Presidential Elections 2007!

The next week flew by as elections were approaching. We left at the crack of dawn on Saturday the 8th to head to San Marcos (which is 3 hours away). What we didn’t know is that we were actually going to Tacana (about 6 hours away by bus) after some sort of trickery went down. In order to score a ride back in a car with our director Joe the next day, I had to ride the bus TO Tacana. After each bus ride, I get off thinking – that could not have been any worse!... yet somehow I consistently proven wrong. Amy and I carefully planned this trip to be full of “fake sleeping” so I didn’t have to squish my arm with 5 people a seat. Regardless, while I was actually sleeping, someone fully placed there hand in my armpit to wake me up while yet another man tried to flat out sit on my neck & shoulder (the good one) to get me scoot over.

Finally arriving 6 hours later in Tacana, we ate a quick dinner and had a final observer meeting to iron out all the details for the next day. Another little catch came up, as we discovered only 3 of us were volunteering in the actual town of Tacana while the rest of us had to travel another hour or so to our sites. Molly, Stephanie, and I headed out to the boonies for Presidential Elections 2007. Our site had 5 different rooms to vote in, so we helped people find their number and pointed them in the right direction. We also let older women, pregnant women, and women with a bunch of children jump to the front of the line to vote. Of course this inspired about 10 men to tell me they were pregnant too and they also wanted to cut. For some reason, one line was full of only men and all of the men were wearing cowboy hats. That line by far was the most riled up, as I had to break up a fight at one point, but that was pretty much the excited point of the day – or so I though. Leaving the community was trickier than planned. Political parties paid for giant trucks to take people to vote and get home, and the three us climbed a ladder into the back of an empty truck to head to Tacana. We were locked in the back of this truck- which I can only imagine is used to move cattle or pigs or some sort of livestock – for an hour without movement. After finally getting out, we realized the road was blocked by a truck full of over 100 people which ran out of gas. We started to hike and finally hitched a ride in the back of a pickup the rest of the way home. We got back to Xela at 10pm and hit the sack- vacation started at 3am the next morning!