We have been in Cochabamba, Bolivia for 2 weeks now with 2 more to go. Since I’m guessing most people have never heard of Cochabamba before (I hadn’t until 3 weeks before we got here!), here’s where it is:
Cochabamba is the 4th largest city is Bolivia and the weather here is awesome. The city is known for having an “Eternal Spring” , and since we have arrived, everyday has been sunny with highs in the low/mid 70’s. We ended up in Cochabamba because we decided that we wanted to volunteer for a month somewhere and after a couple of days of searching, ended up finding an organization called Sustainable Bolivia. Sustainable Bolivia organizes opportunities and housing for volunteers in Cochabamba and they work with 30-some different Bolivian nonprofits.
We are working with a non-profit called Fundación Bosques. They have several different projects in the Cochabamba area – one that works with children who have to work to provide for their families and two projects that are trying to create sustainable sources of income for poorer rural communities in the mountains so that they can start providing more basic services (like water) to their citizens. Brandon is redoing their website and I’m helping them build a budget for one of the projects. I’m also helping out at another organization called DECOOPSO that helps run 6 cooperatives in the area that employ poor and marginalized people. I’m working with a few other volunteers to get them up and running on an accounting system.
We’ve been really enjoying out time here so far. We’re living in a house with 6 other volunteers (most also from the U.S.) and Sustainable Bolivia has a lot of organized activities – it’s almost like being in college again and living in the dorms!
There’s a hill in town with the largest Jesus statue in the world (even larger than Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro) on it that Brandon and I hiked up the first weekend. Its name is ‘Cristo de la Concordia’. In the background of this picture, you can see the hill with Cristo at the top.
The hike up was actually harder than we thought it would be, but the views were great!
There were also some cable cars that you could take up and down, although we hiked it both ways.
We actually got to climb up inside the Cristo statue for even higher views through the holes in the statue. The mountains that surround the city are beautiful and it’s on our bucket list before we leave to go hiking and exploring up in the hills.
