Hay trabajo, inquire within

We followed up last Sunday with the capacitation session for the three families. It involved all three families crowding around the toilet (20 people in total!), while Alfredo, Alex´s husband, explained the proper maintenance and use of the dry toilet. After each use, they need to throw a handful of a mixture of lime and ashes so that it keeps the pH up and keeps the dessication going. I think everyone understood the basic concept, but Alfredo didn´t allow enough time between talking for an adequate translation of everything he said into Tzotzil (it was the same way when I was translating into English for Andrea!). I don´t think people understand how hard translation is. But hopefully, the members of the families that know Spanish will explain it well enough to the non-Spanish speakers. Everyone seemed excited about using their toilet, and of course they all found it hilarious the explanation of how the toilet works...I guess potty humor transcends all cultures!

Now, I´m sortof in a work slump, because an albañil from the community seems rather difficult to come by. You basically have to know someone who knows an albañil...and then that albañil has to be free at the time you want him to be. I´m beginning to realize how lucky we were with getting the previous albañil, though I think we paid him much too little for his work. First of all, in the beginning Alfredo negociated him down to $12 per day, which is not a whole lot of money ( even though we did let him take as many taquito breaks as he wanted), but second of all, other albañils seem to be put off by that number. It seems that the amount albañils are paid is public knowledge in the community, so whenever I ask someone if they know any albañils, the response seems to be ¨None that would work for $12 a day¨. I´m perfectly willing to pay more than that, but its hard to bring the subject up around the first albañil after he worked for so little. I think a typical wage for an albañil in Damasco is about $14-15 a day, and a typical wage for an albañil in the city of San Cristóbal is a minimum of $18 per day. Its hard to imagine how someone can provide for the family on $12 a day, especially when they spend $2 on Coca Cola alone!

I was talking with Beto, Alex´s father, about it, who hasn´t been without his preocupations about the organization of this project in general, and he thinks that it ought to be up to the community to obtain an albañil. It should be their project and their responsibility, and that indigenous people of Mexico are so used to receiving handouts from the government (in exchange for votes for the PRI and, specifically in Chiapas, to prevent future Zapatista communities) that they never take the initiative and work for things if they can get them for free. Beto worked for a while with an NGO in his home state of Hidalgo, in which he worked with campesinos to organize themselves to set up community wells. The NGO wasn´t set up to just dig a well and provide the campesinos with water for free, but rather they organized the community to set up their own wells and the only thing the NGO provided was the credit so that the campesinos could get loans (otherwise unavailable to campesinos...although I´ve actually seen two Grameen Banks here in San Cristóbal!). Then the campesinos will pay off their loans with the increased crop production from the water. One thing interesting about how he was describing his work with this NGO was that he said a few of the projects they worked on were failures. With these projects, they built the wells and the wells are still there, so in an engineering sense they were anything but failures (and also when reporting to international donor organizations), but that they failed to have the community take on the project as their own and organize it themselves.

I think this is the aspect of participation that this project is still lacking, that the community feels like they need to take the initiative on the project. The people in the community obviously want a dry toilet...I´ve only talked with one person who said that they didn´t want one. However, they don´t want one enough to save up the money to purchase one. Now, to be fair, a dry toilet is not an income producing item like a water well is, so its not like the people could expect to earn back the money they were loaned for a toilet. An example of the economic state of the people in Damasco: Domingo II (who we just built a toilet for) a while ago got a $300 loan (I think) so that he could have a chainsaw for growing his crops. And then the chainsaw broke soon afterwards, but he was stuck with a high interest debt that has grown to over $1000 by now. I don´t expect him to be able to come up with the $300-400 to purchase a dry-toilet, and the participation of him and his family has been well worth his receiving a toilet. But I want to keep this in mind when continuing with the project, that we are still lacking levels of participation. Speaking about the government projects, Alex showed me a sketch of a new proposed government project building dry sanitation toilets...which looked exactly like the ones we are building except they cost about $1000 more per toilet (I think someone is skimming a little something something off the top). These are dry toilets that the government is giving, just perpetuating the reliance on handouts...and I hope that we can distinguish our project from that of the government. However, when deciding who will receive the toilets or trying to find an albañil, I still feel like people are expecting me and the organization to do it, and that the community of Damasco sees this as a COPÍN project and not as a Damasco project.

Terminados...Sale pues

The project had a minor setback two weeks ago. Andrea came down with a kidney stone and had to return to Houston to see a doctor there. It looks like everything has turned out all right for her, but she will be missed by everyone here!

Sitting in the waiting room of the public hospital provided me with a different perspective of what the problems of poverty and lack of education really look like. This hospital has many indigenous people visiting it, because it provides free emergency care to everyone(and I have to say, it was faster care than I´ve ever seen in a hospital in the U.S). While I was sitting in the waiting room, in walks this young girl, that couldn´t be more than 12, who looked malnourished, was having trouble walking by herself, and was clutching her stomach in pain. She had thought she had some sortof gastrointestinal illness, but found out that she was actually pregnant. A pregnancy has to be one of the worst things for a 12 year old body, and espcially for someone malnourished as she was. The chances of complications during childbirth are extremely high for someone that young, which brings me to the next people I saw. There was an indigneous male and some family members waiting in the room before we had arrived. Then the doctor calls them over to talk to them. His wife had given birth in el campo, but the baby had died in the womb a few days earlier, most likely due to malnutrition. As a result of the complications in the birth, the mother got a serious infection and so they took her too the hospital. And so, the doctor begins telling this man, in a completely nonchalant manner, that his wife has a serious infection and they are going to give her a dose of penicillin, but there is a good chance that she might die in the next 3 days. I couldn´t beleive the way the doctor brought this news, it seemed as if what the doctor said and the way she said it were two completely different situations. I guess it´s just hard to beleive that situations like this still exist after living in a such a rich country like the U.S. Many of the people here don´t receive more than a primary education ( many less), because they have to start working or get married after primary school. And in addition to that, the schools don´t provide the sex education that people need in order to realize that a pregnancy at 12 is not healthy at all. And malnutrition just makes any problem much worse than it was. Walking though communities like this, you see many of the ´things´ of poverty, such as tar paper roofs, unlined pit latrines, hauling firewood up the hill everyday...which seem uncomfortable but not terrible. But just walking through the community, you don´t see the child and mother mortality and the terrible affects of malnutrition. There is just so much more than you see in the first glance.



The albañil (skilled worker) we have been working with invited me to be the padrino (or godfather) of his daughter for her graduation from kindergarten. That was such an interesting experience and an honor. Throughout Mexico, graduation from kindergarten and from primary school is a big deal in which there is a huge celebration and all the parents select a padrino for their child to walk up with the child when they receive their diploma. When I arrived at the school, the albañil told me that all the padrinos and fathers were eating breakfast, so I went and had some food in the preschool building. Everyone was busy preparing for the graduation, which was held on the basketball court of the school, and the entire town of Belén must have been present (Belén is the community directly across the carretera from Damasco). The event started a little later, when the teacher sang the national anthem (who has gotta be one of the worst singers I have ever heard). It seemed as if the kids didn´t really have the amount of patriotism I would think one would find at a mestizo school, the teachers had to go around forcing the kids to stand up during the national anthem. I would imagine that I wouldn´t feel inclined to patriotism if my government ignored my needs for so long and acted like I was inferior to them. Then the celebration commenced with a full two hours of dancing! All the students in each grade would have a few dances they had prepared to music. There were 16 people graduating from kindergarten, but only 7 were graduating from 6th grade. I guess one could assume that half of the kids in kindergarten are going to drop out of school in order to work before they finish primary school. After the dancing was over, they gave out the diplomas, in which they would call name of the kids, and they would walk up with the padrinos. The teacher would hand them their diploma and the padrinos would hand them a present (thank god I remembered to buy a present!). After it was over, I was taking pictures for the family, and it seemed like everyone wanted a picture of them with their kid...so I´ve got about 30 pictures I need to get printed.

We aren´t going to be working with this particular albañil anymore, because we had only contracted with him to do 3 dry toilets, and he has already found work starting on Wednesday. That´s too bad, because in additional to being a good albañil, he was great about organizing with the families and getting them to participate in the construction of their toilets. He was born to a father who was an alcoholic. He was one of 7 kids, but his 5 older siblings all died as children because of the negligence of his father. His father died when he was about 8 from alcohol abuse, and because his mother didn´t have any savings, he had to go out to work. He began working in the corn and coffee fields in the lowlands close to Tuxtla Guitierrez, where he remained working for 16 years. He became an alcoholic himself, and began to spend all of his little money on alcohol, leaving little for his family. When he began to work as an albañil, he began to see what he was doing to his family and stopped drinking so much alcohol. Its such a downward spiral that people turn to alcohol because of the shame of not being able to provide for their family, but spending all the money on alcohol only makes the problem worse. He has 7 children right now, and one of his children died at the age of 3 months. They took the child to the doctor, but he was unable to do anything to save the child. He seems very interested in what work is like in the U.S., but I don´t think he likes the idea of being away from his family that long. I can´t imagine how hard it must be to make that choice to risk it all for that great job in the U.S.

We finished the first three toilets today! All the families are really excited about it. Alex wants to have an information session on Saturday in which we teach the families about the proper use and maintenance, and she doesn´t want people using them until we have had the information session. But Salvador II is really wanting to start using it today, and keeps asking to use it before the information session!

The father of Alex has come up with a motto he wants us to write on the toilets;

Caga feliz
Caga contento
Cages adentro

but I don´t know if the families would really appreciate the humor of that written on their toilet!

I´m unsure when we are going to be able to start on the next toilets. At this point, I am thinking that the time and money will alcanza for a total of 7 dry toilets this summer, however we still don´t have an albañil to work on the remaining 4. I want to hire another albañil from within the community, because not only would he speak the language and be able to communicate with the families, but we would keep the knowledge of how to construct the toilets within the community, so that the project can continue without us gringos being around. Speaking of gringos, on the trip to the community earlier this week, I saw a couple of Americans standing by the side of the road, and I have to saw that my first thought was ¨What the heck are a couple of gringos doing here?¨ before I realized that that is probably the exact same thought process going through everyone´s minds when I get stared at on the trip over there every day.

For the next 4 toilets, as I mentioned before, one of the toilets is going to be for Juan, who is contributing more materials than just sand and gravel. The other 3 we are going to do through another lottery in the community. We have been working with the town leaders to come up with a complete census of the community...but it seems like every census has a different number to it. The lottery is definitely a more fair way of choosing the order of who is to receive the toilets, and it seems to have more legitimacy with the community (even though its hard to tell what they are thinking at the community meetings, since everything they say is in Tzotzil). However, I think that having participation on the family level will be more difficult, since we are picking random people and hoping they will participate. For these three toilets, I have been very impressed with the level of participation we have had with all of the families. They have always been there to help with the construction and seem very proud of their toilets. One of the more important reasons for family participation in the construction is that they have pride in the toilet, the willingness to maintain the toilet, and the know how of how to fix the toilet should problems arise. Today, I saw a great example of why this is important. One of the sons of Domingo II seemed concerned about if rain would enter through the door, so I began to figure out a way of putting up some láminas to divert the water away from the door, and then the son says ¨No no no, don´t worry about it. If I see that it is a problem, I´ll fix it myself.¨ I was excited after hearing that, I think that these toilets are going to be maintained pretty well and the families are taking ownership of them.