Abducted by Nuns

You have to be careful with nuns. They look all sweet and innocent, but that`s part of the trap, because underneath it all, if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile. Or at least in our case, if you knock on the door to ask exactly what it is that they're doing, they hand you a broom and tell you to start cleaning the floor....

You`ve probably all been wondering why we have been so quiet for the last week or more. Well, our last post came to you from Potosi, Bolivia, and as it happens we are still here, nearly 10 days later. We have been abducted by nuns.... Well, ok, not exactly abducted - it is voluntary. But working with nuns, yes.

Before we left Denmark, we decided that we wanted to do some volunteer work as part of our travels. We had originally planned on doing this in Ecuador, but we found it particularly difficult to find something - a lot of places have quite complex setups that were expensive in time and/or money. Committing to something in advance from afar is a bit dubious when you don`t really know what exactly you`re going to be doing, or what the city is like etc. Thus, when we arrived in Potosi, the voluntary work idea was still very much up in the air.

But the second day that we were here, we were wandering around town when one of us noticed a car parked on the other side of the square - on the side of it was "Missionaries del Charidad" - the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Theresa`s organisation. Dorthe worked with them in Calcutta when she was 19, and really enjojyed the experience - we had tried to find out some information about them before we left, but were unable to find anything - we weren't even able to find if they were active in South America, let alone where. And yet, here was a car with their name on the side of it, sitting in front of us. There was nothing else to do - we went up and started talking in our appalling spanish. The driver took us two shops up the street, and there were two nuns photocopying their passports. "Yes, yes, come to our house and talk to Sister Superior". Which, of course, was the trap that led to the two of us with aprons on and brooms in our hands...

As it turns out, we are the first non-local volunteers that they have had in the five years that they have been running in Potosi. They have a home for elderly people (30 men, 40 women) from the poorest areas of Potosi and its surrounds who do not have any family to take care of them. In addition, they also prepare lunch for a further 50 very poor families (each with a minimum of 5 members, some up to 12), all of which are missing a parent (usually the father) - yup, that`s mum and eleven kids. There is also plenty of work with other children in the surrounding community.

So what are we doing? Well, Dorthe and I work in separate parts of the building - I work with the men, and Dorthe with the women. We typically start the day at 8am cleaning the dormitories, toilets, and um, the patients who didn`t make it to the toilet during the night. Dorthe spends quite a bit of her time combing and doing the women`s hair, while I often make the beds and drag some of the mattresses out to air. 10:30am is lunchtime for the residents, followed by the epic undertaking of serving up between 300 and 400 servings of food for the 50 poor families. We normally finish at 11:30am, and go and get lunch, followed by a siesta like all the locals - we are often utterly destroyed by lunchtime. Work starts again at 3pm, and thankfully its much more calm in the afternoon - some days we just sit around and try to talk to the residents in Spanish. We`re done at 6pm, and often just go home, have dinner, and go to bed before 9pm - somedays you feel like you should be in a rest home yourself, you`re that tired.

So that is what we have been doing. I`ll write more about it over the next few weeks - as you can imagine, it is an utterly fascinating place to work, and there are many, many, stories to tell. But for the moment, suffice to say that although the work can be extremeley tiring, it is extremeley rewarding, and we are both enjoying ourselves immensely.