Our Group 75 Peace Corps Thanksgiving consisted of the volunteers cooking an enormous meal with yours truly organizing the kitchen and cooking the turkeys. See the photo above to visualize my quick-bake turkey preparation strategy. I de-boned the birds, put my arms in the body cavity, and tenderized the meat through aggressive shadow-boxing. It worked wonders.
Heading back to site tomorrow is turning my head back to my projects and my excitement about getting going on what feels like a few concrete projects. We had another meeting the day before I left for Thanksgiving and, although only a few people came, it felt very successful. We have decided to create two groups: a community chicken management group and an “improved” stove group. In addition, I am working with a man named Marco to build ram pumps for a part of the community without water.
Chickens!
There are about 100 houses in the town of Guabal and about 20 families that grow chickens to sell as broilers (chickens to eat). As we do not have electricity or refrigeration the chickens are sold live and there is a pretty small window (about 2-3 weeks) in which they are in prime eating shape. The problem that the community has identified is that all the families buy the baby chicks from an outside vendor at the same time, which means there is about a month with more chickens than the community needs, followed by several months without chickens. We have not figured out our strategy for solving this problem yet, but it will have to do with staggering production so there is a more consistent flow of chickens throughout the year. We just need to find consistent access to baby chicks or start raising our own. More on this later!
Stoves!
The vast majority of the families in Guabal cook on a Fogon – an open fire with three stones placed around the fire to accommodate a pot. It works pretty well, but it is quite inefficient. Although outside groups would identify less deforestation and better health (due to a chimney for the smoke) as reasons to start using more efficient stoves, my guess is that most families would say that having to look for less firewood is their main motivating factor. Luckily, there is outside money available for projects like this because they lessen deforestation.
Water Pumps!
The water pump I built and wrote about in my previous post is a hit in the community – and I am stoked! I built this pump for purely selfish reasons (watering my crops) but it has turned into something a few people are very excited about. There are about 15 households that do not have access to the aqueduct, and with the current technology cannot get access due to how their houses are placed. My friend Marco wants to build a couple of these pumps to fill a large storage tank for these families. Honestly, I am slightly hesitant to dive right into this project because I do not fully understand how to figure out the capacity of the pump and I want to make sure it can supply enough water for the needs of the families. I will need to figure out the pumps full capacity before seriously getting going on this project.
There are so many great ideas for things to do in my community that there is no way for me to be sure, at this point, of the exact nature of my work. The three projects described above seem to be the first on the “to-do” list, but things may change. In the coming posts I will likely be sharing more ideas we have spoken about and sometime in the future narrow these ideas into more concrete projects. Hope you are enjoying the posts, comment below!