Fishing, Meetings and Governments

This is our adopted father, George. George and his family are constantly feeding us, taking us out into the "Chacos" (farm fields) and really making us feel part of the community. This is a throw net and we ended up catching our dinner for the night.

These are the buggers we ended up catching, couple of piranas a pacu or two and I'm not going to even attempt to name the others. On average they were approx. 3-4 inches long and never more than 6 inches. For dinner we de-scaled and gutted them and then Tomoko (our adopted mom) fried them up whole, that was the first time we ate a full fish, head, fins, bones and all. It was like a really crunchy fish stick.

This is Anna doing the "pee pose" that us men know. Now I'll fill you in on the background.... Anna and I had attended a meeting in which we discussed with various other development agencies, health departments, and NGO's about sanitation issues which the main topic was sustainable bathrooms. This particular picture was at the end of a four day meeting (we were pretty tired of bathrooms by that point) and Anna volunteered to try and explain a homemade urinal to the group. This picture was part of the explanation and there wasn't a dry eye in the house, it was absolutely hilarious. She won a t-shirt as a result.


We live in a town with other volunteers "the catholics" is there collective name. The two ladys in the group asked Anna if she wanted to help them explain the concept of "natural family planning" to the women who live in and around Okinawa. This was there first meeting in which they informed the women of the community that classes would be held on a monthly basis and all were free to come. It was impressive to see Anna, Marie and Elizabeth talk to over two hundred people in a second language for more than three hours.

Other goings on...................................

Anna and I had a fairly successful meeting the other day. This may not sound very successful but we have different scales of success here. The other day we established, thru an informal meeting, that we will have a formal meeting (with invitations) next month in which we will form a formal committee who will be responsible for issues of sanitation in the municipality. However slight this may appear (and I'm sure it does) this is a big step in a good direction. Our main goal here is to establish projects that will be sustainable, basically, we want to work ourselves out of a job and to do this all of our projects should be able to proceed without our presence and this formation of a formal meeting to appoint a committee which is responsible to paid government employees is a step in the sustainable direction. Cross your fingers.

Next week we plan on going to Cochabamba. I'll be invesigating a new bathroom construction which seems promising but expensive. Anna will be having meetings with PC management about the cancelation of the next training group, sounds like political strife is growing enough that PC canceled a whole group of new volunteers who were supposed to arrive the first week of May. After our trip we will be entertaining Alison and Leah Montgomery, Anna's mama and sister for a couple of weeks so we should have some great pictures of there trip here. Stay Tuned! Tom.

Water for the Trees

Just had the good pleasure of taking a trip down to the Chaco to help some friends build a rain catchment tank that will be used to water seedlings as part of a reforestation project in the area. Cool beans.

We got a call on Friday afternoon from the Peace Corps about the project, and Saturday I was on my way down. Poor Tom was a little under the weather at the time and didn’t care to brave the ten hour trip on a bus with no bathroom, so he stayed in Oki, where we have a lovely flushing toilet.

The Chaco is the dry southeastern region of Bolivia, and it spans the departments of Tarija, Chiquitania, and Santa Cruz. It’s a large, desert area with beautiful mountains and, during the rainy season, which we are currently in the midst of, lush vegetation and flowing rivers. I met up with some fellow volunteers in Villamontes on Sunday, and from there we traveled to Chimeo, a sweet little Chaco village where one of the volunteers lives and has worked to start the tree nursery and secure funding to build the tank.

Six a.m. Monday morning we set to work, clearing the area where we’d build the tank and where the nursery will be established. Twenty people from the village came to help out for the day, which was an incredible show of support. They kicked that jungle’s butt and cleared the way for the construction of the tank in three hours. It struck me as ironic watching them take down full grown trees with their machetes, clearing the thick jungle to the ground, so that we could plant more trees in order to reforest other areas that have been clear cut for the sale of timber. So it goes.

To build the tank we poured a circular base of concrete about two meters wide, made a skeleton wall about two meters high out of rebar and chicken wire, which we assembled by hand on the ground and then stood up in place, on top of the base. The walls were then covered in concrete, and then the domed roof put in place in a similar fashion with rebar, wire, and concrete. It took five days to finish the tank, with the help of a number of members of the community, six volunteers, and a lot of rain slowing us down. It was an awesome week, and I was excited to be a part of a project that will contribute to the sustainability of a community’s resources, provide jobs, and protect the environment.

The rain catchment tank we built will hold ten thousand liters of water, collected from a roof that will be built over the tank. During the rainy season (roughly November to April), the tank will fill with rainfall and the trees will be watered naturally. During the dry season, when it is likely not to rain for more than six months straight, water from the tank will be used to keep the young trees alive and growing. Volunteers are building such tanks for human water consumption all over the Chaco as well. In this part of the country, water shortages are a very real problem and affect tens of thousands of people.




The beautiful new tank, all but the lid and spicket in place.



Assembling the dome lid of the tank. Amazing what you can do with some rebar and chicken wire.

Water To Our Knees

We seem to have the opposite problem up here in the jungles of Santa Cruz. There have recently been massive floods to the north of us in Beni, leaving hundreds of thousands of people flooded out of their homes. Two weeks ago we delivered food and supplies to people in a flooded village just down the road. Though the water had receded substantially, their homes still had a foot or more of water in them, and the twenty families from the community we visited had been living under tarps along the road for over a month. Sickness and malnutrition abounds in such areas.

We’ve been lucky not to have flooding in our town this year. At this time last year most of the community was under water, and people were living in tents and sleeping on any dry ground they could find. But the rains persist, and inside our pink hut in Oki, it’s so humid our concrete walls are sprouting mold and the chairs in our living room are rusting. Crazy.

It is normal to have a rainy and a dry season here, but the weather patterns have become more extreme over the past few years, and flooding and droughts have become an enormous problem. The Bolivian Government recently stated that the governments of the developed nations that are consuming vast quantities of carbon and thereby causing global warming, which in turn is spurring la niña to deliver her disastrous weather, should take responsibility for the damage they’re causing. In short, the message is that the US should pay up and compensate the rest of the world for the effects its greed is having on everyone around the globe. Wow. That’s not a bad idea.

But I thought global warming was just a myth. . .