Refresh Bolivia|

Today we visited the barrios to take a look at the finished bathroom and to eat some food that the women of Libertad prepared for us as thanks. The bathroom looked great, but it’s going to look even better once the shower is finished and all the tiles are put into place (picture coming soon...). The ladies were so nice in making us food to thank us. Although I was hesitant about eating the salad they prepared (can never be sure about the cleanliness of food), I ended up eatin

Lathan and I (Akshay) finally finished surveying Libertad!! We learned a lot about the communities throughout our three days of interviewing, and are excited to apply our knowledge in our future community efforts. We started the day having completed 29 surveys from the previous two days. Based on the map we drew of Libertad, we knew that we only had to cover two more streets in order to have passed by all the houses. From the barrio profile that was given to us by Maria Eugen

In the morning Lathan and I (Akshay) made this nice food! We spent the day inputting survey data and working on the training manual for the nursing students. We also made a spreadsheet database to input data that Maria Eugenia gave us. Claudia took a day off after having worked tirelessly on the bathrooms for a solid week! In the evening, Lathan and I played basketball at San Simon University with some local kids. It was an amazing experience, because the linguistics students

Bathrooms with Harsh and Claudia ​ Today the day started off pretty late because we were under the delusion that we didn’t have that much to do and would finish everything pretty early. As usual we were wrong. We got to the site and all we essentially had to do today was finish the lid of the toilet and install the PVC tube that was the handle. We also had to install the lid to the digester. Three things. The first problem we encountered was that the lid we had left to dry y

Community Health Worker Training with Akshay and Lathan ​ Before we started today’s content, we had a discussion about how to raise awareness in the communities that these newly trained health educators exist. We decided to combine each barrio’s monthly meeting with a health fair where the health workers could talk about what they have learned and possibly do some practical demonstrations (like building the water filters!). We started talking about today’s topic: maternal hea

Bathrooms with Claudia & Harsh We got home at 2am again last night but surprisingly felt great all day today. The day started off with a 10am meeting in the neighborhood with Maria Eugenia, Emiliana, Sandra, me, Harsh, Akshay & Lathan. The themes of discussion were: the current bathrooms, the Quito conference, J-term plans and the workshops. We know that the bathrooms we built in January were bad. There are no other real words to describe them. It’s not like we didn’t try --

Today started off bright and early at 9am (pretty harsh for Harsh since we got home at 2am last night) anyways it was still super nice of Rodrigo to once again pick us up for no real reason. He helped us find hay and honestly without him there was no way we would have found it because we drove to the other side of the city and then randomly stopped and a small boy was just selling hay. Impossible to spot. Then we bought caulk and went to the bathroom site. ​ ​ Once we got to

Bathrooms With Claudia & Harsh Our day started bright and early at 8am with Rodrigo picking us up to get the correctly sized rebar. We went to the biggest “ferreteria” or tool shop in town. However, they couldn’t cut it here so we had to go to another place and wait 30 minutes for them to cut it. While we were waiting Rodrigo decided to make Harsh eat typical Bolivian food …. Again. Rodrigo’s mission is to ensure that Harsh has the best visit to Bolivia ever. So we promptly g

Community Health Worker Workshops and Building Water Filters: Featuring Lathan & Akshay ​ This morning, Akshay and I (Lathan) left a little bit earlier in order to go shopping for bowls to build our water filtration system. We went to IC Norte, which is huge supermarket, kind of like a Target. Akshay also wanted to get some beans for dinner. When paying, there was a little misunderstanding with what NIP meant, but I realized that it was a PIN number in Spanish, número de iden

Today was a pretty relaxing day filled with a lot of waiting --really proving that to work in Bolivia patience is a virtue. We started off the day going to the supermarket (IC Norte) to pick up some remaining supplies for the CHW training sessions and groceries for today’s lunch and dinner. The taxi ride there was eventful in that I (Claudia) did not have small bills to pay the taxi driver so I had to go into the supermarket and buy a pack of gum to get small bills to pay him