What am I Doing

I imagine that for the past ohhh…10 months…many of you have been asking yourself the question “what exactly IS Austin doing out there?” and I would be lying if I said I have not asked myself that same question on an at LEAST weekly basis (sometimes daily). Peace Corps is a very unique experience and part of its uniqueness is the ability and necessity to dictate your own schedule. You kind of get dropped into a community with some ideas of things you COULD do but nothing that you really HAVE to do, so you try and figure out what the community wants, what services you can provide, and where these two intersect on the Venn Diagram of life.

My last blog, What I’m Working With, detailed the monstrosity that is my aqueduct, the problems that need to be fixed with it, and the problems with fixing those problems. In light of this some of you may be REALLY wondering what I am doing with my time here, and I too had my doubts for a bit. There are low’s all throughout Peace Corps dealing with everything from missing home, to integration in your community, to the idea of leaving. This particular low I was having dealt with the “what am I going to do to make an impact here?” question. I knew the aqueduct was difficult in its scale, and my second trip to the toma got delayed four times before we actually went (some of these delays nobody told me about until I had been waiting for people to show up for an hour and then somebody woke up, stepped outside, and said “O…I guess nobody told you?”). This set me back a little more in what I felt like I could get done with the aqueduct and decided I should look into other projects perhaps as my primary sources of work since this aqueduct seems like it will be trouble, both with the aqueduct work and the coordination with the aqueduct’s directive. That brings us to the million dollar question of what ideas do I have.

My first idea is not exactly exciting, but the community has asked for it so I will try it out, and that is English courses. Now every Thursday evening I give an hour long English course covering basic conversational English. My first course went well enough. Participation is a little difficult to encourage and people are very apprehensive of speaking it out loud just because they are quite shy about sounding wrong. Hopefully the participation can increase and people will shed their timidity to talk more, but we will see!

Another idea, and one that hold much more promise, is to build small scale incinerators. This basically involves having a metal 55-gallon drum with both ends opened rest on a rebar grate over some blocks. You make a small fire below the drum and grate to start the eventual inferno and then throw all your trash into the barrel and put a top on it. The top block a lot of the ash from escaping and forces it to burn more completely, holes in the side of the drum allow for oxygen intake and some smoke to escape, and more oxygen is pulled through the bottom of the grate to increase to intensity of the burn. The entire incinerator is fairly cheap, being built for about $20 and they can be shared between a few houses. This would be a more efficient way of burning our trash (not the IDEAL solution but definitely better than what we have currently). I have decided this would be a nice way to keep me busy. It would be a way to help the trash problem around town, which people have expressed their disapproval of, and have a physical project that I can say was accomplished during my service here in Panama. I have built a pilot incinerator for myself and it seems to work nicely. I have also started the discussion of it with community members to see if we can’t really ignite some interest in this thing (sorry, had to go for the pun). I have pretty good hopes about this project since it is something that is driven on a person-by-person basis rather than an entire community effort and can be accomplished with little cash, two things that make other large scale projects a great difficulty. As with the aqueduct and other little projects I will hopefully be able keep the blog-o-sphere up to date with the progress of the project and any new developments. Thanks for tuning in again and check back for more later!