Success!

My bottle school project is finally finished. After three months of construction and almost 6 months of collaboration and planning, we now have a beautiful two-room schoolhouse. Hooray!



Of course, this project definitely didn’t come without some roadbumps. First of all, it’s obvious that the school is now turquoise. Here’s what it looked like a week ago:


At the last minute we decided that the color should change, partly because some of the stucco work was kind of sloppy and had to be reapplied . Ideas started flying around, and next thing you know the mayor plunked down Q700 (approx. $90) for three buckets of paint and the community slapped on a fresh coat. Unfortunately, given the stark difference between light blue and dark red, 15 gallons wasn’t enough paint and now the back side of the school looks like this:


It’s not clear why the mayor didn’t just buy more paint – there were, ahem, some obstinate conversations last Thursday that resulted in certain people just sort of throwing up their hands and saying “this isn’t my problem anymore.” Kind of disappointing, but it’s sorta fortunate that the blue/red combo doesn’t actually look too bad.

Meanwhile, the welders were throwing me for a loop. This is Rolando, holding one of those special, extra-fluffy breeds of chicken:


Rolando, who actually seems like a pretty nice guy, got a bit behind schedule. Having promised that he would have the entire project completed by the 15th of August, I figured that we’d have 6 days of leeway, just in case anything came up. Boy did they cut it close – at 11:30 pm, the night before the inauguration, my community counterpart Don Miguel called and told me – “Justin, you can sleep soundly because the welders just finished installing the doors and windows.” Of course they had to fill in the big holes they drilled and then let the concrete set overnight, so we were putting a final bit of cover-up on the next morning. I literally had to warn the visiting donors, Dave and Cheryl Watson, to beware of wet paint when the inauguration began.

But who cares? It’s all over now! The work is done and there are just good stories to tell :)

On Saturday, (and skip this part if you’re squeamish) we butchered a cow in preparation:


It was two years old, cost Q3000 (about $370) and weighed about 600 pounds. They did the whole jazz right in the middle of the field, and I thought it was funny because there were NO cows anywhere nearby, like, time to make yourselves scarce lol

Here’s the head butcher distributing the cuts of meat to the amas de casa (house mothers) – note the cat waiting patiently in the background :)


Of course, we had to skewer up a little barbeque right then and there, which was probably the freshest beef I’ve ever eaten (it was pretty tasty)


At one point the local kids wanted to take me on an adventure, so we went to a nearby waterfall (you can see it off in the distance):



It’s so beautiful around here.

Sunday morning I headed back down to the community at 9 am and the ladies had been cooking for hours – it’d be stewed beef for the inauguration.


And then, everyone started to gather, all dandied up in their nicest clothes:


I even wore a suit:


There were lots of important people – from left to right:

Zach Balle (co-founder of Hug It Forward)
Cheryl and Dave Watson (visiting funders)
Juan Manuel (the new Hug It Forward coordinator in Guatemala)
Don Armando (one of the town councilmen)
Miriam Lopez Ochoa (the mayor)
Carlos Julajuj and Doris Guzman (my direct boss and his project specialist)
(I’m not sure who the guy in the orange cap is lol)
Jose Caceres (Program Director for World Vision in my area)


There was dancing:


There was a ceremonial ribbon cutting:


Formal awards:


More little kids in costume:


Lots of speeches (can you tell I’m zoning out?)


And this girl sang, no lie, 8 of those wailing Mexican rancheras about drinking and lost love and we sat there as patiently as we could :)


All told, it was a fantastic day! Thanks to everyone out there for all your support!

Signing a contract

Awesome news – my Bottle School project is set to break ground on May 16th!

On Thursday night, Hug It Forward director Chris Barry came to my project site and we signed a contract, along with community representatives and the mayor. I’m really excited!


Specifically, this meeting dealt with the accountability of all involved parties – from left to right in this photo:

The Community - Don Miguel is a prominent leader in the village
Hug It Forward - that’s NGO Director Chris Barry
Peace Corps - I’m the project coordinator
The Municipality - that’s Doña Miriam, our mayor
(Our newly named)Project Foreman– Frainer

Everyone’s contributions thus far were spelled out and all upcoming responsibilities noted with regards to the construction phase of the next 2-3 months.


What went especially well is that the community got a strong voice in deciding how to manage the project, even though they aren’t providing any of the funding. My hope is that community project direction will result in prouder work and a better final result.


Specifically, I was very happy that the Municipality allowed the community to use local men as their labor source. Originally, our mayor had agreed to pay the wages of two assistant masons for the project, but instead of assigning some of her existing employees to the job, she let the community pick its own workers. Her decision surprised me a bit, seeing that there are plenty of peopleat the Muni who receive a salary but do very little actual work(and you wonder why we have budget “problems” :) ). The bottom line is that I applaud her choice and I think we’ll avoid a whole host of problems as a result.

Here are some labor details you might find interesting:

Project foreman (mason, experienced in concrete building and construction)

- funded by Hug It Forward on a 6,400 quetzal contract of approx. 2 months of work, paid out in 4 biweekly checks, averaging out at around Q125.00 or $17 US daily

Assistant masons

- funded by the Municipality at 5,000 quetzales apiece for the same timeframe, averaging around Q100.00 or $13 US daily)

note: Unskilled labor is provided by the community.

Basically, we’re ready to go. After the massive bottle collection from a couple weeks back, we now have more than 4000 filled bottles (eco-ladrillos), with probably another 4000 partially filled– that’s more than enough to begin construction. All that remains is for the community to level the project site, which, given that they’ll probably do it by hand and the school will measure roughly 42’ by 21’, they’ll need at least a couple weeks. On the far end of the soccer field in this picture is where the school will be built.


In the meantime we’ll be making the funding arrangements…..


To everyone reading this - thanks for your support! Please let me know if you have any questions, or feel free to check out some of my earlier posts here, here, here and here.

News coverage of Bottle School projects

Here's a link to a story featured on NPR titled "Trash to Treasure" which discusses a Bottle School project similiar to the one I'm putting together - Laura Kutner, the volunteer featured in this story, is a recently returned Peace Corps volunteer....

Identifying a community

I wrote about some progress with my Bottle School project in a recent email, but it seems worth repeating here for posterity and for everybody else that didn’t get cc’d (I also wrote in Spanglish, which was probably confusing)

Check out this blog post for background information – a basic idea of school construction, design, etc.

Now – the official first step of a Bottle School project to identify a community with whom you’ll work. Here’s a picture of the main road in the village where I hope to build a school made out of 6,500 plastic soda bottles (so cool!)


There’s no school here, just a couple of areas where de facto classes are held for the 52 students of elementary school age. On the right you can see a structure wrapped with blue tarp; it looks like this from the front:


The floor is made of dirt, and a few stray dogs can usually be found lying around trying to stay cool – the midday sunshine here can be punishing. There’s another area where classes are held, which can be seen faintly on the left side of the first photograph – it’s actually the verandah of someone’s house:


The need for a school in this community is obvious, but there are plenty of Guatemalan villages that need schools, unfortunately. As a project coordinator, therefore, the question is to decide with whom you wish to work, which is important because a Bottle School project represents a partnership with the community in question – they’re the ones responsible for collecting the bottles. Furthermore, each two-room Bottle School (approx. 7 x 14 meters in size) requires that all 6,500 20 oz plastic bottles be stuffed absolutely full with inorganic trash (candy wrappers, styrofoam, etc.) Sound time-consuming? I’d say so – collecting the bottles represents a huge task, but filling just one takes like 10 minutes. Here’s a very brief, accidentally-shot video of me struggling to cram a plastic bag into a soda bottle with a piece of rebar:



Ha ha, very funny. Anyway, so the sheer amount of work requires that you partner with a motivated and dedicated group of people who won’t waste your time. What’s more, the community also has to provide all unskilled labor in the school’s construction. Hug It Forward, the NGO with whom I’m hoping to partner, agrees to provide only for skilled labor and building materials (obviously not including the bottles…)

Basically, the Bottle School project isn’t meant to be manna from heaven, a huge influx of cash appearing from United States that precludes the residents of some lucky community from lifting a finger – it’s meant to be a collaborative effort. The Bottle School project insists that a community to get involved with its own development, which is arguably just as important as building a school for needy students or cleaning up the environment.

At this point I haven’t run into any roadblocks or detours yet, so I’m still feeling pretty optimistic about the whole project. We’ll see where I’m at in about 4 months :)

Bottle Schools

I started a pretty big project today; if all goes well, at some point in the course of my remaining 21 months in the Peace Corps, I hope to successfully organize the building of a school made from plastic bottles.

If that sounds crazy in English, be assured that it makes even less sense when I try to explain it in Spanish.

Here’s a completed example of what I’m aspiring to:


Sorry I had to blur out the name (PC blog rules) – anyway, can you make out the little black box next to the doorway? It’s directly to the left of that beige post…..this is a close up:


Plastic bottles filled with inorganic trash make up the walls of this building. Surrounded by opposing layers of chicken wire, then covered and smoothed over with a few layers of concrete; voila! you can’t tell it’s just garbage. Meanwhile, the concrete beams and columns you can see outlined in the wall are what hold up the roof and make everything structurally solid.:


Here are a few web resources. This is Hug It Forward, the NGO with whom I hope to partner. Their on-the-ground operations here in Guatemala are managed by an ex-Peace Corps volunteer – the deal, as I understand it, is if the community contributes the mano de obra (physical labor) Hug It Forward will provide most (or all) of the $$ for materials.

Hug It Forward also has a number of videos on YouTube; this one might seem sort of silly, but you get the idea...

I feel like I’ve got Bottle School coming out my ears these days – tons of volunteers are excited about starting their own projects, and here’s a link to an article in a recent Peace Corps newsletter:

Heck, today they even put Bottle School stuff in the local sensationalist rag-of-a-newspaper, El Diario (January 25th 2011, page 13)

It’s pretty exciting stuff…..