World Envrionment Day

Today was world environment day, so everyone here at the office spent the day out in the city, handing out information on Environment Las Americas' programs and campaigns and the issues that are affecting Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the Americas. I ended up at the local University de San Simon, getting students to sign up as new members of our organization. While it seems kind of crazy for an environmental organization to be handing out tons of paper, people were actually reading the fliers and talking to us about the issues, which made me feel a bit better about the effort. (Aside: I thought it was kind of funny that Google didn't have some cartoon thing on its home page for Environment Day, but I couldn't find any way to contact them to complain. It seems as important as St Patty's Day or something that gets shamrocks for the O's in Google!)

Other things that are going on: our ongoing work to build up an ecotourism program - right now this involves a lot of planning for a new website, meetings with the tour group that we want to work with, and trying to make lots of new contacts in the ecotourism/community tourism world. We have a really great opportunity to provide an in-depth learning experience for tourists here while helping communities to make money via community tourism, which is seen as one of the last alternatives in many places to growing coca, which generally requires the deforestation of national parks, where many indigenous tribes live. Things are moving pretty slowly, which can be frustrating at times, but I'm hopeful that we can get together a great program.

Also last week a bunch of saw Pirates of the Caribbean - while it wasn't as great as the first one, it was certainly entertaining! Definitely a highlight of my week... This week there is a día feriado on Thursday (a national holiday), so one of the other volunteers, Erica, and I might try to go to Oruro for a few nights to sit in some hot springs and see a volcano. Anything to get out of the city soon. It might also generate some more pictures, since I haven't taken any in the past 2 weeks.

I'm finally getting to know my way around the city, and actually remember how much things should cost in the markets so I don't get ripped off (although it's sometimes hard to feel bad about giving someone a dollar instead of 80 cents...).