Pool Party!

Me, Noelia, and Geraldine

Last week, the educadoras (the women who take care of the girls at the orphanage) invited the other volunteers and me to come with them on an outing.  To celebrate the girls who had birthdays in September and October, they were taking everyone to swim at a pool.  Because I got a lot of pictures - and because the day was filled with so many only-in-Bolivia moments - I thought I'd do a blog post about it.

We're ready for an adventure!

The woman in charge told us they were leaving at 8:00 on the dot.  Ina (my German roommate), Julia (my American roommate), and I got to Madre de Dios around 7:45 to find a whirlwind of activity.  The girls were all super excited, showing off their bathing suits and running around bringing food from the kitchen to the van.  Typical of Bolivian punctuality, we helped a little, then hung out and played hand clapping games until about 8:20, when a huge bus showed up.  The younger girls got in the van.  The educadoras got in their own cars.  The older girls, volunteers, two cooks, and the toddler and infant sons of one of the cooks got on a huge bus.  The van driver gave the bus driver some instructions, and we were off.

I'd asked the girls and the cooks where we were going, but they didn't know.  This didn't seem like a huge problem - the driver did have directions, after all, and I rarely totally understand what's going on here - but then we passed the city limits of Cochabamba and pulled over next to a soccer field attached to a high school.  The bus driver explained he was waiting for the van driver because he didn't know where to go next.  So we waited.  And waited.  And waited.

After about 15 minutes, the bus driver asked if anyone knew where we were going.  We also realized that none of us had any of the cell phone numbers of the educadoras.  Unless the van appeared - which was seeming less and less likely every minute, as I grew more convinced that the driver had gotten us completely lost - we were going to spend the entire day beside that school's soccer field.  We didn't even have the keys to get back into Madre de Dios.  Julia, Ina, and I seemed to be the only ones who were concerned, though.  The girls kept on singing along to the radio, the cooks kept on smiling out the window, and the bus driver texted.

Such a beautiful site

Miraculously, we did eventually see the other van appear on the road behind us and turn a few streets away.  We did a frightening U-turn on a narrow street, and eventually caught up with them bobbing along a dirt road.  We followed them to our destination: a fenced-in field with a grove of tall trees on one side, a beautiful view of the mountains on the other, a pool, and two little buildings - one that just housed bathrooms, and one that someone told me was a "country house" of a family with some sort of connection to the department for the protection of women and children and, through that, to us.

At first glance, it seemed beautiful - idylic, even.  The sun was warm, the view gorgeous, the pool huge.  The girls bounded out of the bus and we started unloading our food for lunch (huge pots filled with potatoes, rice, and chicken, as well as a big plastic bag of lettuce).  We brought it to a table by the pool, then looked in the pool...

Beautiful!  But wait for it...

Just...ewww

And saw nothing but a foot of green water.  Literally, green.  I am from the land of 10,000 lakes, and I have never in my life seen a body of water that looked less suitable for swimming in.  There was a little hot-tub like pool to the side that the family was filling with a hose, and that looked fine, but the main swimming pool was a disaster.  Ina, Julia, and I looked at each other in horror and said it was such a shame that the girls wouldn't be able to swim.

We were wrong.  Unfazed by the slimey, green, completely non-transparent water, the girls started climbing down the ladder and splashing around.  Julia, Ina, Andrea (the social work intern), and I were horrified by the water.  No one else seemed concerned in the slightest.  The girls swam, splashed, did headstands, played with floaties.  The director of the home hopped on in herself, and, when she got out, she came over to where we were sitting to splash me and laugh about it.

It's almost like showering off, right?

Soon, a water truck arrived.  (In all of Cochabamba, water is limited - for big things like filling pools or watering big gardens you have to buy water from a truck.  In the southern part of the city, there is no public water system, and everyone has to buy all their water that way.)  As Julia gasped in horror, asking why they didn't drain the pool and clean it first, the driver hooked up a hose to the truck and started adding clean, clear, normal water to the sludge at the bottom.  All day, he kept coming back and dumping more water in - but, somehow, instead of diluting the water and turning it a little clearer, every new delivery of water only seemed to make it more and more dirty and a grosser shade of green.  The girls loved, it though, and ran over under the hose to play in it like it was a waterfall every time.

Pots of chicken and potatoes, stored outside all day - yum!

At around 1:00, it was time for lunch, and we discovered another complication.  Apparently, each girl had been responsible for bringing her own bowl, but no one had told us to do the same.  (Maybe all pool parties are bring-your-own-dish here?)  After a lot of searching, we found a few extra bowls, but no silverware, so Julia invented the potato spoon (you take a bite out of your potato and use it to scoop up your rice).  It was fairly effective.

After lunch, the girls went back to swimming and playing volleyball and hanging out on the roof above the bathrooms.  (The bathrooms, by the way, were completely out of water all day.  There were fifty girls, ten adults, and two toliets we couldn't flush once.)  Ina, Julia, Andrea, and I spent the afternoon tanning on the grass, dancing with the girls, and trying to avoid being splashed.

¡Feliz cumpleaños!

Towards the end of the afternoon, we gathered around to sing happy birthday (the tune you all know with Spanish words) and eat a (delicious) chocolate, vanilla, and fruit cake.  By that time, the wind had picked up and the shade covered most of us, so a lot of the girls started to dry off.  Some of the girls started playing on the trampoline, some of them came over to ask me to tell them fairy tales, but a determined few kept splashing around in the swamp.

All in all, the girls declared it a great success.  I can't say I had quite as much fun as them, but no one got cholera - so I'd have to call that, at least, a great success as well.