Valle de la luna

Valle de la luna is a tourist hotspot right outside of La Paz in an area where erosion has worn away the majority of a mountain. It's composed of clay, and over the years it's become a work of art. The valley has mostly beige or brown rock but sometimes (depending on the light and time of day) it's like a red or violet color. This was my first 'trip' outside of La Paz and I can't even describe how beautiful it was! Also, the pictures definitely do not do it justice. We went on a Wednesday afternoon (after clinic and before Spanish classes started up). It cost 1.5 boliviano to get there (it's almost an hour trip... and 7 bolivianos = 1 US dollar. so you do the math-- pretty absurd) and then we watched the sunset there and took a taxi home (a little more expensive... 3 bolivianos each instead, dear lord). Speaking of the money exchange, it's so funny how caught up we all are now with things as insignificant as a few bolivianos. Like bartering between 20 and 25 turns out to be a few cents. One of my friend's Sarah has come up with a phrase that every time you're buying a meal AND dessert it's like buying a coffee from starbucks, just to keep us all in perspective. Everything here is just soo inexpensive. And we all love it.

Clinic this week ended up really well. I finished up at Hospital del Nino but am going back in three weeks again and am hoping to get to sit in on some surgeries! The illnesses here are both very rare and very sad. There is this boy, Vidal, that has become our new buddy. We gave him our cell phone numbers and this weekend when we were at Lake Titicaca (more to come later on that) the kids called us from the hospital landline to our cell phones to say hi! His friend, in the hospital, is Franz, who got beaten up by his older brothers and had a hematoma, which they operated on but also caused him nerve damage causing him to lose complete control over his left arm. There are also a lot of teenage girls (14 or so) with what I'm guessing are dislocated hips from birth that have never been fixed. We've also seen a few cases of tropical diseases, varicella gone terribly bad, and kids that lose fingers or hands due to fire or fireworks accidents. The sad thing is that each kid is just hooked up to an IV; no monitors or anything like that. I have to think that instead of spending weeks in the hospital down here, in America they'd have already been out and back home. Carolina, the girl whose medical history I had to present in Spanish, has proptosis in her left eye from a dental or sinus infection; at first she was so shy, but now everyday she has a huge smile at 9 am when we come in. Thursday night we went to the Black Market and bought a Winnie the Pooh puzzle for Carolina (Pooh is her favorite) and little light up sponge balls with faces on them for the other 8 kids. The 30 Bolivianos we spent total(less than 5 dollars) hopefully made these kids weekends (I know Carolina loved it because I did the puzzle with her 3 times on Friday afternoon haha)