Worm bins and long drops

Tom and I concocted a dynamite worm bin last weekend at his fam’s place. Our bosses presented us with a purchasable plastic worm bin fit with pipes, gaskets, and the works that our families could purchase for 100 Bs ($12, which is a lot for around here. To put it in perspective, Tom and I get $2 a day for living expenses outside of room and board –enough to buy furnishings, t.p., drinks, and the occasional dinner out). We constructed our worm bin for $0 out of scraps and bits we found around the yard: an old barrel, a piece of plastic sheeting, a discarded piece of pipe, and a broken squeegee we found under a pile of bricks.

An old cylinder head from who knows whose car served as a punch to make a hole in the barrel for drainage. Once constructed, we added dirt, worms, and kitchen scraps. It should start producing its golden abono (Spanish: worm poop/fertilizer) in a few months. One worm, if fed right, will produce thousands of offspring within a year, and they’ll happily eat up all your kitchen scraps and turn it into wonder dirt for your garden.

We’ve also been learning to build eco outhouses. Building outhouses might sound a little outdated, but the norm here is to wander out back, find a patch of dirt, and do your thing. Well, that “thing” will eventually end up in the wrong place –your water source, your kitchen, your hands, your food- and cause all sorts of trouble. Bolivia has the highest infant mortality rate in Latin America because of poor sanitation. It’s ambitious to think we’ll be able to make a difference in two years, but a small change is still a change.

Figuring out how to build an ecologically friendly, waterless, inexpensive, user friendly, compact john is a learning process. We’re putting our thirteen heads together, along with the guidance of our stellar trainers, and are constructing an eco bathroom that should last half a century. The most important part of the process is involving the family, teaching them how to maintain it and, most crucially, helping them understand why using a bathroom is better than using the yard. There are NGO bathrooms all over the country being used as sheds and clubhouses because the families don’t understand the benefits of their god-given purpose. Education is our number one job.

Pouring the concrete for the base of the john. We forgot the rebar. Oops. We added it on top at the end. Might work.

Talking to the fam and playing games to teach them about using their new eco potty.

GI distresses among us.

GI bugs are fairly common south of the border, and our group is no exception. We’ve had two volunteers, so far, go to the hospital for IV fluids and a curing round of either antibiotics and or antifungals (which I’m told is something like an antiparasitic). Two out of 29, not bad odds, but it is only the second week we’ve been here, and I’ve had my fair share of “gastro-intestinal emergencies.” Anna, on the other hand is solid as a rock. Her health that is.

Due to the size of our blog we’ll try to put a link on the page to a bank of photographs you may peruse at your leisure. Hopefully in the near future we’ll be getting a phone as well. My phone is locked (courtesy of America), but rumor has it can be unlocked down here for about 6 dollars, which is roughly 50 Bolivianos. That’s about what we earn in three days.

Short entry this time, more to come, hope all is well. Talk with you all soon.

Dogs everywhere!

Middle of the night, middle of the road, black ones, spotted ones, little ones, little ones with gigantic heads, there are dogs everywhere and they love to bark and fight. The genetic diversity of some of these dogs is astounding. I’m wondering if we shouldn’t be doing neutering and spading instead of basic sanitation projects.

We already started doing a basic sanitation project this last Monday. There is a young family that lives approx. ¾ mile away from Anna and I’s houses that does not have a proper bathroom. They poop with there cows in the field behind there house, brainworm anyone? We began by building a solid base with field stone and the rest of the Bano ecologia will be constructed with brick, rebar, cement, and some ceramics. The latrine/bano ecologia will be a dry latrine, meaning that after each use a small amount of dry material (lime, sawdust, (don’t mix the two) etc.) will be added (down the hole) and within eight months to a year of use you have clean compost. The bathroom will be elevated and have two chambers, one chamber every eight months to a year then switch to the next chamber. It gets a bit more complicated but you get the idea. Reduce, reuse, and recycle.

It’s a bit cold here in the mornings about 40 F but then heats up to around 70-80 by early afternoon, and dry, and I love it. Breakfast consists of a hot beverage similar to ovaltine or coffee if you’re lucky enough to have bought it and a basic, somewhat flat, tasteless, nondescript piece of bread in a roll form. Lunch is always soup and usually pretty good. Dinner (for those volunteers that get it) is filling and good as well with plenty of carbs, rice, potatoes, egg, beef (I’m not sure what kind) and juice, its always some variation of those ingredients.
Its not quite wish-list time, but if someone sent me some jif peanut butter I wouldn’t complain. What news of home has you! We hope everybody is doing well.

Daniel/Papa, hope your feeling better, we’re sending good energy your way.
On a technical note for our blog, some folks have said that they can’t post a response, at the end of the blog entry there is a line that usually reads something, something,…comments (0). That line can be clicked on, specifically the word “comments”, and will lead to a page where you can post your comments

your place or mine?

So moving thousands of miles from home has its differences. I’m not sure where to begin with all those differences so I’ll just write about general happenings. Alright, just for a moment I’ll digress: not throwing toilet paper in the toilet, a difference that takes some getting used to.
Anyway, in general Anna and I are having a good time. At most times we are extremely busy, whether it is language class, technical class, planning community development projects, or trying to fit/jive with our families. It should be fun trying to find our niche and accomplish something good and/or practical.
Anna and I live in different houses……(I’ll return to this later). We live about a block apart in a rural area approx 15 kilometers northwest (I think that’s right) of Cochabamba in a town called Matenda. My family is amazing, mom, dad, a fourteen year old boy, a sixteen year old girl, and a four month old boy, I’m the first volunteer this family has housed. The father, from what I can understand, is a construction foreman and the house I live in is relatively brand new, electricity, toilet, hot shower, roof, etc.
So, as I expected, my language evaluation by the Peace Corps was labeled as ‘basic,’ which means that I can count to ten in Spanish and that’s about it. Because of this evaluation the peace corps asked us if living apart for the first three months of training would be ok, with frequent visits and ‘permission’ to spend the night at each others houses. Sure no problema. Well, Anna lives in a dark cement hole with a family that resembles…..well this is public information, and I don’t want any retaliation to occur. . .
So at our first training meeting we brought up the idea about moving in together with our training director and it was great talking with him about our disagreeable living situations, he was open to Anna moving into my place but stressed that we need to do it slowly in order for Anna’s family to save face, our first cultural sensitivity lesson. So hopefully by the end of the month Anna will be moved into my place.
Our days are exceedingly jam-packed and we’ve been informed by current volunteers that this is normal for the first three months, which is called Pre-service Training (PST). Language class begins at 8-8:30am and goes to 12:30, one hour for lunch, then its technical training, community development, medical lectures, cultural sensitivity lectures, or some other training until 6pm, this makes for one heck of a long day. And this schedule goes from Monday thru Saturday, with our free day being Sunday. Fun but exhausting. I’ll write again soon, I began this correspondence on this Monday and it won’t be until Friday or Saturday that I’ll be able to walk twenty minutes to the local internet café to send it off. Oh yeah, dad you’ll get a kick out of this, my project director’s last name sounds like mcclellan and he acts about the same and he was an assistant scout master for 20 years, and no I haven’t put anything in his water.
Hopefully we will be getting a cell phone, fairly cheap here, and I’ll post our number up soon. We miss everybody, Take care, Tom and Anna.

Bienvenido a Bolivia!

We spent the last day and a half in Miami for our Peace Corps staging event, where we met the rest of our group. Last night we all jumped on a plane and headed south overnight to South America. We made it into La Paz, the capital of Bolivia at 5:30 this morning, then caught another flight to Cochabamba, the town of 500,000 where we will live for the next three months going through language, job, and cultural training in preparation for our two years of service as Basic Sanitation volunteers.

There are 29 in our group -it´s an awesome and energetic group, and we´re stoked for what´s ahead. Bolivia is beautiful. We were flying eye to eye with 20,000 foot peaks this morning, and are now resting in the valley of the Andes at 8,000 feet. The streets of the city are busy and colorful and so very different from any place in the US -the architecture, the faces, the language -it´s exciting to be here, to finally be doing what we´ve been wanting to do for so long.

Again, sorry for no pictures -we can´t hook up the laptop just yet, but we will soon.

Thank you, friends and fam, for all the support and love in sending us off. We miss you. Have fun and let us know what´s going on back home. You should still invite us to parties. That way we´ll feel loved, and who knows, we might just show up.

Holy #$%&*!! We're doing it.

I think its all settled into our heads that we are actually leaving the country for the next two years. Feels pretty good. We catch a flight from Miami to LaPaz tonight, take-off 11:20pm, arrival 5:30am, not too sure on the logic of that one. We'll write again soon, sorry no picture for this one. Take care and love you all. Tom & Anna.

back home for a spell

Three weeks of road trippin. Can you believe we're still not sick of it? This mighty little truck took us 4,000 miles around the country without making a fuss. Tom had this truck when I met him in Montana six years ago. We've driven it around the country four or five times together since, it gets 30 miles per gallon, it's dirty and worn and smells a little funky. We had to sell it right when we got back -I almost cried.

After three weeks of fun and friends on the road, it was time to get back to C'ville to take care of business and enjoy the company of our friends and family here. It's not easy saying goodbye to so many people we love, but we're making the best of our last few days here.

Playing with friends back home:

Jessie and Willie

Margaret and Sunny


Sunny, Nathan, and Willie


Sister and brother Leah and Joe have taken us into their house for the week, many thanks and much love to them for being so rad. Our days have been spent doing a lot of tedious chores you've got to do when you're about to be out of touch for two years with no phone or forwarding address. In the evenings we've been playing with friends and hitting up all our favorite spots in town. Turns out our favorite spot is not in town. It's on the river at our friends Jay and Erika's farm where we used to live. Where we hosted the first annual New Year's Day Polar Bear Bathing Suit Optional Swim this year. Where we swim and fish and party and play. Where Tom proposed to me a few years back. Where life is good. So we go there lots.


Tom and Gus on the way to the river.




Joe, Leah, and Tom. Dinner by the river.



Tom, Lio, and Joe. Philosophizing and stuff.