Bolivian Fashion

So, before you start chuckling too hard at my outfit, please note that this is NOT the common clothing for Bolivians. We spent the past weekend celebrating a local catholic festival in our community. We’ve been practicing the dance “La Llamarada” for a little over a week and Friday and Saturday were our premiere performances. We danced as a group in front of the community with some local Bolivian women, who taught us the dance. We went all out for the dance, and rented costumes for everyone. Definitely not the most flattering costumes in the world, but they were fun to wear for the dance. Most all of the families came to watch us and seemed pretty entertained by the whole thing. In general, I think the town got a kick out of watching a big group of gringos and our attempt to recreate the dance of the llama. In one hand, we held stuffed llamas, wrapped in plastic and the other we had a knitted “onda” which you can see me flinging around in the picture. Traditionally, you place a rock in the onda and fling it around to hit the llama, I assume for herding purposes. There were no live llamas in site at our festival, but I am pretty sure that we could have mastered this technique after our disciplined dance training. Fo’ shizzle. Things are going smoothly thus far down here. I have mastered the art of once a week showers, non-flushing toilets, the lack of toilet paper, and the lack of hand washing stations. I also now have the luxury of sleeping inside a mosquito net every night. I like to think of it as a high-class canopy over my bed, but others might not agree. We are all living with families right now and are in the third week of our pre-service training. Lots of language classes and lots of technical training, but I feel like we are all advancing, so that is a good feeling. Please let me know how things are going with you. Drop me a line when you have a chance, as I would love to hear from all of you. XOXO.