On the Way to La Paz

Hello and welcome to my blog! I would like to start off by explaining what exactly I am doing and how I came about the opportunity. I am currently on my way to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I will participate in a three-month “Students for Development” (SFD) internship assisting in the research of sustainable food security in the Andean Mountains. I had seen this opportunity posted on the Saint Mary’s website when I applied in 2012, and at the time I had thought: wow, I REALLY want to do that... but, I probably have to be a master’s student. Turns out I do not! I applied in February, was accepted, and now I get to do field research as an undergraduate student entering my third year of university, which is pretty awesome.

I will work with an NGO, CENDA, which stands for Centro de Comunicación y Desarrollo Andino (http://cenda.org/). The internship is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the funds are filtered through the Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada (AUCC). As you can see, my major (International Development, or IDS) contains an excessive amount of acronyms! This year, CIDA merged with the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs, so Canada’s development agenda is set to change and this is the last year this internship will be funded. In fact, I just found out that the funding agreement ended last year, but we were able to go this year thanks to leftover money from people too scared to go to South America! :D Right about now I am feeling pretty lucky to be a permanent resident of Canada which gives me access to amazing opportunities such as these. I am also thankful for having grown up in a Latino neighborhood in the United States where I attended a bilingual elementary school, which gave me the background in Spanish that I needed. I have wanted to go to Bolivia for a while, so this is like a dream come true for me. Best of all, I am doing this through my university. So, I will earn three credits while I am there, and I will maintain full-time status as a student by counting it as a Co-op work term.

Although I have not arrived in Bolivia yet, I am already so ready to start my blog. I am writing from Miami International Airport, and there is no free wifi, which comes to me as no surprise from a US airport. What is more, the trashcans are not divided to separate recyclables as they are in Canada. As a final comment (though this is just an assumption based on my experiences in US airports) I would be very surprised if the luggage carts were free. As you can tell, I resent US airports, including their “take-off-your-shoes-but-hurry-up-and-put-them-back-on” policy.

Anyway, I met a very nice immigrant from Haiti at the airport. He is a janitor. It seems to be the trend that the immigrants (which are mostly Latinos) get the all the service jobs. We had a nice conversation, and I encouraged him to look into Canadian Permanent Residency, as he seemed very interested in my situation. Maybe we will see him in Montreal someday- hopefully not as a janitor.

I will soon fly to La Paz and stay there for two nights with the other Canadian intern before we head to Cochabamba. Her name is Alicia Jones. You can check out her blog at barefootinbolivia.blogspot.com

I welcome your comments, opinions, thoughts and suggestions to my blog, so don’t be shy. The more feedback, the more activity, the better the conversation! Feel free to share this blog with your family, friends, or whoever you think you be interested. I ask only that you try to be humble and don’t bite my head off if you think I said something wrong or flawed. I admit that I do not know everything, and although I try to avoid making generalizations, it is easy to fall into that trap. And, even I can be opinionated sometimes! All I can do is try my best.

My plan is to stick around Bolivia until the end of the year, leaving me time to travel to Peru and wherever else I get to before heading back to Canada. In January, I am required to host a public engagement event based on my work with CENDA in Bolivia, so stay tuned for that if you are a Halifax resident. I look forward to the outcome!