Monday, January 9, 2012

First Day of my Bottle School Project!






Jan 3rd 2012 – Day one of Bottle School Project!

I thought I would try and blog about every week of this project since it is a long time in the making and a lot of people have helped me get to where we (my community and I) have arrived today. Today was the official first day of work on the construction of my bottle school! I want to be clear, I only say ¨my bottle school¨ because I am super proud of this project and I have been the project manager of it since November of 2010! I will try to keep anyone who is reading my blog updated on how the whole project process is going, struggles and triumphs as well as some evaluation as well as to how something could have been done differently or better. Since I do not have wireless internet access and this project will be taking up the entirety of my life for the next two to three months, I don’t know how often I will be able to update but I will continue to write up assessments via my computer and post these when I can!

I never could have gotten anywhere without the help of many, many people and organizations: my community, my school and school director, the Ministry of Education of El Salvador, several other schools that helped me to collect and fill bottles in, Peace Corps volunteers and staff that have helped me out with technical and emotional stuff, my parents, all the donors to the project through StayClassy, NGOs of Guaymango, and of course I need to send a huge thank you out to the people who came up with this original idea in the first place and I just happened to stumble upon it by accident: Hug it Forward (HIF)! Zach, Heenal and Juan Manuel and have helped out so much as have many other staff members that I have come to know though emails. I could never have even begun this project without these guys and I owe them everything. So I send a huge HUG out to all of you!

Pre-Day One

In preparation for the day of breaking ground on the project, my two albañiles (these are head foreman for the project) and I went to the bank to take out the first round of donations sent to us by HIF. We left super early as the banks are always packed with a line of people waiting to get in before they even open. Side note: while we were waiting for the bus, there was a HUGE rainbow in the sky over my community even though it wasn’t raining and had only sprinkled in the early morning. Good luck for 2012? Yes, I think so. Luckily we got to the bank before too many people had showed up, and were attended to within 15 minutes (I would like to note that last time we went there we had to wait an hour and a half just to set up a bank account!). Unfortunately due to banks being terminally slow in transferring funds, we hadn’t received our donation so I had to call up a contact of mine who has a ferretería (a hardware store) and ask her to front us the materials so we could get started with the project. From the bank we then had to travel all the way back to Jujutla (about an hour bus ride), stop at the hardware store to order the materials and then take them back to my community. It took almost the whole morning to accomplish but we were ready to start the project! It was so surreal loading all of the materials into the truck to take them to my community; I have been dreaming and positively visualizing this day from the day my school told me they wanted to do this project!

Day one (!!) January 3, 2012

We start the day at 7am. I spent all last night praying to whatever kind of god, God, higher power, Goddess you name it, that the first day would go well and that people would show up to work. The best and hardest part of this project is that the community has to give all the manual labor for free except for a couple head foreman who run the project and have to be certified masons or foreman in order to get paid. The only problem is that I am working in an area that is in extreme poverty so asking people to take an entire day off of work to come to the school and give their time, sweat, and energy for free is asking a lot. Luckily when I got to the school there were already two representatives of two families there waiting for me! This is extremely awesome because people here usually show up an hour late for everything, which isn’t really late for them but normal and expected. All in all, three out of the five families that were supposed to send someone to work showed up. Technically two out of the three were supposed to come a different day but who cares?

The only drawback to the day was that it was extremely windy and there was dust being blown about everywhere. That and the fact that we did hit the main water pipe for the school and created a small moat where the foundation for the walls is eventually going to go were the only drawbacks of today. My PC friend Kara Zucker came down from her site to help me stuff bottles and help me to distress which was awesome. Luckily we have a lot of bottles and most of them are pretty full but a lot of them need to be stuffed more with plastic trash so the majority of my day was spend stuffing bottles and then going out to forage in drainage ditches, bushes, and the side of the road of plastic bags. They aren’t that hard to find here.

I guess for my evaluation of today would go something like this: I wish we had waited to start until the 9th of January. I am glad that everything went well today and I think will continue to go well but I would have preferred to leave more time between the holidays and the start date of the project for the funds to transfer. Having my contact at the hardware store front us the materials was great but they are also more expensive than where we would have gotten some of them (mainly the iron materials) if we had had the funds to do so. Also, my school director doesn’t start her work until the 9th, so she couldn’t be there for the first day (or she rather chose not to come in during her vacation, which is fine). My reason for having the start date on the 3rd is simply because that’s what the parents and community members wanted. They wanted to start the project in November or December of 2011 and work while the students weren’t at the school but we never would have had the funds in time. So as a note for future projects: don’t start your projects anywhere within a week of any holiday season!


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