Comin Home

Well People, not all of you know this but some do. I have made a big decision and decided to come home like 18 months early. But being down here has giving me plenty of time to think and read. I've read something like 50 books in 6 months. But while being down here I have realized a few things. First of all how important certain people are in my life. I have been contemplating this decision for a little while now. And I made up my mind about a month ago. So this sat. I should be rollin back up to Lynchburg probably for the rest of my life.

Another factor to this decision is the fact that I am not really doin what I thought I would be doing down here. I don't know if ya'll got the memo on this but I work behind a desk. Has anyone ever known that of me. The kind of work I know I love is working with my hands and seeing results. So I still want to try and help out other folks but in other ways. For examples, Going down to MS and helping rebuild homes, Habitat for humanity, feedin the less fortunate. Things along this line of work. So it has been a lot of things that have led me to this decision.

Now the most important is the folks back home. One of the main things that firmed my decision is a friend who has become sick with cancer who will beat it like it ain't no problem, and then a aunt having a stroke. It makes you realize what's going on and what is truly important. Rachel is very important in my life. Me and her broke up before I came down here and then about a month later decided that was not what we wanted. We actually want the exact opposite. We really want to get married and have babies someday in the near future. well babies in the not so near future. I Love her more then she knows and she is definitely a big part in my life and heart. For all ya'll that have not met her or not had the chance to get to know her, you should. She is amazing. My momma and sister are also extremely imporatant in my life. I can't wait to get back and see them both on a regular basis. I think this is the longest we have gone with out seeing each other. I'm not sure though. And probably the most imporatant is of course Sabo. He is one of the ones I can't wait to see the most simply because he is the only one that has no clue that I am coming back and I really want to see his reaction. Lastly is a bunch of good friends back home that i am so lucky to have. I know with most of them we will probably intertwine our lives together for the rest of our short lives.

To B-41 my group in Peace corp. I love you all and will miss everyone of you. It has been so good to get to know you all. I am so glad I waited till IST to leave so I could say good bye to each individually. These are times that I have enjoyed and learned from tremendously. It's hard not to when you are the only gringo sometimes and are around such amazing people. But i will pray for all of ya'll and will miss ya'll tremendously. I know i will run into most of ya'll again.

But this sat. should be the day I arrive back home I can't wait to finally kiss Rachel on the lips and I hope I rememberhow to do it. It has been way to long. But i will try and call ya'll soon to catch up. For anyone that is interested we are definitely doing a huge get together for Talladega in Oct. So we shall coordinate that soon. So for now chow and love you all for keeping up with me and my travels. Jonathan

surpise visit

It has been a little while since i have written anything, mainly because much hasn´t been going on. Well a little bit has been happening. The military came in and took over our city two days ago. My boss told me to go home and stay in the house. I am thinking oh shit, what is going on. I found out that they are doing a house to house search. They finally get to my house later that evening and i am thinking of pretending I am not there. But i figure I haven´t done anything wrong so i open the door. Wrong move. They push through and start asking me questions about why somebody from the United States is living here. I try to explain but they are going through all my stuff. My landlady tells them to leave me alone, But they are literally trashing the place. They don´t find my money thankfully, But then they finally leave with the help of my landlady and we then clean up my place. Actually none of this is true. I really have not been doin much. I just wanted to keep this suspensful and interesting.
Really I have been playing soccer with my office, we are in a tournament with all the other government offices. Tonight we play in the final and i was told if we win tonight we win the tournament. Guess what the prize is. A case of beer. 2nd place is half a case, and third is a special prize which i´m sure is one beer to split between 8 people. And last night i ended up scoring 2 goals which was pretty awesome to do. Considering I am playing against all latinos and I am the only Gringo playing. But anyway I have also brought some southern culture down here. I am teaching a local lady how to cook BBQ. We are going to try and build a smoker out of old propane tanks and then she is going to sell the meat. I´ve been downloading recipes for her to use and found some remakable web sites on smoking. I think i might do the same thing when i come back and try to have some side work. but A special CONGRATULATIONS out to Lindsay in SC for the healthy birth of her wonderful new baby boy. But talk to ya´ll later, chow

happy July 4th

WooHoo!! Happy July 4th. I was thinking that day that there are probably only 5o people in all of Bolivia partying. It was really cool. We would tell the Bolivians what we were doing and everyone wished us felicidades. So it was pretty awesome. Four of us went to Argentina to buy meat. They are famous for there cows. The meat was oh so good. We ended up buying approximately 14 pounds of steak, 4 pounds of sausage, and 3 chickens. We had a feast. We brought the frisbee and of course i bought some fireworks, which we didn´t shoot off till 2 a.m. The only problem we had was that we bought a 3 foot tall rocket and placed it in the ground. Well we put it in too far and the thing didn´t lift off. Have you ever seen one of those huge motars explode on the ground? well it shot red sparks all over us and the shockwave was powerful enough to set off the car alarms around the area. We of course took off running. But then we remembered that we were in Bolivia and that kind of thing doesn´t matter.
But anyway, The picture here is of me cooking our fish for dinner that we caught. I´ve gotten pretty good and whirling the hook over my had and then letting go. I can pretty much cast it as far as anyone with a pole. But we are going again this weekend. It´s probably my favorite time every week when we go fishing.
So i noticed the other day while i was walking down the street at how weird it was that it was July 4th. We relate so many of our holidays with the seasons and the weather. Imagine a really cold July 4th where you have thick jackets on. Or Christmas at 110 degrees. Where you want be using the coat or blanket you just got for another 6 months. No one here would ever think of a white Christmas. The leaves are falling down here and you can just feel fall setting in and winter coming. I never realized how much association we have with different parts of the year with the weather. Well love you all and hope everyone had a wonderful and safe fourth and nobody lost an eye from a bottle rocket. We all know it is very possible.

Found a new hobby

Yeah that´s right the president came to Villamonte to join in a parade we had. I have now seen Bill Clinton and Evo Morales. Although I don´t remeber seeing Bill Clinton because Me and Jeremy ( Mom doesn´t know this story in highschool yet) decided to stay the night with his cousin at the Birmingham southern campus. We ended up drinking a whole bottle of Vodka very fast. I won´t say how fast. But let´s say after 15 minutes the vodka tasted like water. So i don´t remeber much of the night except when i puked outside of devinci´s pizza in Homewood and jeremy told me it was the most beautiful vomit he had ever seen. Well needless to say we laid out on the grass listening to Clinton the next day. Anyway, this parade was pretty cool, there were mixed emotions about Evo just like there are in every country. But overall it was alot of fun.
Well I have found a new past time. I went fishing this weekend with some guys i work with. We did not use fishing poles and that is what made it tremendously fun. All you do is use a hand line. I was immediatley converted to this technique and plan on never changing. You can feel everything going on in the line. The water moving by, the undercurrents and the river bottom. Then you pull that fish in with sheer muscle. I was worn out after this. The catfish are huge down here. The biggest was atleast 7 inches long! I ended up catching 5 catfish. Yeah we got catfish down here. We didn´t cook ém up this time but we are going next sat. and i am going to bring a frying pan, oil, eggs, and flour. Whip us up some fried catfish. Never thought this moment would ever happen.

still doin what i love best

Well this is the tree we tried to save. Guess we didn´t do a good enough job. We tried but the parents and school officials decided that it was dangerous because limbs could fall and hurt somone. It was weird seeing someone concerned with safety because you don´t find that much here. Also the tree was in perfect health. So you accept the loss of the tree and then have fun cutting it down. The guy who runs the tree nursery was the one initially cutting this tree. But he was messing up the most important part of the cut. He was messin up the notch! so I took over and fixed it all up and the tree fell right where i wanted, In between two basket ball goals. It made me miss tree work and runnin chain saws. After watching him I realized at how much better i was at running my surgeon´s tool.
Well i went on another inspection the other day. It was quite interesting. It was very beautiful but that wasn´t what made it interesting. It was the drive there and back. So the inspection is about 100Km away. We bring two spare tires. Of course we blow both of them on the way there. So now we are in the middle of nowhere and we decide to keep going. So we do our thing on the inspection. Me, not really understanding what the hell we are actually doing. So then we stop at this town to try and find a gomeria, tire shop, and nobody is there so we keep going. Well you know what happened? Can you guess? Of course we blew another tire. Now comes the first time I have ever been pissed of in Bolivia. If you are stopped on the side of the road no one will stop and help you. Not even to say " well that sucks" and drive off. So miracuaously we walk to a clearing and after about 30 attempts my cell phone works out in the middle of nowhere. So then we sit and wait for 3 and half hours. Then everything is gravy and i get home at 11. So that was fun. Well everyone be good and sometimes be bad. Talk to ya´ll soon.Jonathan

Goin on a bike ride

Well here is another picture valerie. I truly loved your poem. You should quit your job and start writing poems about me. I think you could make a good living. If you can´t tell in any of these pictures I have lost some weight i think around 20 pounds. But it was a much needed 20 pounds to lose. I weighed in at 210 when i came here. I feel a lot healthier too. Peace corp is a great weight loss program due to all the lovely ways you can get sick. Which i must say i don´t get sick that often especially now that i cook for myself. The parasites haven´t popped out to have a look yet so i think i killed them with that puro alchohol. Lord knows it did a hurtin on me. So to tell you what i have been doin down here so ya´ll think i am tryin to do some good. Right now I am trying to work with a woman named Cira and start a recycling project for the city so some less then fortunate women can make a little bit of dough. I hope to start visiting some of the schools to start Eco-clubs. But i have been told that almost all eco-clubs fail. But i am going to try anyway. Also in two weeks i will start teaching some english classes for about 6 kids. As for my real job in the morning, with the desk and all, I don´t do that much and I am not very happy about it all. I have been mandated professional phoographer. I recieved this because I have a digital camera. It makes me wonder what i would be doing there if i hadn´t of brought my camera. But next mon. I am going to talk to my boss about this and tell him that this is not the reason I joined Peace corp. But besides that I have made some pretty good friends. One guy is Johnny and he is real cool. I work with him to plant grass, we are about to build a soccer field. But that is pretty much my work for right now.
So the reason this is titled goin on a bike ride is because erin, another volunteer 10 km away, and I are going to ride 90km tomorrow. It should take around 8-9 hours depending on if my bike breaks down. I just bought this bike last week and within two days the damn pedal fell off, my tires are completely out of wack and the tools to tighten my spokes don´t exist. Oh yeah the name of my bike, ¨THE HURRICANE¨, that is what is written on the side of it. So erin and i are going to leave tommorow morning about 8 and hopefully arrive around 5. I really can´t wait, it is pretty flat most of the way there, so it shouldn´t be too long but i am bringing extra money in case we have to get a taxi. So that is a little of what is happening. I hope everyone is doing wonderful. Bob how are you doin brother, send me your e-mail address so i can write you some. You seem to have tons of schoolin goin on right now. But i miss you all and love most of you, just kidding i love you all. ciao- sledge

never drink pure alchohol when they say it is tequila

So i guess you are wondering what this title means. Well i thought it was pretty strightforward. But here is what happened the other night. I went with another volunteer that lives here in villamonte to one of his friends house. They were actually people from holland, so we spoke in english. So some of the guys i work with called me to see if i wanted to to come over and drink some tequila. so i decided to go over there later that night. Because one i get to practice my spanish and two get to drink tequila with some guys i work with. So i go over there around 12:30 and hang out. Well sure enough not a drop of tequila was in that house. Instead there is puro. Which is pure alchohol and they mix it with water. It wasn´t all that bad. But the stuff has a way of creeping up on you. So we hung out and talked about some projects that i wanted to start up. Mainly recycling here in town as a way to bring in money for poorer folks. But slowly and surely my spanish turned to something very unintelligible. so i decided it was time to walk home. When i got home i really wanted to drunk dial Rachel but at three in the morning AT&T would not allow me to recharge my card. So unfortunately Rachel didn´t get to here my lovely voice while she was still sleeping. So then my alarm is set for 8 so i can go to work. This is where the real fun began. I decide there is no way that I am going to work. Not that i had a hangover, but you have to remember that was pure alchohol and as i said it creeps up on you. So needless to say i was still drunk and felt like something was wrong with me. I called in saying i was sick. Which i did get sick but it was because they mixed it with the water and well now i might have some parasites or intestinal problems. So i never threw up but i slept in till 4 in the afternoon! I never ate till 8 at night and then went to sleep and slept another 12 hours. So that was it. Never drink pure alchohol when they say it is tequila.

i´ve been told to write more

So here it is, Generally i get up around 7:30 and and not really wanting to, i get off of my straw mattress and go see if i have water today. Then if i have water, it smells like rotten eggs. Now if I want to take a shower, which i generally don´t, I have two pitfalls I have to watch out for. Both of these deal with an electric shower head that heats the water. If I try and adjust my shower head and haven´t turned off the power then guess what, I´m electrocuted and that feels midly like an electric fence, but remember I am completely wet. The second thing i have to remember is to turn off the power to my electric shower head when I turn my single faucet off. Somehow the electricity travels through the pipes and to the faucet handle. So after i walk into the bathroom and decide yet again to not take a shower, then i dress, eat a banana, and walk to my office which is thankfully only 10 blocks. During my walk i encounter all sorts of obstacles. Ususally cows, chickens, and dogs and all the poop that they leave on the street. I used to think it weird a dog shit on the street but lots of ideas i had, have been shattered by coming here. Then I go to my office and try my best to follow what anybody is saying, and then throw in my own two bits that i have pre thought out before i actually say it. I have no problem down here speaking before i think about what i am about to say. Sometimes I go to meetings and other times I study spanish. Then comes 12 o´clock and it is time for my three hour siesta, I go and scrouge up whatever I have in the kitchen and eat and then go lay in bed and take a nap and read a book. Around two i wake up and do Yoga which i have recently started. It is actually alot of fun and I happen to have lots of time on my hand so laugh as you will but i like it. Then around three or 4 I have spanish class with Roxanna. Then we just sit around and talk about whatever and she corrects my spanish. Usually I drink a bottle of 1 dollar wine because i have found alchohol helps out my Spanish. Now don´t think I am an alchoholic, because my tolerance is so high that a bottle generally doesn´t get me drunk. Then i usually cook dinner and sometimes another Bolivian come over named Peter and we all hang out and chat. Then if I´m lucky Rachel calls me and i get to catch up with her. But rachel, valerie, and my mom are all real good at calling so it keeps me sane. Then at night i usually Play Soduku and then read until 10. Then take a big whiff of straw and go to sleep hopefully sleeping the whole night. But generally Roosters wake me up around 4:30. Then sometimes the routine starts again. But then again here in Bolivia nothing is routine, because the people won´t allow it.