Work, Work, Work...all we do is Work!

The above picture is the guys "working"...actually, they are taking their lunch break in one of the many places they've stopped over the years.

Looking over the last several blog posts, someone might be tempted to think that all we do is party around here! So in order to clarify, I’ve decided to talk about some of the work that we (well, mostly Steve) has been doing around here. My work at the office is pretty drab...in fact, I think my work at home is a lot more exciting, so I'll just keep my office work to myself :)

These last few weeks, Steve worked on putting together a botiquin (veterinary supply box) for each of the communities. This included researching common diseases and their medicines for both the rabbits and goats, buying and testing out a tattooing system, visiting a few veterinarians here in the city for some suggestions, buying all the medicines and vitamins and boxes to put them in and then finally distributing them after recommending to the farmers that they organize themselves in how they are going to use the boxes. It is meant to be a sustainable box, meaning that every time somebody buys a vaccine or vitamin, payment is received and then used to buy more of the same.

We shall see how it goes. One of the issues that we have struggled in learning to deal with here involves the management of money, or shall we say, the lack thereof? The majority of people have the mindset of, We’re eating and drinking today, for tomorrow we die. And if we don’t die tomorrow, then we borrow on credit whatever we need because we might just die the next day. And so on. As you can see, there is no consideration given to savings or future planning. This has been tricky in several areas of Steve’s project and we still struggle with knowing how to handle this wisely.

Taking water samples from sources in the communities. All of the water sources came back positive for fecal contamination.


Steve has also spent several days out in the campo visiting families, looking over their animals and talking with them about any issues that may have come up. Getting out to the campo can be an adventure in itself. This past Friday, the mud was so deep, he had to jump off and literally walk it up through the muddy trail in order to reach the farthest community. He enjoyed himself, but was pretty sore the next day.

Visiting a house in the campo. You can see the one wall is in the process of construction. Mud and cane are used.

We’ve also done some brainstorming sessions on how to better use Abby’s time wisely (Abby is the short-termer here with us). She is finding out that anything that you try to do in the campo invariably takes twice as long as it does in the states, or even here in the city. She has a lot of interesting and wild stores about life in the campo, you can check her blog at right.