Yesterday was the first day of Spring in Bolivia. It is also El Dia del Estudiante, El Dia del Amor & de la Amistad. A sort of Spring, Valentine's Day, Friendship and Students Day all rolled into one. I think Bolivia has more specialty days than even the US, even with all our greeting card days. Some like friendship day seem to come around more often than once a year! (It is always good to celebrate your friends.. Hi Jan!)
After our reflection and prayer time last night, our mission group decided to head out for pizza. A treat we had been hoping for for weeks, a treat because it is not a cheap food item unlike the 4 cent oranges I bought this week! With the list of celebration days above, we slowly realized the error of of ways, checking out 4 different pizzerias with hour waits. We will wait until our next reflection to indulge.
So as all of you head into fall with cooling days, rain, leaves changing color and falling, pumpkins, cider and the rest (yes I grew up in the northeast), you can imagine us heading into Spring. Yet most of your images would be off for a Bolivian Spring.
First of all there is no rain, no crocus pushing up from the last melting snows. No wild bursting rushes of flowers or flowering vines. During these previous months of winter, people have been cutting back their still flowering trees, bushes and vines. But without August and September showers there simply are no flowers.
We just keep getting increasing heat until Advent time or until the showers begin and with it a coolness that does not become Summer, especially knowing I am so close to the equator. The rain brings to the dirt caked landscape mud. Slowly without being aware, because you are looking at your feet to avoid the mud, or to prevent tracking mud indoors, a spring comes.
The brown landsacpe has turned green and wildflowers and plants bloom and you look at your calendar and it is actually March! Strangely the Spring sensation lines up more with the traditional Spring of the Northern Hemisphere. All the pictures in this blog posting are from March of 2011. I left the original title, I just never had time to write a post at the time, and as Spring just started I thought they were more appropriate to this date.
I am interested in the celebration of Spring here, I guess it is the Spring equinox really. Very little of my northern image of Spring lines up. Certainly the days are warmer as well as the nights. Rainy season use to begin here in November, and thus the planting began in the countryside. The rainy season has pushed it's start into December, January and even as late as February some years, making it difficult for the planters to seed their fields.
Environmental change, global warming, and even El Niño/a have been sited as possible causes for this change. I hear this year the rains will begin earlier according to the old people who read the signs of nature (or should I say back to normal rhythm). I am interested to see if they will predict correctly. Interestingly in the last week we had sprinkles and many cloudy days, which for me is a great relief to the intense sun at over 8,500 ft.
Another seasonal difference is that we also have a windy season which had just extended itself from August into September this year. The wind usually comes more frquently in the afternoon with a strength to blow your clothes off the drying lines. As it is also still dry it feels more like dust storms, which blow sand and dirt right into the houses through all the cracks of poor construction and non existent door thresholds. Another reason to get your clothes in as soon as the dry, which is pretty fast here in Cochabamba.
I usually write my entries at home and type up at internet, I did so yesterday. Last night it snowed in the mountains, and was still snowing as I made my way into the city. I reflected that so many people here have seen snow in the distance and right now can even see it snowing, but they rarely get a chance to touch it or walk in it, as you would really need to make a mountain trek to it at 13,000ft and on up. This snow will certainly help any Spring planting (snowmelt), maybe the predictions are already starting to happen. Today we feel the cold of the snow, in the past I could even smell it blow down from the mountains.
