Trash Campaign and a Fun Weekend:

I know I mentioned in the previous post that we are doing community contacts, where we go out and do work in the community. Ginger, Kevin and I decided to plan a “Campaña de Limpieza” (clean-up campaign) because there is no trash system outside of large pueblos here in El Salvador so people just throw their trash EVERYWHERE!
There are layers upon layers of trash in people’s yards, on the sides of the roads – it’s horrible. And what’s worse is that a trash system was proposed for our community by the local mayor’s office, but our community turned it down because they didn’t want to spend the whole $1-2/month to have a trash truck come weekly to pick-up trash. So instead people continue to throw trash on the ground, burn trash (even plastics and toxic stuff), or bury it.
So we invited the school kids and other community members and with the help of the President of the ADESCO we were able to get the trash truck from the pueblo come out to help us clean up and take all the trash away.
It was awesome. We started off with a short charla about the different types of trash, how you can take care of trash and why it’s important to treat trash and then we cleaned up the main streets of the community. We had so much trash. I started raking this hill and it was just layers after layers of trash buried in this hill – I never was able to get it all out.
We had a pretty good turn out, the president of the ADESCO was excited, and so was the head of the trash system, who came in from the pueblo, so we had some good support. However, mainly it was just children, whereas we would have liked to have more adults there to reinforce how great of an idea it is to hire the trash pick-up.

Although it all turned out well, we had a scare. The thing is the ADESCO and mayor are of opposite of parties of the Health Promoter in out community so there are huge amounts of tension there. So when we spoke with Oscar to arrange the trash pick-up we mentioned that the Health Promoter was invited. Later tha day I got a call from the President of the ADESCO asking me why the Health Promoter was invited, that he didn’t want to work on the campaign if the Promoter was involved and all this crazy stuff. Later I got a call from Oscar saying the mayor’s office disagreed with the collaboration of the Health Promoter and that if he was going to be involved the trash truck couldn’t come. Man I was freaking out, I mean what the heck? Why can’t we all just get along? Obviously things worked out but it was our first real challenge as volunteers, a good preparation of what to expect in our sites.
This weekend I went to San Salvador to visit my friend Patrick, from Cincinnati, who is here studying at the UCA, the Jesuit University, and working with a program called the Solidarity House. He lives in student housing close to the university, which is in a really nice part of town. We had dinner at a tasty Italian café, that was real Italian – the people are from Italy. Then we went to a music festival at the University. It was awesome. There were artists from all over Latin America – a ranchera band from Mexico, a Chilean, and these two ska, reggae-ish bands that were awesome. There were food, jewelry, t-shirt and book booths. It was a really fun time and kind of a step back into the normalcy of city life. In the richer neighborhoods, or even on a university campus, it’s really easy to feel like you’re back in the states. Sunday Patrick made pancakes – so yummy – and then we went to see Ghostrider which was horribly fabulous. It was nice to spend some time in the city and in good company, with an old friend.