So now that we are into the month of December, it´s officially acceptable to start talking about Christmas and Christmas related things. Despite the 90 degree plus weather, we have little flashing snowflake lights and fake pine trees in all the shop windows down here, too.
I really hate asking for (more) money from anyone, but I´m going to throw this out there anyhow, cause it´s Christmas time, and I hear that charity is like, really in right now. And our organization is broke. I hate asking for money from corporations more than anything else, though if you know of any foundations that might be interested, please let me know. Otherwise, here goes-
The deal is pretty much this: the community of Santa Barbara, where I work, has no bathrooms, no water, no access to water, no plant growth, poor sanitation and erosion prone hillsides. I am currently running a project that aims to create a sustainable ecological cycle in the community, transforming Pro Habitat´s completed eco bathroom construction project into a resource and tool in order to improve community sanitation and the local environment. The project has two primary focuses: a community wide educational campaign, and the formation of a small women led micro business. The educational campaign features house to house educational visits and monitoring for families who already built their eco bathrooms, and a sanitation, health, and bathroom cirriculum and teacher training program in the local primary school. The micro business ladies will be trained to take care of the waste products of the bathrooms, recycling them to create fertilizer and grow vegetables, and both fertilizer and produce can then be sold to the community.
plant growth! sanitation!Thus we have the ability to combat many of the community´s issues at the same time: Eco bathrooms don´t require water and therefore save the already very low-income families money on water costs. The house to house education includes assistance in rerouting other household water waste into home gardens, encouraging plant growth. The school curric will increase community knowledge and improve sanitation practices. And the micro enterprise will create fertilizer to support further plant growth in the hillsides as well as provide supplementary income to the women involved. The more people we can get excited about the bathrooms, via the school campaign and increased awareness, the greater the possibility that more families will be willing to construct them in the future, contributing the ecological stability of the region and improving sanitation levels at large.
yup, I´m really posting a picture of little kids in need. I know.The trick, of course, is that we have virtually no money to do any of this. The bathrooms are thankfully already funded and completed, but without these additional social and economic programs they will not function as a part of a sustainable cycle, and the technology risks going unused or misused. The community of Santa Barbara is providing $3,050 in in-kind support for my project (mostly in the form of donated land), Fundacion Pro Habitat is covering at least $300 of the costs, and the Foundation for Sustainable Development may or may not approve my grant request for additional funds. In order to ensure the completion and the long term functioning of this project, we need at least $1,000 more to create and print educational materials, run capacity building classes for the women, and prepare a site for the waste recycling center.
Most of you lovely family friends have already contributed money to get me here, and I seriously appreciate that, and don´t wish to ask for anything else. However, since it´s Christmas, I thought I would throw out this opportunity to donate somewhere where you know the money will be used well and you can get all the follow up information and documentation that you want. All donations are tax deductible, of course! And you you can make them all official and formal like, here. Friends, even $10 or $20 bucks would be seriously useful. That´s almost 150 bolivianos! Pretty awesome.
You can also donate via paypal by clicking here:
Anyhow, thanks for reading, and if any of you can support this work, thanks again, immensely.
Best, and hope you all have a lovely December and holiday filled season.
P.S. While this project lacks a strong political or organizing element, community to community skills transfers and capacity building are inherent to its success. Yet it is of course this basic disconnect that is key to everything that interests me about development work. However, Pro Habitat is indeed engaged with political operations in other projects, hand in hand with the communities, so you´ll just have to trust me that it´s all a part of the same process. A super interesting community action-sanitation-bathroom program has been invented and piloted in India- read about it here. These folks may actually come to Bolivia to run another pilot in the next few months, which would be amazing. Cheers!
