Where In The World are Brian And Angela?!?: What's Goin On

I’ve been pretty darn proud with how the community is managing its trash. Collection is regular and on time, people continue to participate, and nobody is daring use their big new plastic buckets for anything but recyclables. We even came back from a three-week vacation to find that everything was fine. Sweetness! The next step will be to take all the recyclables down to Piura to sell. I’m not really sure if they’ll make money from it because the market fluctuates so wildly (the prices paid for recyclables are intricately tied to the price of crude oil. If it’s more profitable for a manufacturer to buy the raw material, they won’t bother buying the recyclables to make their products). We also have 20 new rain-and-dog-resistant trash cans to install around town to replace the defunct old ones. Like the can-crusher, we contracted the awesome Peruvian Arnold Schwartzenagger (see below) to make them.
By the end of service (mid Nov.) there will still be a lot of loose ends to tie up: recycling committees in the schools, a landfill for the primary school, a waste diagnostic, and a community-based monitoring committee to oversee the solid-waste management activities. Since I’m not being replaced as an environmental volunteer, we’ve requested two health volunteers to replace us. Hopefully one of them will work on trash stuff as a secondary project. I’m pretty sure that there are no couples in the group that replaces us, so the next two volunteers are going to have to share the tiny and isolated town of Sicchez as if they were married. Yikes!

A week’s work of recycling – before and after.

The intrepid and very dedicated woman who separates the recyclables. All labels and caps are removed from the plastic bottles and subsequently crushed – manually. They get a higher price that way. Sorting recyclables is a very labor-intensive task, it takes her a good 6 hours once a week to get through everything. Interestingly, the more technology that a recycling system employs, the less effective the sorting is. Manual labor is by far the most accurate of sorting methodologies. This can be a good thing for any kind of community, as it creates a space for jobs.

Recycling classified and ready to be taken to the city to sell. Can you see in the bottom left hand corner of one of the pictures an aqua-blue metal thing hiding under the mattress? That’s the can crusher I had made in Piura. We have a large accumulation of cans that need to be crushed before bagging, and so I asked the welder that Brian used for his improved cooking stoves to dream us up a crusher. (Another cool side story, it’s one of a kind and made by a Peruvian Arnold Schwartzenagger who is the nicest, most on-time, polite, and honest man I have ever done business with here. And he is the only Piuran to have a dune buggy in the entire city – which he built from scratch!! He’s genius!)

Brian is doing an awesome job with his garden and stove project. By this point, he has conducted multiple house visits to every single participating mom (over 40) to check on gardens, help with stoves, and trouble-shoot. He’s easily done over a hundred visits, which is not easy breezy because all 4 villages where he works are far away and isolated. That’s why he chose them in the first place. Sounds perfect for him, right?? Nothing to do but walk all over the place. Actually, he is getting a little tired of walking for 6 hours and using a whole day just to do a relatively small amount of work, but I still think it’s good for his peace of mind. Much better than sitting on the porch all day at least! So far there are 12 stoves installed and correctly working and 30 or so functioning gardens. He’s giving a Sept. 15th deadline to all the moms who haven’t yet installed their stoves, since they’ve had them for two months. If they don’t make the date, we’ll give them to other moms who have been asking.

A very happy mommy with her new improved cooking stove. Pretty self-explanatory, the fire wood goes in one end and the smoke goes out the chimney.

Brian and I went down to a village to help some families build their new stoves. You have to make a lot of mud to serve as the glue that holds the adobes together. From there, you basically stack them and make a special bed for the grill to go on top of. There are a few technical requirements, but it’s really easy to do. We actually had a blast working with the people. They made us laugh the whole time and we ate lunch three times (of course no one would allow themselves to be embarrassed by not inviting us to lunch).

Next up is what Brian considers our most successful project as of date: a little running race for the community members organized to celebrate the town anniversary. Although a huge headache to plan (the typical stuff: herding cats that are always a day behind), it went off without a hitch!!! Hooray! AND, we had my wonderful and dear friend Helen visiting us to lend a hand. So the race was manifested with the combined efforts of the health center folks, a couple of motivated teachers, us, an NGO, and the local police. We secured donations for prizes, water, snacks, t-shirts, and logistical support; and made two categories: kids 9 – 12 and adults 13 and up. (I know what you’re thinking, but we couldn’t get enough prizes for a third category). The kids ran a mile and the adults about 4 miles. The nurses and doctors were placed along the route with water and med kits, the police officer halted traffic (one car), and the rest of us stayed at the start/finish line to cheer the runners on. The adult group ended up having three girls and 25 boys between the ages of 15 and 20. There were 13 kids, 7 girls and 6 boys – sad, sad commentary on what happens to girls after puberty, no? But that`s also another story. Anyway, to our delight, they all rocked it! These youth are used to walking and hiking everywhere all the time…of course they did great!! A proud day for us indeed.

The health center workers.

The start/finish area.

My host sister...she won the girls category!! YAY!!

The participants for the kids category. So cute!!

The winner for the boys category!

The female winner for the adults category. She beat out a bunch of the guys, in spite of the fact that everyone said that girls can't run the same distance as boys. Machismo is dead!!