My mind is always thinking about trash now since that’s my main job, trash management education. Being somewhere that doesn’t have a management system in place makes you really really think about how much trash you produce and how bad it exactly is for our environment. It makes you think more about packaging, plastic bags, and everything. I am trying to get a hold of some red wrigglers so I can try vermiculture in my casita and have a little compost and with the stuff I can’t compost make eco-bricks. They are a really cool way to use trash in a good way and not burn it or throw it in the campo. Basically you take a plastic soda bottle that still has a lid, and stuff it with trash like chip bags, plastics, and other inorganic trash so that it is really solid. You can end up fitting a lot of stuff in one soda bottle! Then once you have enough, you can use them to build different structures like schools, latrines, and recycling centers. Several other Peace Corps volunteers have done projects like this and it has turned out really successful! I know it may sound kind of crazy, but it’s a way to manage trash when there are no landfills or a trash pickup service.
On Wednesday I went for a hike with several of the guys I work with to the site where the landfill and recycling center is going to be. It is so beautiful out in the rural area! There are HUGE avocado trees that grow in the wild and look like they would be great climbing trees. It was fun going with those guys because they are all really funny- David and Hugo, who work in the Planning office, both were wearing dress pants and nice shoes, and then Elmer and Don Bernabe always dress like vaqueros, or cowboys, with HUGE belt buckles and really pointy boots. Don Bernabe even had on his sombrero. Bernabe is really religious and asked me how to say a lot of things in English while Elmer filled me in on where the best places to buy good quality boots are.
I also made oatmeal-chocolate cookies in my toaster oven for my host-brother’s birthday on Thursday! It was so nice to have my room smell like cookies and be all warm and toasty. Even though I didn’t have all the ingredients, and I used fake M&Ms instead of regular chocolate chips and put in honey instead of brown sugar, they still turned out pretty tasty! I’m looking forward to making another batch this weekend for my co-workers with the leftover ingredients. The nice thing about here is that you can buy eggs one by one, so you don’t have to buy a whole dozen at once. You can do the same with sticks of margarine, pounds of flour, even cinnamon! On Thursday I gave my first charla here to 16 year olds at La Salle, a private school run by brothers. Apparently there are schools like La Salle all over the world, even in the United States. They were founded by a rich French guy or something like that. I will look it up first before I try to explain it more. Anyways, my charla was over organic compost, and their assignment is to make little composts in 3 liter bottles that they find. Hopefully it works! It was really fun and the kids paid attention most of the time.
I have slowly but surely tried to wean myself off of pan dulce and am now down to 1 a day. I’ve started eating mangos a lot though- you can buy bags of mango slices in the street for 1 quetzal and so that’s usually my before lunch snack. Hopefully I will get a cutting board and knife this weekend so I can just start buying mangos and make my own mango slices so I don’t use as many bags. But it’s really refreshing! And sometimes there are these weird spices on them- like a mixture of salt and something called pepita and it tastes really good. My stomach has been hurting lately from eating too many beans and tortillas. I think they’re both kind of hard to digest in large quantities, and my host mom doesn’t put garlic or anything in the beans to make them smoother, so I’m excited to start cooking for myself next week! Since it is mango season, mango chicken is first on my list to make. I ate my first pollocriollo yesterday. This is what I understood: Pollocriollo is basically chicken you raise yourself at home. It’s fed corn, tortillas, and other kitchen scraps while the chicken she usually buys is fed something like a Purina mix for chickens. We had a rooster for a while and then my host mom killed it for her son’s birthday and made a stew with it. It was really good but I’ll be honest- couldn’t really tell a huge difference between pollocriollo and the pollo that she usually buys from the meat lady. Some people here though only eat pollocriollo and it’s something that people eat on holidays or celebration days.
Earlier on this week I met with the CTA, who is kind of like the school superintendent for Santa Maria, and talked to him about going to the schools and doing educational programs for them. He said that was a good idea and that I should come up with a plan and a curriculum to present to the principals at their next meeting in May. I’m really excited to come up with a curriculum about waste management but it’s a daunting task at the same time! I really want whatever I do to be sustainable, so I would love to leave behind a curriculum the teachers could continue teaching. So that’s what I’m working on now as well as trying to get together English classes again. The volunteer before me taught English and I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and ask me to start the classes again because everyone wants to go to the States. I probably won’t start them until after Semana Santa, which is the week before Easter. Next week I’m going to attend a sewing workshop with the women’s group here to get to know the women better. The only problem is, they usually all speak Tz’utujil. I went to their meeting on Monday, and it was all in Tz’utujil. Very confusing.
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