worms eat the garbage!

Tom and I just took a trip out to visit our bud Josh in the Chiquitania to see all the fun with worms he’s having over there on the Brazilian side of Bolivia. Awesome stuff! After a good twenty-four hours on trains and busses and taxis getting there, we spent a few days checking out his worm bins, talking trash, and walking the tranquil dirt streets of his little town.

Here’s some worm bins Josh has built to compost organic trash.

These little California red worms love eating kitchen scraps, grass, leaves and manure, which they turn into fabulous black dirt, excellent for gardening. My work partner Seberiano joined us for the trip, and we learned quite a bit about building the bins, keeping worms healthy, and getting people in the community involved. This specie of worm can live for 15-20 years and will produce thousands and thousands of offspring in a lifetime, plus a whole lot of nutrient rich, aerated dirt. Worm bins are all the rage in Josh’s town, and we’re hoping to start a similar program in Okinawa. I’ll keep you posted on that one.


Me and a donkey. Donkey's are my favorite animals these days.

No Bolivian house is complete without a hammock.

While out there on the easy east side, we took an afternoon hike up a mountain that looks over the flat, green vastness of the Chiquitania. What a beautiful place. Epic rocks.






While in Josh’s site, we also ate about a gallon of homemade guava yogurt that a friend of his makes, drank a lot of coffee round the kitchen table, and learned about rocket stoves, a genius design of a stove that uses very little firewood. We might try to get those going in our site, too, since most of the trees in the area have been cut down, and a lot of people in Oki still use open fire pits for cooking, which waste a lot of wood and create lots of smoke –bad for earth, bad for lungs. The rocket stoves are expensive to build ($75 each), but maybe we can come up with a cheaper design or find an organization to help fund the project.

It was a great trip and, as always, fun to get to see another volunteer’s life and work. Those Peace Corps volunteers do some cool things for the world.


These are two local artisans who make pottery, drums, and jewelry. I bought a tea pot and six mugs this woman made for four dollars. I wanted to give her more, it seemed like so little for such great work, but doing so would just contribute to driving the prices of artesania up to an inflated and unaffordable value, which would hurt local business, not help it. Funny how it all works.