Classes will resume in ten days at Maryknoll. It’s time for a recess! I am making preparations now for the days ahead. My laundry is hanging out to dry in the athletic yard. I will head to the pharmacy after I publish this post to get the prescription for my sleeping medication filled. Four good nights of sleep and counting. Last night I woke up at 1:30 a.m. to use the bathroom, and I went back to sleep in very little time and stayed asleep. This medication has been a success. What is more, I feel less drowsy now during the day, and my mood has picked up. Good news indeed. Before Monday I will figure out how to pack everything I need for my trip to La Paz into my backpack and one additional tote bag at most. Toiletries, night clothes, underclothes, my breviary, my rosary, a notebook, a book to read, and sleeping medication and altitude medicine (sorochji pills or coca leaves?). Plus room in one or the other bag for souvenirs if I am spendthrift. I’m taking a bus to La Paz, a six-hour trip at the minimum on a “coach” with very little overhead storage space and no bathroom. I hope my bladder holds out for the one restroom break we make on the way. The trip to Oruro and La Virgen del Socavón on Thursday requires less logistics, being a one-day trip. We will meet Profesora Viviana’s husband at Maryknoll at 7 a.m. and depart together. We will either eat at a restaurant on the way or pack food for a good lunch. We will return to Cochabamba in the mid-to-late afternoon.
Backtracking to class: We continued our review of the three past tenses for the first three class periods. Joshua and I remain mystified by the subtleties of time in the Spanish language. We are simply going to have to memorize the clue words that cue us to the preterite, the imperfect, and the preterite perfect tenses. We are simply going to have to read more Spanish texts to uncover the context for proper usage of these tenses. In the fourth period it was a Scrabble rematch. Today we had four teams: Profesora Vicky and me; Profesora Liliana and Joshua; Profesor Óscar and Charles; and Profesora Sara and Padre Juan de la Cruz, one of the Korean students. It was a close competition between my team and Joshua’s; alas, his duo bested mine by nine points. It was the luck of the fichas; what can you do when your opponent draws the Q, the Z, and the RR, the highest-scoring tiles? What can you do when, like my team, you have to forfeit your turn because all you have is consonants in your tile rack and need to change them out? Well, I say Profesora Liliana and Joshua won on points, but Profesora Vicky and I won on style and strategy. It looks like we will continue to have Scrabble matches on Fridays for the near future. One day I shall have my vindication!
Coming up this weekend: I was thinking of making a day trip on Saturday to Quillacollo. I was planning to go to Quillacollo last month for the archdiocesan youth/young adult ministry event, before Fray Bladimir’s transportation plans proved untenable. I would like to pay tribute to Our Lady of Urkupiña, venerated across Bolivia but especially in Cochabamba. According to tradition there was an apparition of the Blessed Mother on a hill there called El Calvario. I would like to visit the hill as well as the church that enshrines this devotion, San Ildefonso. But if I stay back at Convento San Francisco, then I will plot my itinerary through La Paz; I’ll find some way to get fresh air; and I’ll keep writing more lyrics or poetry. On Sunday I will visit the girls at Nuestra Casa in the morning. Then, come Monday, time to travel.
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