February 20th I hit 1 year in the country, and this April 28th I will have spent one complete year in my community. When I was applying to be a peace corps volunteer I thought that two years was a relatively long time. Taking into consideration the generally slower pace of life in Latin America, I figured it would feel even longer. Well... I don’t know if it’s just my personality but the time has flown by. Only one year to go and there are still so many things that I want to do and want to learn to do.
Here are some of the things I’ve been up to last year in addition to teaching at the school and managing and improving the recycling program and planning the big end of the year field trip to the national park.
After my parents left the country I went straight to a two week training. Its called In Service Training, because it takes place after you’ve been in your site a few months. The training is more specific to the community needs and potential projects that we will be working on.
We got to make bricks and build eco-stoves. These stoves serve as an alternative to the “fogon”s people use outside of their homes. A “fogon” is usually a few large rocks with some wood underneath and a very large pot on top. These fogons are not very efficient, a lot of heat is lost and so a lot of wood is burned and a lot of smoke created. The eco-stoves address these issues.
We also saw some great examples of recycled crafts, did some garden work, and worked in the “monte” chopping all the weeds with machetes. My favorite part however was a muddy hike during a downpour! It was a good 2 weeks, that now seem like a century ago.
After I got back I started working with a community group on getting a plant nursery started. Surprisingly enough, this group came to me and invited me to their next meeting to talk about the plant nursery because they were so excited to get started. This is something incredibly rare here. I am still working with this wonderful group, however at times they do not do so well with follow through. After sitting down and discussing the objectives of the plant nursery and the desired outcomes we came up with a plan.
Our first activity was seed collecting. Due to the time of the year we had to collect fruit tree seeds because almost all other trees only produce seeds during April and May. They decided on orange trees because that is what they wanted to reforest with in the community so that the animals could benefit to when they search for food. We went out into the “monte” and drank an excessive amount of orange juice and collected all the seeds. These seeds were then washed, dried, and the thicker skin was peeled off of them to prep them for planting.
Our next activity was the seed bed construction. We used all local materials, such as bamboo and palm leaves. We mixed fertile soil with river silt, and some organic material and filled the seed bed. Finally we planted the 200 strong seeds.
The step that followed was learning from our mistakes. After about a week the group was not very consistent in watering the seed bed and the beautiful little plants soon all dried out. This was very unfortunate, however I believe that it was a lesson well learned. They themselves realized that they needed to come up with a more strict watering schedule and be more responsible when it comes to that.
Another one of my activities this past year was attending a Leadership seminar. I was invited by my counterpart from the Mayors office and I was told to invite potential leaders from my community. I did exactly that and for the next 8 weekends every Saturday and Sunday I sat in a seminar 8 hours a day. It was long! Very very long! However, I do think my community members got a lot out of it. And I got a lot of networking done. The participants were leaders from small communities but also from Penonome itself so I got to do group work with the mayor himself and many other important people. Establishing these good relationships with important people was definitely worth the price of losing all my weekends, especially these relationships proved to be very beneficial later on.
During this seminar it was established that the lack of the ability to speak English limits people's ability to have success when working in the tourism industry. This over time led to me starting a program called Eco-Ingles. This is an english class offered to adults from all around the province who work with eco-tourism, or would like to work on eco-tourism in the future, but have not had the opportunity to recieve English language education due to economic barriers. I have a man waking up at 3 am and leaving at 4am just to travel across the province and to get to the class on time by 9 am! It is incredible! I think the program is very beneficial and I am glad I was able to get it going, but my oh my did it take a lot of work. From designing the program and getting the and planning all the logistics it was quite the job. However, after writing many professional funding letters in Spanish and many meetings with the mayor for which I usually had to sit outside of his office for at least 4 hours just waiting, I was able to obtain the funding to pay for the lunches, transportation and materials for all the students! From there part 2 of the work started, running the program. I believe that getting the funding to start the program was one of my major accomplishments of last year. The program is now well under way and I will post some more details about it soon!
In addition, as part of the leadership seminar the participants were required to do 6 hours of a replica of some of the sessions in their own communities. This was a great opportunity for the participants to really serve as leaders in their communities. I was excited to see how the the community members that I invited to the seminar would take on this task. After many hours of preparing we did a 3 hour workshop with 60 students from the 9th grade, and a 3 hour workshop with the artisan tourism group. Both went very well and it made me so proud to see them stand up in front of so many people teaching what they learned and leading discussions.
I finished off the year by conducting a study on trash generation rates in my community. I found out that the community produces an estimated 200 tons of trash per year of which nearly a quarter is inorganic and not recyclable. All of this is burned and the toxins are released into the air that we breathe. Not even mentioning that a significant amount of recyclables and most organic matter is burned as well. I have been asked to present on the study and on the topic of trash management to the mayor's office this Wednesday for Earth Day. Considering that they have absolutely no trash management system implemented in rural communities, likely due to the fact that they have no idea how much trash is generated since no body has ever attempted to measure it, I think this information will be the first step to getting them to think about what more they can do - an important step since trash management is their responsibility. In addition, I have been invited to speak on a radio show about this on Earth Day itself. It's like I've become a local expert on the issue! I'm excited to be on the radio but also slightly nervous about being interviewed about serious issues on air and in Spanish. We'll see how it goes, or honestly if it even happens at all. Things change quite a bit here last minute but keep your fingers crossed that all goes well.
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