I brought with me to the meeting my most active Health Promoter, Andres Huertas Canerio. He was extremely excited to learn all the ins and outs of construction of stoves and latrines, and coming from a background in construction, I just felt he was the perfect match for the meeting--I was totally right! Andres is the guy you call in my town when your water pipe bursts, or you need to build an adobe house, or your bean crop is dying from a plague and you need help. He’s the Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor of Nanchoc if you will. He asked so many questions during the meetings that some of the other people got mad thinking we’d never leave—it may have frustrated some people, but I was as proud as I could be. I think I might have actually found one member of the community who’s ready to light a fire under the rear ends of the people of Nanchoc and get to working!
Now I’m hoping I’m not speaking too soon saying that. I really do hope that Andres and I, together with the Health Post and other Promoters, can finally get some projects going. Now that Andres has actually seen how freaking easy (and relatively cheap) it is to build an improved wood burning stove, he’s ready to build. He even wants one of the first ones we’re going to make. Our new game plan is to build 7 (you buy one big piece of metal that makes 7 stoves) stoves as part of a pilot program, putting them in influential houses in the community—Andres’s house, my house, Carmen (a lady at the health post who EVERYOE knows), Teo (the lady who owns the phone), the soup kitchen in Andres’s neighborhood, and one at the health post, the other slots are still up for grabs. But I’m excited that we seem to have a plan. In this up coming week we will be getting in contact with sellers of the metal we need to find a cheap price and hopefully start building by mid-September if all goes smoothly.
Not only did we get the stove project underway, but I found my new favorite way to grow veggies. The guy who was teaching about gardens happens to live in a city, so he has next to no space to grow veggies in. Seeing as how it’s like his job to teach people how to grow things, he figured it’d be rather hypocritical of him to not grow them himself and started growing plants on a shelf…sorta. The idea is to build a 2 story growing platform. Envision a bunk bed, but instead of a mattress there is a bin to grow stuff in.
Now I took this idea one step further. I’ve been trying for MONTHS to get my host family on board for a garden, and I wanted a bunny. They told me that there was no space for a garden at the house, it’s true, our patio is chock full of trees, so there’s not a ton of room…but there is some, but that I could build a little hutch for a bunny if I wanted. As long as it was just one bunny. So, I took the guy’s idea for the bunk bed system of growing and changed it a little… I’m going to have a bunny house on the bottom bunk, and veggies growing on the top bunk! I know, super great idea Jenny! I know, I’m proud of myself for thinking it up too.
Tomorrow (18th of Aug to be exact) I’m going to dig the holes to put the posts in, and walk about an hour with the donkey and start begging for people to give me 1 or 2 stalks of bamboo to get building. Usually people don’t give away bamboo…it’s like the duct tape of my site, now I know that you can’t tape things together with bamboo, but you can build damn near anything out of it. But I’m hoping my status as a gringa will help me get some for free…and if not as the gringa, as the broke gringa who knows how to build a latrine and is willing to share that knowledge. So here’s hoping that in the next blog I’m talking about my complete bunny hutch/garden combo and putting my focus on planting and buying me a bunny rabbit. No clue what I’ll name him, but if he’s gray I might have to be uncreative and name him Bugs Bunny…and maybe find me a black duck to name Daffy. I mean the neighbor’s cat’s already named Sylvester.
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