I was away from Wed to Sun night last week, for work of course! I flew Wed morning to Cochabamba with two other women from the office. We had a capacity building workshop from Wed to Fri. The workshop was being given by UNICEF to community-based hygiene promoters. It was a very interesting 3 days and I think I probably learned as much as they did! The hygiene promoters are people who travel to communities in their municipality and hold hygiene promotions sessions, follow the construction of water systems and latrines, and do basic repairs to water taps and systems.

The workshop was actually being held in a town outside of Cochabamba. Thurs night, I and the other two women from the office decided to go into the city and have dinner. Well, as is Bolivian style, dinner turned into drinks, which turned into getting back to the hotel at 3am! And we had to start with the workshop again at 8am. However, I discovered a Bolivian game that people play in bars here. It is very similar to Yahtzee, but the scoring is different and the rules are slightly different, but generally it is very similar. I still don’t understand the scoring, but I’m sure I will learn over the course of the year.

Friday afternoon, after the workshop, I made my way to a hotel in the city center and then to a meeting with an NGO called Energetica, who works with solar power. We are likely going to be working with them on a project involving water systems that run off of solar power (which is pretty cool!!). Sat I went with someone from the NGO to a town called Mizque, where we nearly did not find anywhere to sleep except the truck! Thanks goodness that the last of the 4 hotels in the town had space! Sun we visited two communities that have systems that run off of solar panels. It was all very interesting! And, as you can see from the photos, the countryside was absolutely gorgeous.

I didn’t get much of a chance to see Cochabamba itself (and museums tend to be closed all weekend except for Sat morning!). However, its climate is somewhere in between La Paz and Santa Cruz, which in my opinion is the perfect climate – eternal spring! It also seemed halfway between Santa Cruz’s laid back feeling and the business feeling of La Paz.