Volunteer site visit

3.19.12

This weekend I went to Las Charcas which is a small down next to San Juan de Miguana in the South Eastern part of the Country.  I went to visit another volunteer in the Environmental section so I could see what the life of a Volunteer is like.  My volunteers name was Erin and she has been working on installing a new kind of cook stove in her community.  She’s faced a lot of difficulties with her community and her different project partners but she seems like she might be more optimistic about the project that she was just a few months ago.  She lives in a three room casa (well only two rooms are useable) with an outdoor latrine. The first day I was there we went grocery shopping in the pueblo and took motoconchos about 30 minutes to her campo.   We rode past rice fields, and other small fields.  She made me a quesadilla for dinner, which was awesome.  The second day we walked around the town and she introduced me to her neighbors and we did a brief community meeting on trash and the different types of trash…. This community has no access to trash services so they tend to either litter their trash or burn it.  Many people showed up to learn about different options. 

On the third day Erin let me ride her work horse (which she bought to help with her work).  Then we worked with her Brigada Verde club (kind of like boy scouts) to transplant some plants she had been growing into a garden bed and build a fence around them so that the chickens and sheep would not destroy them.  Finally she showed me how to use the mini stove she had to bake in a special pot.  We made banana bread.  By the way I learned a lot about the banana plant… for instance banana plants grow for about a year and then fruit and then they sprout little baby plants out of the roots (I think) and they don’t bloom or bear fruit again so the people just cut them down.   The structure of a banana plant is really interesting and is kind of more like a flower to me than a tree.