Blogday: Bolivia and Peru

Liz Henry — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 20:08:12 -0500

It's Blogday! Here we are at the Nuthouse, cooperative home of Rook, Moomin, the Pilot, the Acrobat, Peanut, & me. My friends Debbie Notkin from Body Impolitic and Mary Tsao of Mom Writes are here. Mary's surfing for mommyblogs outside of her network or outside of the U.S. Debbie is looking for French blogs and has tapped into a vein of left-wing stuff in French, a language she doesn't know very well. More people are coming to the blogging party soon!

I'm looking for blogs in Latin American countries I haven't blogged about before. Bolivia, Nicaragua, Paraguay. I also want to find and highlight some blogs written in indigenous languages in Latin American countries.

Right away I find Blogs de Bolivia, a great site with a huge blogroll! One of their writers, Almada (Gustavo Siles), now living in Barcelona, has some amazing photos of a parade with acrobats, umbrellas, fireworks, and a dragon. His blog is Almada de Noche. I was amused at his exploding Dell post!

Blogs de Bolivia also referred me to Mar desierto or Mariana Ruiz, of "Marea y cielo: somos seres de la luz que reflejan esos dos espejos". I clicked over to Mariana's flickr account to see a few photos of a meetup: Beers y blogs.

Mary and Debbie and I are showing each other exciting blogs on our laptop screens. "Where is Burkina Faso...?" "This is making me want to go somewhere!"

I then learned from DrLingo that Windows has just been released in Quechua; and from David de Ugarte of Blogueando la Biblioteca, that Claroline, an open source elearning platrform, is being translated into Quechua, Aymara, and Guaraní by a grassroots effort sponsored by la Biblioteca de las Indias Electrónicas. David cites the ubuntu manifest: Every computer user should be able to use their software in the language of their choice. DrLingo reminds us: "Two and a half million people speak Quechua in Bolivia, and there are a total of 10 million Quechua speakers across South America." So... well... now they can use Windows and soon they will be able to use Claroline too.

Katari.org is a blog in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, with a ton of links. I'm not having luck finding a blog in one of those languages, though there must be many... So I need to search Technorati on some common words in Quechua. How about amigu, friend, from this glossary. Amigu is not specific enough: I get too many results that are not in Quechua. Just before giving up, I try searching on "love" which is "khuyay"... that leads me to Habla Quechua, a blog by Noemi Vizcardo Rojas, a lawyer and language professor from Lima, Perú. Wow! Poems, photos, sound files, mini-language lessons, all in Quechua and Spanish. Noemi specializes in agrarian law, constitutional law, distance learning and the open education movement; she writes a bilingual column in Quechua and Spanish in an agronomic engineering journal; she has written a dictionary and a book of poetry... AND she blogs. The sort of person who will make you proud to be a fellow blogger.

Tags: blogday2006

Contributing Editor Liz Henry also blogs at Composite and Badgermama.

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Blogday: Bolivia and Peru