Our First Five Days in Photos

We are finally in a place with both internet and time.  We have been doing a lot.  It's been fun and also really hard.  We will write more later, but we thought that pictures would be just the thing right now.  So:

At the Minneapolis Airport, after an early morning.

The view from Elias's family's country house in Huajchilla where we spent the first 2 days resting and acclimatizing.

And the courtyard there.

From the river bed in Huajchilla.

Sam with Patricia, our incredibly gracious host and Elias's mother.

Neal and Elias's little brother Gonzi.

Enough said.

Sam looking cool.

Moon Valley outside La Paz.

Gonzi being cute.

A young Elias gets busy on the dance flo'

Feeding pigeons in a La Paz plaza.

Hanging out with Emma's former host family in La Paz.  We watched the local soccer team, Bolivar, come back to tie in a Copa de Libertadores match.

Neal is sick on our way to Batallas.  

Emma is not interested in being photographed..

Cereal at the bustling Saturday market in Batallas.

About 60 local high school students cram into a room to see a presentation about Scattergood and our environmental ideas before we go out to pick up some recycling after the market.

Neal and his fans.

Annie and Raquel, a solid basketball player and very sweet young lady.

A lot of bags of separated recycling.  Pretty good for 30 minutes work.  Annie does the "Irving".

So that gets us through Saturday!  More photos and stories to come from the last few days.  A brief preview: On Saturday we went to 2.5 hours of a 6 hour service at Emma's Quaker meeting in town.  We shared a great potluck lunch.  On Monday we mini-bused to El Alto and taught a lot of English to high schoolers at the local high school there.  Yesterday we were at the local elementary school in the morning, and came to La Paz in the afternoon.  Today, back to the Quaker School in El Alto.  

We've now officially been here for one week.  Whoa.  

Long Travels and Huajchilla

Hi everyone!

We´ve been somewhat off the grid since we arrived, so this is our first opportunity to post on the blog. Thanks for your patience.

We left with Catherine (thanks!) at 4:30 Tuesday morning to drive to the Cedar Rapids Airport.  We went to sleep in our beds in Huajchilla roughly 24 hours later, at around 4 am.  In between, we made stops in Minneapolis, Miami (a nice halfway point, as there was a lot of Spanish all around us), Bogota, and, finally, our arrival in La Paz.  We cleared customs at around 3 am.  After passing by some money-sniffing dogs (they busted Neal for his $20 that he had already declared) we finally made it out the gate.

We were greeted there by the best possible welcoming person, Patricia Quevedo (Elias´s mom).  She hustled us into a van with blankets and te de coca.  Just walking to the parking lot left us out of breath.  We made the sleepy drive to her family´s guest house in Huajchilla, south of La Paz, got ourselves settled, and went to sleep.

Yesterday we woke up late, ate lunch with Patricia, her son Gustavo (Gonzi), and Doña Sonia, her nanny/cook/awesome lady.  We then walked down through some fields to a river.  Gonzi was incredibly cute and charmed the heck out of all of us, especially Annie.  Her heart was won when he kissed her on the on the cheek to say goodbye.

In the evening we grilled out with the crew from lunch and also Elias´s other brother Daniel, and cousin Nicholas.  Lots of food and good multi-lingual company (including a rousing game of 2v2 futbol, and some spoons).  We are now in an internet cafe in the Zona Sur (the trendiest part of La Paz), on our way to meet up with Emma downtown.

More to come, including pictures!

Nos Vemos,

Sam, Annie, Neal

12 Hours 6 Minutes left here at Scattergood.

As we are gearing up and making all of our final checks to leave for Bolivia, the reality of it all has really started to sink in. Because of some recent events, the number of people that are going on this trip has been reduced to four from the originally planned eight. This has been a hard start to the trip though we have not really had time to fully process everything. We have been needing to focus on finishing our pre-trip check list, packing, and finalizing this blog.

We are really gonna miss our friends who could not come with us and are really feeling this loss. We'll try to to embody the experience that we all would have had to the best of our ability. We will show as best we can what we have done and who we have met on this blog.

Our next post will be from Bolivia!

-Neal, Annie, Sam