First Night - 5/14/06

I arrived at my new Bolivian home yesterday around 4:30 pm…in all honesty my new family did not seem very excited to have me here, they were fairly complacent…much more than I was expecting. But, they knew nothing of me before I arrived today, and I nothing of them. We didn’t even know each other’s names. Dinner was fairly quiet…nothing but simple conversations…questions about where I was from, what my family is like, how old I am. I found out that most of their family lives on this street…grandparents, uncles, cousins, the works. A veritable Bolivian Boomer Road, if you will. I returned to my room feeling quite homesick for familiar food and people who spoke English…this was not the first or last time I wondered to myself “What am I doing here?”

My host father then came to tell me that there was a gathering up the street tonight…a baptism party for someone in the family, and asked if I wanted to go. Doing my best to overcome the homesickness, I figured I might as well begin getting to know the people I’d be living around, which turned out to be an excellent decision. I met a whole host of friends and family, all who were very interested in what I was doing there. This was the first real test of my Spanish skills…aside from the loud music playing, both the people I spoke with and myself were a little tipsy, so it was certainly a challenge. Everyone wanted to shake my hand and call me a friend. I had an excellent conversation with a guy named Don Tito, who told me he could tell that I was a beautiful person on inside as well as on the outside. My host-dad told me more about his life and how he raises his kids and I found out that this family isn’t much different than many of those I know back home. We danced “la cueca,” which is a local dance where the participants swing handkerchiefs in the air and halfway through take a little break for a quick drink that everyone throws back quickly. Those of you who are familiar with my dancing skills know that I didn’t quite master the dance, but no one seemed to mind. I was a happy little gringo.

I got up around 9am or so and sat down to a cup of coffee with my host sister when my host dad came out and asked how I felt, confessing that he didn’t feel so great. He encouraged me to come with him so he could show me the customary Sunday Bolivian hangover cure. We walked through a couple of cow fields to a neighbor’s house that had been converted into a tiny restaurant where many came for soup and some more beer. That’s right, it’s 9:30 am after a night of drinking and we were drinking beer again. “A little hair of the dog that bit ya” as my mom always says (not that she practices such a thing). I took it easy…telling my host dad that I liked to drink, but not 24 hours a day. I had a great conversation with a younger guy named Alberto, who was confounded by the fact that mother’s day in the U.S was not the same day every year. From there, we went back to the house we had been the night before, where everyone had returned for more drinking and playing a game called “zanuela,” which is strangely like cornhole, only on a much smaller scale and played with coins. My host dad informed me that everyone worked so much during the week that the weekend was the only time they had to spend with family, so that’s really all anyone did on the weekends. I hung around for a couple more hours talking with folks but then walked back home to spend some time with the rest of the family. Needless to say, it was an interesting first 18 hours or so.