The Fighting 43rd

The second day of staging ends with a red-eye flight from MIA to La Paz. PC medical officers met us at 6:30 a.m. with water, meds, and oxygen tanks in case anyone couldn’t handle the 12,000 feet. The connection to Cochabamba, where Peace Corps Bolivia is headquartered, is only an hour. There was a group of current volunteers to cheer for us when we stumbled off the plane, looking really cute without coffee.

Cochabamba is fourth largest city in Bolivia, the geographic heart of the country at 8,500 feet. It’s the “city of eternal spring”, which is an exaggeration of temperate until you think about your alternatives: freezing Andes and Altiplano plateau, humid Yungas tropics. We will spend the first week in the city for orientation. Our hotel rooms are decorated with reminders to drink water, not to drink the tap water, and not to flush the t.p. There are also 6 liters of bottled water in case you missed the first sign. We get a safety briefing with points like:
· When traveling at night, take a taxi instead of walking
· It is best not to take taxis at night
· It is best not to go out at night after 19:00
· The following “red zones” should be avoided (followed by a list of everywhere in Cochabamba except the 2 blocks around our hotel and an area farther north – which is separated from the hotel by a red zone)

The streets and sidewalks are narrow; at every other corner are cholitas that break your heart with their tiny, dirty children. Houses are surrounded by walls, the tops of which are embedded with pieces of broken glass bottles. It looks scarier than I think the city is, but then again I don’t know anything. We were warned about cleferas, gangs of street kids addicted to glue, which I thought was kind of funny until someone told me last year’s group got attacked by them near the giant 130-foot Christ of the Concord statue. Super. It’s not even safe under the BIGGEST JESUS IN THE WORLD.

We’re in welcome/safety/cultural sessions each day up until dinner. At a decent restaurant, it will run you about $2-4 USD, plus a few bucks for beer. After dinner we end up at bars earlier than future AA talking about important things like if mace or Elmer’s rubber cement is better against cleferas, and designing tattoos that say “The Fighting 43rd”. Every training group ends up super close, which is scary/comforting. Comforting because I really like B43 and scary because we were told you end up knowing intimate details of everyone’s poop.

FUN FACT/QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Everyone has a little Giardia.”