Day 3 of Bottle School Project!

January 5, 2012 Day Three

Today went well even with the wind still going strong. Luckily it keeps the temperature down which has been fairly high recently. The weather here is mirroring what we normally see in October with the wind and March with the heat. 2012 thus far has been a little weird weather wise. Only two of the five families showed up today and I lost my two foremen for the entire morning who had to go to Sonsonate to get the funds out of the bank. We finally figured out what the problem was: the bank account number has two numbers at the beginning that you don’t use for the bank account. Wish they had told us that sooner and we could have gotten all of our funds last Tuesday when we first went to the bank. Lesson learned for sure.

I was thinking today as I was stuffing bottles that I should definitely write a little blurb for this blog about the best way to stuff a plastic bottle. It is actually quite the art form as you have to make certain that you are stuffing the bottle from all sides and angles so that in the you’re your bottle is literally as heavy and hard as a brick, which is why we call them ¨eco bricks.¨ See below and enjoy! (BTW one of my foremen made me a new and improved bottle stuffer which is pretty amazing and doesn’t tear up my hands. It’s a metal bar just long enough to stuff the bottle and thin enough to fit inside but its heavier than a bamboo stick and doesn’t break. Its also heavier which helps with pushing down the plastic bags in the bottle to further compact them. It also has a rubber tube that covers the handle bit so that I can push and pull the bar down without the metal tearing across the palm of my hand)

A Good Way to Stuff a Bottle

Total stuffing time: depends on how much experience you have but at least 20 min for a bottle of 1.25 L

Materials:

A plastic bottle

LOTS of plastic bags of different sizes, shapes, etc. You´ll probably want to have at least 200 on hand if not more. They need to be DRY which is the most important thing otherwise your bottle will mold from the inside out and smell really bad. They also can not have any food residue on them. They don’t have to be 100% clean but please make sure they are dry! You can only use plastic bag material, no paper or other materials can be used.

A stick to smush down the plastic bags. Mine is a metal bar which is like rebar of 3/8 in size with a rubber tube around its curved handle. But you can use a bamboo stick or branch of a tree. Gloves or an old sock is recommended for your hands.

Strong arms (just kidding, but if you fill enough bottles you will have them)

Stuffing

When you begin the process of filling your bottle remember: you have to make sure the entire bottle is stuffed to capacity, so go slow and make sure all sides are fully packed to the max before continuing on in your stuffing. Don’t add too many bags at once. You also want to make sure you are comfortable and best situated to give yourself the best leverage for pushing down your stick into the bottle. I prefer sitting on the floor with the bottle or on a bench with the bottle between my legs. Other people prefer to sit or stand with the bottle on a table but try out different positions and see what works best for you. Also, use your whole body to push down onto your stick when you start to really fill up your bottle, you don’t have to just use your arms.

To start, I usually stuff in about 4 or 5 bags and then use my stick to push them all down to the bottom, making sure to fill even the ridged bottom. It helps if you use your stick, sliding it along the sides of the bottle as you turn it to evenly compact. Once you have the bottom nice and compacted with various bags, keep on going until you reach the top. Remember, you can always fit another bag in there. Once you have the entire bottle filled almost to bursting (don’t worry, it won´t break but it might break you), then you know that you have filled it enough. Make sure to continuously slide the stick down along the sides of the entire bottle and smush into the center as well.

Day two of Bottle School Project

January 4, 2012 Day Two

Today was even better than yesterday. We had all but one of the families represented to work on building the classroom and I had some kids and a friend of mine come help to fill bottles. So far we have enough bottles full and ready for one whole line of one wall. Technically we have enough bottles for the whole classroom but a lot of them are missing some plastic trash and need to be stuffed some more. Luckily, we have enough plastic trash thus far to fill them. It was still pretty windy today but not as bad as yesterday. We finished some of the columns and main feet for each column today so when we finally finish the foundation (which we should be getting to in the next two days or so) we will be ready to put up the iron bars for the foundation and columns for the walls. We still need to get the sand, cement blocks and gravel for the foundation and the beginning of the walls but tomorrow the foremen are going to go to the bank where the funds will hopefully be ready and waiting for us, but money does move rather slowly here.

One evaluation for future project managers of projects like this, and this may seem like a no brainer but bear with me: Make sure that you get a fair price for your labor. Foremen here and I believe everywhere will try and take you for all they can get. I have worked tirelessly to get my foremen to lower their labor fees and we finally settled on a final budget and work contract which everyone signed and THEN I remember something crucial which is when I calculated their work days, I also calculated Sundays which they most likely will not be working, so they are getting paid one day a week to not work. Stupid, I know. But what makes me feel better is I did get them to pay a helper out of their own pay, so that Sunday will go to him. It is so hard trying to pay people what they ¨should¨ be paid. The pay here daily would be slave wage labor in the states so I have a hard time paying someone to do an entire days work of hard labor with little rest in the hot sun for only $8 a day. That’s when they are a foreman who is certified to do the work and they work at least from 7am to 5pm. If they are just another worker helping with the labor they get paid about $4 a day. I am paying my workers for the whole job that they are doing instead of on a daily basis but it´s about $12 a day but they work every day of the week minus Sundays from 7am to 6pm and they don’t really rest at all except to eat. I am definitely over paying them by peoples standards here but I know these guys, their families and their living conditions which makes it a lot harder and makes it hard for me to be impartial and get them to work for less. But I have learned so many lessons throughout this project and this is just another one to add to the list for any future development work that I may do.

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 9^th 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 9^th, 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 3^rd 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!

Blogging during the 10 day tropical storm...

It has now been raining for more than 96 hours nonstop in El Salvador and I am starting to lose it a bit. So in order not to get adobe house fever, I decided to walk to my pueblo and update my blog. My house flooded the night after last but luckily I was able to contain it and nothing was damaged. I did however spend the entire night wringing out towels and sweeping water out of my house. My hands are red and welty but they are getting better. I also had to go out in the mud at night with a hoe (or alzadon as they are called here) and dig my canals deeper. They were blocked and filled with twigs and leaves which made the water block up and go into my house instead of down my hill and into our river. I became soaked and covered in mud, so much so that I had to shower with my raincoat on first to get the mud off and then get to my actual body. And yes I took pictures but I won´t put them up here yet ;) (pictures of me covered in mud, NOT showering mind you). I managed to get through the night sweeping and wringing until about 5 am when there was enough light outside to go and put trash bags around the bottle half of my house secured in the mud with bamboo sticks. Peace Corps has really taught me how to be spontaneous and efficient in hard situations, but this is through the throw us in the pool and make us learn how to swim by trying not to drown. They definitely should have trained us to fix our houses and prep them against the rain. But it makes for a great story anyway. 
But the rain has been kind of a blessing in the fact that it has forced me to relax, cook, sleep in, nap and study for the GRE which I have in two weeks. I never would have done that if it hadn´t been raining since I always have a pretty busy schedule. The only down side now that the water has stopped entering my house is that all my clothes are wet and covered in mud and I cant wash them!! Oh how I long for a laundry mat right about now. I dream about putting my clothes in the dryer and them taking them out when they are done and getting that warm, nicely scented experience. So if you have a laundry machine, count yourself lucky people, my underwear has been wet for three days and the only way to dry it is to wear it :). 
In other news, I have started the process of building a classroom out of bottles with my community. We haven´t actually started building yet but we are fund raising and getting the bottles filled by nine different elementary and high school schools in the area. We will need about 3,000 bottles for a 6 meter by 6 meter classroom and we will be using about 500,000 plastic bags to fill our bottles. Its an amazing project and I am so proud of my community members for being so open minded and excited about doing something completely new. I will include a video of what we will be doing in my community with a non profit based in the US called Hug it Forward. If you are interested in supporting my community raise funds (since I am not personally allowed to touch or receive any money being a PC volunteer), feel free to visit their fund raising web page. You will probably be hearing form me in the coming months asking for donations. Please donate, its an amazing project and a really important one.
Here is the link: http://www.stayclassy.org/fundraise?fcid=132423

One year down, one more to go!

So I realize I havent posted in a long time (aka since MAY) but I have been extremely busy and I wanted to post something so here are some photos I wanted to share with you all since photos speak a 1000 words.
My projects right now include working with two womens groups (one making bread which has been a delicious experience, and the other making recycled art items), teaching two english classes four times a week to my 4th, 5th and 6th graders, teaching an awesome art class to my lovely babies in 2nd and 3rd grade once a week, working with an NGO doing recycled art projects with youth in 4 different municipalities (about 95 youth in total), and promoting my bottle school project (for more info on the idea behind what is a boteel school, etc got to hugitforward.com) in different schools across my department. All in all, I am pretty busy in a good way. The new Youth Development group is finally here and the old Youthies just left or are leaving now which means that my group is the veteran group with YD which is a little intimidating and hilarious since we all are just trying to do our best to get by and there really arent any ¨veterans¨ in PC. Every day is a new experience, a new challenge and a new adventure. I love it here!

You Know You´re in the Campo When....

This is a funny compilation of insights by myself and fellow Peace Corps volunteers about living in the countryside, ¨way out there¨ or AKA the Campo. We all love it but there are always funny, memorable moments that we want to cherish forever. They all make the PC experience that more interesting and enjoyable (I think).

1. 1. The bugs are as big as your face

2. 2. Every conversation you have is like having déjà vu

3. 3. That sock that fell off the laundry line is totally still clean

4. 4. When you finally do get to the capital, you find that a trail of dirt has followed you

5. 5. The clean clothes you definitely washed still smell after they dry

6. 6. That 4 year old in your town drinks more coffee than you do

7. 7. When people smile some (or all) of their teeth are gone or silver

8. 8. You guard your peanut butter and oreos in your bedroom like it´s your crack

9. 9. You go into your ¨bathroom¨ only to find its already ocupado…by a chicken

10. 10. You are awoken by roosters like clockwork at 10pm, 2am, 5am, and then whenever they feel like

11. 11. Spiders are not afraid of you

12. 12. You shower only to find, less than five minutes later, dirt on your leg

13. 13. Children participate as riders in the jaripeos (rodeos)

14. 14. Yes you can make coffee out of corn

15. 15. You proudly tell your friends that you can cut open a coconut all by yourself with a machete (I can!!!)

16. 16. You look up from your reading to find your grandma walking by with an upside-down dead chicken dripping blood and it doesn’t seem that weird

17. 17. Your new favorite things to do in the morning are sweep and mop your bedroom and then go wash your clothes by hand

18. 18. You gasp when tomatoes are more expensive than diez por $1 (or 10 for a $1)

19. 19. Pues, Nombre, and Cabal have become key vocab words in your every day conversations (study these before you come to visit)

20. 20. Your neighbor brings over her live trapped mice to feed to your cats (circle of life and better than rat poison in my opinion)

Hope that didn´t scar anyone. Its a wonderful ride here in El Salvador and every day I think to myself how lucky I am to live here in this beautiful country with these amazing people I work with every day. I get paid to play with kids, gossip with old women, visit houses to play with babies and learn a lot about the real world and what its like for people to live in it. Makes me think sometimes that the US isnt really all that real at all. Or if it is, I think I prefer it here more.