked traditional Moromoreñian food on rocks over open fires. Flat breads of fermented wheat and cheese (Ichaska), wheat soup (Lagua), and sweet charque (dried beef) empanadas were the fare. We hosted a booth at the fair, held in the new coliseum. We had soil and compost samples from various fields, and were highlighting the connections between organic matter in the fields, reducing chemical use, water quality, and latrines. The highlight was getting people to look at the composted human manure and imagine the value and possibilities of using it to fertilize crops while at the same time protecting human health with latrines. We let them weight themselves to determine how much fertilizer they could produce in a year. FUN!

The revelry continued into the night, but Cassie and I called it quits about 9pm. Something about screaming in Spanish over the music in Spanish really wears the brain out.