By Golly - We Pulled It Off!!

Mary, our new friend and fellow volunteer teacher here at Hacienda Merida put it best:

In the US, we're very time oriented.  Everything happens at a specified time.  People need to be on time, damn it.  It all starts with the alarm clock in the morning and snowballs from there.  Work, meetings, games, lunch dates, church, parties, etc.  To be late is to be frowned upon.  Smart phones, tablets and laptops all have clocks on them, a constant reminder that there is somewhere we need to be at a specific time.  Calendar software can be programmed to 'ding' and 'remind' and 'snooze', all geared toward getting us to the next commitment on time.  To top it off, adding insult to injury, most of us still wear watches.

  

Stressful, to say the least. 

In Central America, people are more event oriented.  It's the event that is important; what time it actually happens is irrelevant.  Supposed to meet at 8 AM?  Yeah, sure.  Add a +/- to that, almost always on the 'later' end of the scale and you'll be just fine.  Class starts at 5:30 sharp?  Haha - lose the 'sharp'.  Class will likely start at 5:45 - or so.  It's not meant as disrespectful, mind you.  It's just a different pace of life here.  Slower, more casual.  We're getting used to it.

It was 13 November, a Wednesday afternoon, and we had just finished up with the kindergarten group.  We had ordered lunch and were plunking away at iPads when Alvaro walked up and said "Oh, by the way..."  Now, we've learned that when Alvaro says this, it usually means that our commitment is about to get pushed in some way.  

"Next Monday there is a huge event in Merida.  All of the school children from here and from Balgüe are coming for a big recycling event sponsored by Fuente Pura, the bottled water company in Nicaragua.  The representatives from Fuente Pura will be staying here, too."

Okay, so big event in five days.  Got it.  What is our involvement?

"Each child needs to bring 40 empty plastic bottles to recycle, so you should take the kids out this week and collect some bottles with them."  

Umm, 40 each!?  That's a push.  In the US, we would have held a parents meeting, formed a committee and sent fliers home and started on this three months prior.  We would have had a collection bin at school where the students could bring their bottles in and a thermometer-style chart in class showing how each child was doing with their collection goal.  Notes would go home for those students who were falling behind.

Remind me - what's the drinking age here?

Here?  Nope.

After explaining that we had barely enough Spanish to keep the kids inside the school during class hours, the thought of venturing outside into the village with them on a field trip was terrifying.  We would need help.  He said he would make sure we had someone to corral kids with us.  Alvaro also assured us that notices had been sent home and the parents were aware of the goals and the event.

All the juicy details that everyone was magically aware of.

The next morning, we went to kindergarten class and expected to go pick up bottles.  But... no mention of collecting, recycling, the event or bottles.  We decided to roll with it, that there must be some organization behind it all.   Friday came and went, as well, and still no bottle collecting.  We assumed that since the event was Monday, the kids had their bottles collected and stashed at home.  

In true Nica fashion, we discovered over the weekend that the event was actually on Wednesday.  Okay, more time to get it all organized.  Monday morning we would venture out with the kids and collect, collect, collect.

Nope.

Finally, Tuesday!  Alvaro's wife, Esther, met up with us in the common area where the kids meet for breakfast each morning.  Now we were gettin' organized!  We split the kids into three groups - I took the boys; Bex! took one group of girls and Esther the other.  It was bottle collecting time!  

I took my kids to the shop where Yuri and the other workers hangout.  We scored a few there.  Then my group, the brilliant little hooligans they are, hit the HM stash - a goldmine of plastic bottles collected from the hotel operation.  These bottles were being stored to use in construction of the next building and the sidewalks at the school.  

Long story, short:  The bottles are stuffed with garbage generated on the island (candy wrappers and such), then placed in the forms and rebar where they act as filler when the concrete is poured.  They add structural stability and it gets rid of quite a bit of garbage and plastic.  Repurposing at it's best.  Watch this video to see how it's done.

After cleaning out some of the HM stash, I took my team out to the streets of Merida.  Okay, we only wandered a couple of hundred meters from the school but they were finding bottles everywhere.  In a country with no garbage removal infrastructure, people just toss stuff to the side of the road or burn it.  Some hotels, like HM, have recycling bins.  The owners of these businesses are very aware of the importance and work to educate and support the village in any efforts made to reuse, repurpose, recycle, share, sell for scrap, etc.  Visionaries with a long row to hoe.

Bex! had her group strolling along, when alluvasuddenlike they  ducked into a house.  She assumed that one of her kids knew someone who lived here.  She waited.  Waited.  Waited.  Hmmmm...  Finally, she stuck her head in the door and asked the person sitting in the living room if she could come in to find her girls.  He motioned toward the back of the house.  She went in, then came to the kitchen where she found an elderly lady cooking.  The lady smiled and pointed out the back door.  Haha!  Okaaaay.  She went through the kitchen and got to the back, where she found her girls with Ruth, the 'legit' kindergarten teacher.  This was her house!  And she had a fair number of bottles, so it was a score for her team.

I had my guys out on the road.  I heard familiar voices through the brush so peeked through to see a skirt I knew well.  It was my wife and her troupe, just on the other side of the fence and bushes.  My team saw the girls collecting like mad, so they crawled through the barb wire fence and grabbed what they could.  Being somewhat larger than my five year old charges, I opted to NOT crawl through the fence.  

Feeling accomplished and having all of our kids intact, we headed back to school.  We got the kids together and, one at a time, dumped their treasures out to count them back into the bag.  We used the HM stash to top them all off to 40 bottles each, tied the bags, put their names on their bag and stacked 'em up for the event the next day.  It was all pretty easy, actually.  What seemed totally unorganized to us went off without a hitch.

By golly - we pulled it off!

While we were relaxing in the afternoon, we saw a group of people wearing Fuente Pura polo shirts.  The reps had arrived for the big event.  A short time later a truck pulled up and started unloading boxes.  These were the school supplies being given to the cute little recyclers the next day.  Awesome!  In exchange for their 40 bottles, each child would receive:  6 notebooks, 6 pencils, an eraser, a sharpener, a box of colored pencils and plastic folder to hold it all.

We were eating dinner with the Teasdale's, an amazing family from Montana.  They are traveling through Central America with their boys, on an extended exploration and education adventure.  More on them another time.  The Fuente Pura folks and the staff at HM had set up several long tables, end to end, and then staged the boxes of school supplies on one end.  We saw us a good ol' fashioned assembly line a'comin'.  Alvaro stopped by our table and asked if we could give an hour tonight helping assemble the kits.  Sure thing.  

The assembly line looked like it was off to a reasonable start but there weren't enough horses, obviously.  We finished up dinner, then walked over to assess where we would be of best use.  We had a good crew - me and Bex!; Jackie and Aaron with their boys Silas and Jonah (the Teasdale's).  Although the people on the line were filling kits, there was no real method or pattern to what was being done.  With over 1,000 of these to finish for the event tomorrow, things would have to change.  We also found out that, while kit building had started, not all the supplies were yet here.  We were still missing the erasers and some of the notebooks.

I have over 25 years experience in fast-paced supply chain operations and Bex! has quite a bit, as well.  We immediately began to rearrange people and supplies to maximize efficiency and flow.  We got one end set up to start the kits, then slide them down to the next stage where the next component was added and so on.  We piled them up when they had everything we could put in them.  Fortunately for everyone, the missing school supplies showed up!  We got the new items staged and ready for distribution - and off we went!

Notebook station -> Eraser station -> Closure station.  Booyah!

We slid kits down the line, each receiving notebooks and an eraser.  Then they were tied shut with one of those 'string and button' closures.  As the completed kits hit the end of the table, they were stacked into whatever boxes we had available.  The only boxes that really worked for this were the ones the notebooks came in.  But there weren't enough of those and we weren't getting them emptied fast enough.  So completed kits started piling up on the end and the avalanche started working its way back upstream, hampering our assembly line!

Does this guy have an EPIRB for when the avalanche comes?

We needed a place to store the kits until we could figure out a way to box them up.  We couldn't leave them out all night and we needed to keep them dry, in case of rain.  Bex! came up with a simply brilliant idea.  We started stacking the kits in one of the shower stalls!!  HM has some dorm rooms and they share a courtyard area with bathrooms and showers.  As luck would have it, the shower stalls were right at the end of our assembly line.  It worked perfectly!

I hope no one turns the water on.

Once the end of our line was unplugged, we started cruising.  Bex! was directing traffic and acting as floater, filling in if an area got backed up or moving people to keep things running smoothly.  We spent a good four hours building kits and finally finished up around 11 PM.  Again, it's hard to stop my mind from evaluating this task and thinking about how we would have done it back home.  I've been part of many 'fire drills' in my time, mostly at my old brewery job.  This school supply rehandle was on par with the worst of those.  But everyone pulled together, even though it all seemingly happened very last minute and...

By golly - we pulled it off!

Ceci n'est pas une douche.

We met up with the kiddies the next morning, made our way over to the school where we had stashed their bags o' bottles and started up the road to Merida's school.  Most of our kindergarteners had a parent in tow, so we got to meet them.  We were getting a sense of just how big this event was for the community.  Off in the distance, we could here the high school corps performing.  We saw other children and parents walking toward the school, all hauling their bottles along.

Caminamos!

When we got up to the top of the hill where the road levels out, we could see far enough toward the school to get a true sense of the scale - this was huge!  There were thousands of people lining up.  We could see the drummers banging out their coordinated rhythms; they were joined by cheerleaders/dance teams performing routines on the rocky road.  We got up into the mix and could see recycling trucks lined up down the road.  These would be used to haul all the plastic away.  Figure 1,000 kids at 40 bottles each = over 40,000 plastic 1, 2, 3 liter bottles would be turned in!!!  

They have drum corps here.  We're talking to YOU, Ian!

And cheerleaders!  Woohoo!

Where did all these kids come from?

The kids from the village schools in Merida and Balgüe were all lined up with their teachers; some with parents, too.  All were excited to get their new supplies.  This event was for all grade levels, too - young kids all the way up to the high schoolers.  To say we were a little shocked and speechless at the size of this event in an understatement.  This was a big deal for the two villages.  

I wonder what's in those bags...

Our kindergardeners are too small to be seen behind this sign.

Bex! wandered about, getting pictures of the festivities while I hung with the class.  This gave me ample opportunity to charm the moms with my limited Spanish.  It was hot and sunny, so we made use of any shade we encountered as we waited for the event to start.  After short wait, the lines of kids started slowly marching up the road toward the entrance to the school.  We got to the schoolyard and saw more trucks and pop-up tents and the basketball court decorated with flowers.  They had a couple of tables set up where the Fuente Pura reps and the school administrators would make speeches.  Speakers and a couple of microphones - these was a legit event!  Music played and the drummers drummed.  Kids followed teachers to find space to sit, everyone vying for any shade that could be found.  At least there was some entertainment during some of the waiting - check out the video below.

Long speeches are still boring, even in Spanish

Boom-ditty-boom-ditty-boom!

After some speeches and awards, there were some certificates handed out to the people who helped to make the event happen.  Our very own Alvaro was given two awards for his commitment to making Ometepe a cleaner space and for hosting the sponsors at Hacienda Merida.  He had disappeared so his wife accepted the awards and had her picture taken with the big shots.  After the announcements, there were several indigenous dances performed to traditional Nicaraguan music.  Very beautiful costumes!  We felt a bit sorry for the dancers because it was pretty damn hot and no clouds meant straight sun.

Finally, it was the moment everyone was waiting for - time to distribute school supplies!!  Fortunately, they started with the youngest classes, so the K's were up first!  We corralled our very excited kids toward one of the many distribution tables.  They were ALL SMILES!  As they stepped up to the table, they were greeted by volunteers who asked for their bottles.  The kids handed them over and received their new school supplies!!  Happy, happy, happy!  Immediately, they made their way to the side and opened their kits to see what they had.  Pencils!  Notebooks!  Colored pencils!  Eraser and sharpener!  

All ready for next year!!

Pencils and notebooks to practice my alphabet - or to draw dragons!

Just after our class made it through the line, we heard a commotion in the crowd.  We looked up to see Alvaro leading Princess Luna around.  On her back was strapped a whole load of empty plastic bottles and on the back was the a sign that said "No bota la basura"
A lot of people were snapping pics of him and HM's horse as he worked the crowd.  He is a showman and is very passionate about what he is doing.  He gives a lot back to the community here and is working to make the entire island a better place.  Good man, Alvaro!!

The event went much smoother than I expected.  Organized and coordinated.  We had been worried we would lose kids in the crowd or that we'd be there all day while the lines moved slowly.  Truthfully, we didn't really know what to expect.  This is normal.  Of the two categories of 'time' and 'event' orientation, this event proved once again that Nicaraguans are of the latter group.  According to the fliers, the event was to start at 8 AM.  

We didn't arrive until well after 9 - but neither did anyone else.  Is time important?  No.  Is the event the thing?  Yes, indeed!  Smooth and easy.

By golly - we pulled it off!

After watching all the beaming children showing off their new school supplies to their families, we cut out to head back home.  The kids were with their parents so our chaperoning duties were complete.  We walked to a pulperia and got a nice cold Coca-Cola.

Of course, we made sure to recycle the bottles when we finished.

So good!  So cold!