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.