Saturday, June 5, 2010

well it´s a start

So finally, FINALLY the shredder has made its way to its cozy home..San Lorenzo! After hearing from the people in Quito, who built the machine, 3 weeks ago that it was done and that they would figure out the shipping details...well that is one thing you don´t trust in this country. If you want something done, you really have to bug the hell out of people and make them feel that you are pestering them to really get anything done. I honestly could of let the people in Quito linger three or four more weeks but that would of been three or four more weeks of my community not starting this project. So finally, last wednesday, the people are arthur fried (the company in quit that built the shredder) sent the machin to Ambato, where I rented a truck and had it shipped to San Lorenzo.

Maria Elena (my counterpartand host mom), a few jovenes from the community, and I had out first test run with the shredder yesterday. It took a few minutes for the baby to warm up and start (at first I thought that it would never start...¨my god, 2000 bucks out of the window¨ was my first thought) but it did and we sampled some organic waste (small leaves, branches, plants and grass) and then worked in some corn stalks as well. The thing works great and the jovenes seemed to enjoy the machine as well, which is a good thing since we will try to start an ecological group using the young men in the community as a start. This machine was built to shredd corn stalks and grind them up, which is a great thing since we will try to sell an animal feed using the corn stalk as a base to the families who have animals (which is pretty much 99.9999999% of the community).

What we will try in the next coming weeks is to give demonstrations and talks to people in San Lorenzo and all smaller communities around San Lorenzo showing exactly what the shredder can do and how it can make organic fertilizer and animal feed. This will HOPEFULLY lead to more people giving organics a shot when people plant corn in september or october.

As with everything in this country...we´ll see how it goes...