Camino Seguro

Last night I went to the Monoloco for a fundraiser for Camino Seguro. It was a lot of fun, I got to meet up with Josh Lozoff, for those of you who don't know, Josh is an amazing magician who actually went to Carolina Friends School when he was young. I also met up with Arnie, the father of Leah, a CFS graduate who has spent lots of time with Camino Seguro. Arnie is on the board of directors. Barbra, the president of camino seguro, was happy to hear that I made it and had come because of there presentation at CFS.

Today I had my orientation for Camino Seguro and I am going to try to remember all the stuff I learned today. I had a very good tour of the basurero, garbage dump, and the different projects of Camino Seguro. I went to the Camino Seguro office at 8 in the morning with my housemate, Daniel, where we met others who were going on the tour. It was about a 45 minute bus ride from Antigua to Guate. First we went to the Basurero and Freddy, our guide, told us about some of the history of Guatemala and the dump. It was striking, I don't think it would have been possible for me to have had an idea of how big the dump was. It was in a huge ravine, and we looked down on it, and everything around it was dead because of the terrible methane gas produced by the dump. Freddy told us about how the people would collect anything and things like a huge stack of cardboard were worth maybe 4 or 5 quetzales, about 40 cents. The people who worked in the dump would maybe be able to make a dollar a day. Freddy told us about the terrible corruption and the municipality as well. Just to work in the dump the people need to buy ID's from the municipality, gov't, for 40 Quetzales. And then the municipality does stuff they say to help the workers but it is terrible. They created a day care except it costs around 10 or 15 Quetzales for every person. And there is a clinic, except it costs 5 to 10 Quetzales per pacient, and when your working for around 10 quetzales per day its crazy. The municipality also has "donated" money for the kids for school but it comes out to less then 10 Quetzales per kid, which is no where near enough. Freddy said that with supplies and the stupid required uniform it costs over 500 Quetzales for a child to go to school. The tour was a real eye opener. After the dump we visited the Guarderia, nursery, where kids from 1 to 4 years of age go. It was a very nice facility and it was impresive what they did. With donations they are able to focus on a healthy diet and for the first time in the 9 years of the programs existence every kid in the school passed the nutrition test. Meaning none of the children were malnurished. Then we went to the womans project which was impresive. This was a project for the mothers in camnio seguro because if the mothers are sick and not doing well then there children are going to as well. The women were starting to make jewlery out of recycled materials from the dump. It was very pretty, and it was cool because the women were starting to try to form a buisness out of it. Then we went to the escuela, this was the main building in Guate and is where the main school is. It was very pretty. Freddy told us about how the University of Washington comes down each year with of group of architecture students and builds something new. This year the finished a very nice garden in the central courtyard. We watched a movie about Camino Seguro which was very powerful. After all of this we returned to Antigua where we met Yaelle, the volunteer coordinator. She took us around Antigua and talked with us. Through talking with her I decided to take another week of Spanish lessons at La Union because they are very helpful and as Yaelle was saying, to get the most out of the experience the better your spanish the better it will be. I also bought a cell phone today in el mercado. It was a long day and it was very tiring so I have been sleeping most of the afternoon. And later tonight I am going to the Cafe Sky with daniel which is a place with a terrace on the 3rd story where you are supposed to be able to see Volcan Fuego errupting at night.