Advertisement
Published: March 19th 2007
Andres and Lucky
While Andres and I were playing cards, Lucky kept joining us on the table...Hello,
I think I left off with Friday lunchtime. Friday afternoon was nice and quiet at the hospital. Some of the children got discharged, so there were actually some beds empty for a change - normally they are short of beds.
I had my first cry this afternoon. I got there and Gladys was really crying because her hand and arm were hurting. I think she must be badly burnt there because she has her arm tucked away inside her nightie. It´s not that often that she cries, she´s fairly placid, so I felt very sad for her.
I asked the doctor and the nurse if they could do something for her pain and the nurse said she was about to administer something. I wasn´t too sure what she said, maybe something to tranquilise her. I felt so helpless, I don´t really know now why I cried, but I snuck off to the psychology area for a 5 minute cry in private. I think I find it hardest when there is nothing I can do/say to help.
Actually, after that Gladys got better and was fine the rest of the afternoon. As it was really quiet, I
Andrés and Lucky 2
Now you can see Andrés too spent most of the afternoon with the two girls that are able to get out of bed, Nelly and Gladys, mostly Nelly as Gladys was very quiet. Nelly and I spent some time on numbers and then we did some simple addition exercises using the flash cards I bought in the US. As these have Disney princesses on them (Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella etc), she absolutely loves them. Anything pink and princess-ish always goes down well!
She got a sticker for every sum she got right, and as she gets new nightie/PJs every day, I stuck them onto a piece of paper for her, and then we drew the numbers 1-10 and drew examples of each number (three apples etc).
I went back up to the family home for an hour or two prior to coming back down to meet up with a group of people from the hospital to go out. Kirsten was there too, so it was nice to see her, as she´d been poorly. We went to a very typical Quinta to have a meal and a few drinks and enjoy some like Bolivian folk music (with a brief intrusion of a Mexican group!). After we´d
A view of the Cristo from my window
The Cristo is 40m high and is lit up at night in all sorts of changing colours. As well as giving me a sense of peace, the statue comes in handy when navigating my way around town, as you can see it from almost everywhere! finished eating and with the third band on, we also had a bit of a dance, and it was good fun.
I got home around 2.45am, the doctor dropped Kirsten and me home. He is good like that. There were a lot of gates and locks to negotiate and one of them was a bit beyond me at that time of the morning and in the dark, so I climbed over it. I sent all the dogs mad but the next day the family said they didn´t hear me come in, which was good.
Saturday I had a big sleep in and then back to the hospital for Dr Romero and Magda´s English lesson. They are much better at the English alphabet and the numbers now, after lots of practice, and today we started with the time. As the logic is different in Spanish (you start with the hour e.g. 3 horas and then the minutes e.g. 3 horas y cinco. This meant they kept getting it the wrong way around at first but we got there in the end. There was a little toy clock with plastic hands on the ward, so we used that to ask
Did I mention the tortoise?
I know I mentioned the kitten and the myriad dogs at the house where I live, but maybe not the tortoise. Isn´t he gorgeous?! I say ´he´ but apparently they change gender and recently laid an egg. Princess Leia, rather than Luke, according to Andrés! each other ´what time is it? / do you have the time (please)?
The Doc took me back home after the lesson and I had lunch with the family. After lunch, I went with Maritza, Estrella and Carolina to the huge market in town, La Cancha. La Cancha is huge, and I have no idea how we got the sections that we went to - arts and crafts to look at the traditional Bolivian wares, then toys for me to buy some puzzles.
Navigating the market was one problem, the other was that as it has rained so much the last couple of days, there were all kinds of floods in the market itself, so you had to kind of balance on stepping stones where the ground was higher and there was less deep water. It was pretty gross and my trainers and socks got soaked. Not the sort of water you´d want entering your system, for sure!
With Maritza, the haggler par extraordinaire, I was able to buy a dozen wooden puzzles for the children at the hospital for about 115 Bs, which amount to about $15. I am sure I´d have been charged mass more than that on my own, but there´s no messing with Maritza when she´s shopping, as I have discovered. I got some good puzzles, some fun with cartoon characters and others educational with alphabet, numbers, parts of the body... I couldn´t resist a princess one for you-know-who.
Next I bought half a dozen exercise books as we are always in need of somewhere for the children to write what they are learning - letters, numbers, words - and also for them to draw in. Also my pupils in English are hopelessly unequipped, they turn up without pen and paper and end up writing what they learn on little scraps of paper which blatantly will get lost. I´m trying to get them a bit more organised so that they can keep what they´ve learned...
Then Maritza got into shopping gear. Scary! She cuts a pace through the waters and crowds that is beyond belief. I really struggled to keep up with her, carrying a dozen wooden puzzles and navigating the floods and the crowds. It was consoling that her daughters fared only slightly better than me. They told me she´s always like that at the market and they always struggle to keep up. Maritza needed to buy all sorts of bits for her little shop: oil, maize, flour, lollipops, biscuits, candles, and lots of other things, only some of which I even recognised.
Finally we had as much as she wanted (some things were at a price that she didn´t believe would enable her to sell them on) and we got the micro home, catching it up in the dodgy part above the market, which enabled us to get on before the market crowds and therefore get seats and have room for all our shopping.
In the evening I played a dice game called Farkel (must try and buy this when I get home, it´s good fun) with Andres - see photos of Andres and Obi Wan / Lucky who kept jumping onto the table to join us. Lucky is quite a sweet kitten (as cats go!) and likes to sit on you and purr.
On Sunday, I got up about 9.30am and spent the morning fiddling around to save my photos that I´d not yet posted here to a smaller format, to aid faster upload. We went out for lunch with all the family plus Uncle Carlos, Aunt Daisy and their two sons and daughter. The place we went to was very basic in appearance, mud floor, white (ish) walls and you had to queue to get cutlery, pay and get a plate of food over which there was no choice. It was the usual kinda food: a quarter of chicken, a leg of duck, potato, maize, tomato-onion-carrot salsa and of course a roast banana, which I just can´t get into as part of a savoury meal. What you don´t want someone else will eat, though!
It was slightly unfortunate that Iain and I had arranged for him to call at home at 2pm my time, but we left for the lunch at 1.30pm, and there was nowhere to phone from the place, it was in the middle of nowhere. I also would have liked to call mum for Mothers´ Day, but I couldn´t. By the time we went from lunch to the football, it was gone 7pm, so gone 11pm UKT.
The football was between Lucho´s Cochabamba team, Jorge Wilstermann and a La Paz team called Bolívar. Andrés came too, but wasn´t very into it like Lucho because his favourite team is Aurora, the other Cochabamba team. I guess it´s like going to see Liverpool with your Dad when you´re an Everton fan! The atmosphere there was absolutely superb. The stadium (I´ll get photos next time) was like the Quidditch pitch in Harry Potter, very open with mountains all around. Luckily the sun had come out at last and luckily, I wasn´t sat directly in it, as I´d no sun cream!
The football itself was pretty poor, compared to Premiership, lots of silly mistakes and a fairly disorganised attack on Wilster´s part, though in fact they went on to win - which made Lucho happy. The best things about football here are definitely the atmosphere among the crowd, who go wild for it (singing, jumping, playing instruments, throwing fireworks, throwing bits of paper around) and the price: I treated the three of us and it came to, wait for it, just under 4 pounds for the three of us. Why can´t it be like that in England?!
After the football, I finally got to talk to Iain, he called at home, having understood enough from Maritza to know I was at the football and we spoke just before midnight his time. It was good to catch up with all the news from home. He´s bought some new bits for our garden and apparently our nephew (his sister´s eldest son) on hearing that Uncle Stuart and Uncle Iain were here to visit asked where was Auntie Liz. That made my day! Clever little Archie.
After being force fed some oats for tea (still not hungry after lunch!), I played Farkel again with Andrés, Lucho and Maritza. Carolina was still studying and Abuelita and Estrella were keeping an eye on the shop.
That was my weekend!
xx
Advertisement
Tot: 0.089s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0566s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
