What do you do or how
to you feel when someone you meet basically tells you that your job is
impossible to realize, or impossible to even make a dent in?
One lovely warm day
in the campo, I wandered up the neighboring grassy hill with my little host
brother to play soccer. It ended up that
he went off to pick and chew on sugar cane, so I sat on a wood bench in front of
a friend's newly constructed house, watching two cows mow down a lawn and
wondered why we don't do that in Illinois if we care so much about low-lying
grass. Then one cow pooped and my host
brother's soccer ball plopped directly into the fresh paddie. Maybe that.
The cows' owner came
back and sat down to talk. His
question: How long are you here for and
what exactly are you doing? I explained
and like many other times, he focused on trash.
He told me what all us volunteers already know - how people toss trash
on the ground even when a trash can is a step away. They do it when they're kids and they do it
when they're adults. It drives him crazy
and he's all but given up trying to get people to put trash in its place. And what was saddest was when he reminded me
of that time not long ago that I helped him pick up trash in the center of town
- he said that in all his six-something years of living here, that was the
first time anyone helped him pick up trash.
He went on and told
me how some visiting teachers from outside the country had completely changed
the way kids dealt with trash. The road
outside the school was clean, every room in the school was spotless, etc. (to
make a note the school IS pretty clean now).
Apparently a month later, when the teachers left, the school fell back to
being dirty. Same thing happened with
another volunteer 'like me.' And there
once was a recycling program in town but people just got bored, or
disinterested, unmotivated, or something...and now there's a small recycling
shack and no one recycles. The
governmental organizations that promised to take their trash out of the valley
never followed through either.
He shook his head and
said my job is impossible, or maybe doable in a hundred years.
I went home and took
a nap, feeling unmotivated myself to go out and do much that day.
Then some bizarre things happened this week:
-Went to wash the
dishes and found a skinned pig head (plus eyes) floating in the sink.
-Found cardboard in
the toilet and had to fish it out myself.
-Lightly scratched my
nose and suddenly it was gushing blood.
People found this hilarious.
-Cracked open an egg
and found blood. Host mom says that's
because it's the hen's first egg. This
is one of many reasons I prefer veganism...
-Made chocolate chip
cookies that melted into one tasty cookie blob.
Still learning how to bake without measuring cups or spoons in an oven
without a thermometer.
-There is something
like a garbage shortage because half the town is making recycled art.
