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.