Todo es posible, nada es seguro

Everything is possible, but nothing is certain. One of the San Miguel guides said this often last year and I think it is a nice saying to describe the last week and a half.

We had a very busy week in which we had our first teacher training. That went pretty well. Teachers were enthusiastic and our Spanish was ok. It is much harder to give a training in a language you don't speak fluently and it improves the quality a bit as well, but we had a very interactive training in which the teachers had to practice different interactive teaching methods so it was a nice division of doing things yourself and listening to us. We are proud on ourselves that we managed to accomplish this.

The rest of the week was a bit harder. We planned a lot of meetings but they were all canceled. Some examples: The first meeting with 1 school was canceled because the teachers had another training, so we planned a second meeting for the next day which was canceled because of the amount of water in the school (it had been raining for 2 days) and the third meeting was canceled because the teachers didn't have school in the afternoon. Other canceled meetings and trainings included no electricity so no use of laptop and projector for the training, no meeting (by now the raining had almost stopped) because it was still drizzling and it was cold so the lessons were canceled, no training because the school mentioned earlier didn't show up and we had too few participants. The second attempt was canceled because the school building was also used by the morning school (2 schools share the same building) to celebrate Mother's day. This would include a lot of music and as we mentioned before, when Bolivians turn on the music, it will be on maximum volume. Not a good idea to have a training at a distance of 50 m from the music with open windows.

The good part is that teachers are used to canceled meetings and it is usually no problem to plan your next meeting very quickly after the canceled one. The movement of the teacher training from the afternoon to the evening in a different school was a suggestion of one of the teachers and everybody who was there in the afternoon, came in the evening as well.

Next week, we will try to have the same meetings and hope for better weather. It has been raining for 3 days and as soon as it starts raining, hibernation begins. Everybody stays indoors and everything is canceled without further notice. This is a national habit and there is nothing we can do but accept it. Just sit, wait and join in (or do other useful things in the meantime).

It is quite cold now, it is overcast for 4 days in a row and the temperature dropped to 18 degrees. Dutch people would think this is very normal, but we are by now so used to 30+ degrees that it feels like winter. With our open windows in our house (only mosquito netting) the wind blows through the room because our curtains are too small. We hope the sun will be out soon, both for the temperature rise and the continuation of our project. Since I forgot to post this blog and it's on my computer for 3 days, I can now mention that the weather is back to normal.

We will try to extent our visa with one month so that we can stay till the middle of August. Their winter holiday is in the first two weeks of July and interferes with our program. With extending our time here we can continue with our program after their holiday. This includes a little break to go back and forth to La Paz which also gives us the opportunity to visit the library of Conservation International. This organization has done a lot of environmental education project in the surroundings of Rurre in the past, so maybe we can find some useful educational material. We already noticed that a lot of educational material has been made by different organizations, but everybody tends to forget this and the materials end up in a library and nobody knows it exists. We gave ourselves the tasks to put interesting educational material on a website so at least the schools in Rurre have access to it.

The water quality improved by the way. We now have water when it rains and there is only very little sand in it so I guess they fixed something.

We end with this nice picture. The municipality is changing part of the electricity. In the Netherlands they would replace the old wiring. Here, they just build poles and wires on the other side of the road. They are now putting the wires in place and sometimes the trees are in the way. So what do you do: you just put up your ladder against the leaves of the tree and hope it will be stable enough. In this case, it was.

Who wins: Dolf or the chickens?

When you turn on the tap in the Netherlands, you will know there will always be water and it is clean. Yes, we do have a tap, but that is were the resemblance ends. We discovered that when you turn on the tap after a rainy period, their is either no water or the water is muddy. So you shower in muddy water, cook with muddy water and do the dishes in muddy water. That's still better than the no water we have now had on several occasions. It turns out the water to the households is closed during rainy periods. During the rainy season, there was no tap water for three whole weeks in a row, so actually we are lucky. We now keep the biggest pan we have permanently outside (in the rain if it's there), so we can still manage to flush the toilet at the end of the day.

Dolf has found a nice way to entertain himself. He bought a catapult this afternoon to use in his fight against keeping the noisy chickens out of our garden. It was of course of Bolivian quality, so it broke after one try. He is now trying to fix it and he can indeed smash a pebble pretty accurately to a chicken. Downside is that if he actually manages to hit the chicken he will probably smash its brains out, because there is a lot of force behind the mechanism.

Last week we discussed the plans for the school gardens of the primary schools with the other project partner who has an organization in Cochabamba, another city in Bolivia. The director came over to Rurre and we had three days of discussions in dutch, since he is a dutch guy. Nice to have some inside information of somebody who lives in Bolivia for about ten years and sometimes still has trouble adapting to Bolivian life. He is for instance still waiting for a building permit for his house on land that was purchased five years ago. His Bolivian wife is a cook and she has found a way to make stroopwafels which she sells on the market. Nice example of integration of two cultures.

We have all the socio-productive projects of the schools and are now trying to find out how we can turn everything into one big proposal, without losing the big picture.

Because we have decided to do our ecological field practicals not in San Miguel, but closer in the forest around the city and another place only 5 minutes upstream by boat, we can include much more students. We are now talking about practicals for big numbers of students and if we can arrange it, it is very well possible that over 500 students will do a field practical. The practical will still be given by the guides of San Miguel and eventually without our supervision. Classes are pretty big here and some schools have 70 students for each year, so it will be very interesting to see if we can manage logistically. We still have some time to organize this, the practicals are planned for the middle of June.

We will start with brainstorms with each school next week, to see how we can support each project. That will be our make or break week. If teachers do not show up because they forget the meeting or have other things to do, it will be much harder to carry on in the co-operational way we had planned.

We already noticed that our second meeting with some teachers went the same way as last year. The teachers forgot the meeting, we had to call them and one of them said he would be there in 10 minutes but failed to show up at all...If you behave like that in the Netherlands people would be very upset, here it is just normal. But we keep our hopes up, because directors of the schools are still very enthusiastic about the plans.

Living in Rurre again

We managed to find a little house of our own, even including a garden! We wake up with the sounds of the rooster and his ladies (often starting at 4.30h), but hardly any traffic because we live in a small street a bit away from the center. We can shake the grapefruits and carambolas out of our own trees (in a matter of speaking, actually Dolf gets a 3m long pole and smashes the grapefruits out of the tree). The coconuts need some more time. It is really living in the tropics. Every day we sweep the ants out of the house and destroy the new roads the termites build along the different walls. Interesting to find out that they just start on a new wall every other day.

Unfortunately the house was unfurnished so we borrowed some things from friends and bought the other necessary equipment: a mattress, gas bottle and a ventilator. It is nice to cook for ourselves again.

We can work at home if the internet does cooperate and the owner pays his electricity bills. Two days after we moved in we had no electricity. The power company cut us off because the bill wasn't paid. Apparently they did the same with half the village, because their was a very long line with people who wanted to pay their bills. Because of the long line, we had to wait for two days before we had electricity again...

We have to get used again to how Bolivians do (not) arrange things, but so far we have at least 9 enthusiastic schools who want to participate in the project. Now we have to think about limiting possibilities instead of schools not coming on meetings. Like we thought when we left last year, we finally start to figure things out, started to know the right people and know what we wanted to do. We already found out last year that schools have something called "socio-productive projects", required by law, and that this year, the district has made the schools coordinate their topics, so they all include a more or less environmental/eco-tourism topic. It also turns out the municipality made eco-tourism one of the spear head topics of education. So together with the schools we decided to include their socio-productive projects in our project, and this seems to pay off. The schools are very entousiastic, they all turned up and joined in the discussion of the first meeting and the municipality offered even more money to support our project. We try to help the schools in developing educational materials and working out their plans while we try to integrate as many project goals as possible. In this way, the project will be hopefully more sustainable and schools will continue after we have gone. All the developed materials will be placed on a website and maintained by the schools (that is at least the idea).

The topics of the socio-productive projects are quite interesting; from developing a tourist trail in the municipality forest reserve to developing an ecological corridor between the school and the river. Several schools would like to have a school garden as well. Some projects do not fit in with our mission; it is hard to see how traditional costumes of different regions fit in here but maybe this school can participate during their biology classes.

This weekend we had a short visit in San Miguel and further on in Madidi rainforest at their lodge, to assess the damage of the rainy season. The river has flushed a lot of land away and there have also been a lot of landslides. One of the landslides destroyed the kitchen and dinner room of the San Miguel lodge and took part of the path away as well. During the 2 hour boat ride we saw numerous examples of landslides that have come down. Shallow parts of the river are full with trees and plants.

Sadly, there is not a lot that can be done to prevent the landslides. The trees are replanted, but this has no use. Landslides will occur again in the next few years and the replanted seedlings are way too small and do not grow a big root system in 3 years. On top of that, the reforestation office decided to plant ceders. Nice big trees with long roots when they are 100+ years old, but they will never get that far.

Because of the landslides, there is sometimes more space and poor people decide to build their house on part of an old landslide or directly under it in Rurre. The municipality does nothing to prevent this, and that is how the 10 people died in Rurre during the rainy season. During a new landslide, their houses are swept away. This made us a little sad, especially because there are some local people noticing the problems and trying to fight it, but nobody is listening and most people remain passive, do nothing and just let it happen. The people living in the dangerous areas are going to be relocated now, but we bet that in 10 years, there will be new people living in the same places.

The whole village of San Miguel flooded and several houses have been totally washed away. The school show the height of the water level, about 2 meters, while the bank is already 10 meters higher than the river. Their pride, the football field in front of the schools has become an uneven mud field with lots of puddles with water and only a little bit of grass.

But their is also a little bright side. Because so many things have been destroyed, all the people have temporary jobs in rebuilding and replanting, so they at least earn some money. This brings in a new problem: because the reforestation project pays better than rebuilding the lodge, the whole village is replanting trees. They don't seem to get that rebuilding the lodge, brings in more tourists and more money for them in the long run... A long term vision is not very common, especially among the poorer, rural people. But then again there are always a few smarter ones like the boss of the San Miguel tourism company who really tries to get that long term vision understood by the others. But there is still a long way to go.