Chile con Queso

Arica, Chile's northernmost city on New Years Day. We tried to surf a little bit, but mostly just ended up drinking saltwater.
Surfs up dude. I know that is not a surf board if the foreground, but it is in the background. This is Ryan and Brandon, my fellow vacationers and PC volunteers in the Oruro Department.
Chile was a little bit more expensive than Bolivia.
Oh, how much was dinner? 35,000? Good I was hoping you were going to say 35,000. I just happen to have 35,000 right here.

If I've learned one thing in life, it's try to be a good person and make your parents proud of you. If I've learned two things, it's never pass up a chance to be in a picture with pretty foriegn girls.

Big Mama Sajama

This is Sajama village, about 10 miles from the highway where we got off the bus and started walking. It is also where the park entrance is.
This is Sajama from one of its foothills. It is a huge volcano rising up to 21,400 feet. Ryan, the person pictured, and I hiked up a foothill that was 16,500ish feet high.
We set up camp at a conveniently located hot springs here at about 14,000 feet.

It's a nice view to wake up to, and the hot springs were about 25 feet away.

These are Sajamas little chilean sisters. Not quite as big as Sajama, but together they form an impressive trifecta of 21,000+ foot volcanos.

And here they are silouetted at sunset. The skys are crystaline and the air up here is the clearest I've ever seen. If only there was more of it.

Chris Brings Tanks to the Altiplano

(Manager of Learning) MOL is a concept that my boss loves, and that's exactly what has gone on during this tank building taller headed by Chris, the new PCVL boss, and JICA (the Japanese Peace Corps-type organization).

The girl, Leydi, taught us how to find cactus fruit and showed us which ones were ripe and which ones still needed time. They tasted like a mixture of kiwi and raspberry, and we learned something from a 6 year old. That was very gratifying.

A view of Beautiful Oruro from the hill we were building the tank on. These suburbs don't have a car in every garage, let alone two. But they are working together, men and women and children all working really hard together. It was great because it helped changed the opinions that Chris had about the altiplano. He was really impressed and complimentary. He served his first two years in the Santa Cruz region.
Here is a picture of the tank being built. A little bit too much concrete and sand mixture (1 to 3 mix) was put on at this part and it sluffed off. They fixed it when it had dried a little more and it shouldn't have any effect on the strength of the tank.

These tanks can be used to harvest rain water from your roof and it comes out of there clean and drinkable.

Old Bones

These bones were dug up at the original site for the 30,000 Liter tank being constructed on the outskirts of Oruro with my PCVL boss Chris. The Jaw bone is strange, take a closer look. The marble was already in the eye, maybe put there by the kids who hung around. It was dug up with the pottery beside its head, which led us to believe it might be really old. We moved the placement of the tank.