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.
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