Three toilet bowl molds officially arrived this past week, which means construction time is nearing for some of the volunteers that I am helping. This next week I will be headed out to Isla Saona, a small, beautiful island located off of the south of the island. There, we will be building 2 ecological bathrooms for a school that currently has no bathroom. The volunteer and mason from the island attended the training that was held out in Santiago several months ago, but the latrine construction is somewhat complicated so I will be going out to assist them with construction.
I am now realizing the importance of having a construction manual (in addition to the health promotion manual) for volunteers. Especially for volunteers who are in an isolated area with no hardware store nearby to get last minute materials. Fortunately the time that was spent writing a construction manual over the last few months will be paying off. The manual gives the materials needed for each of the 4 days of the construction of the base and the exact tools that are needed. This will prevent us losing an entire day of construction to have to go off of the island to look for any missing item that can not be improvised last minute. Even if it was not an isolated site, this manual is a guide that makes room for error or time wasting little to none.
The work in store for us over the next week is not just construction. I will also be collecting video footage, pictures and re-taking notes on the project. This will all be used to continue the construction manual (adding in sections on how to use our toilet mold, how to build a caseta, ect.) and to double check the accuracy of the measurements in the manual. The video footage is for a video project that I will be undertaking with some of my fellow AT volunteers that will explain the entire composting latrine project.
I am working on an outline for the video that begins with the community diagnostic phase and finding that your community needs composting latrines, health promotion, construction, removing the actual compost, using the compost, ect. This will be used as a tool by volunteers doing this project in the future to give families a visual of exactly how this project works. My roommate Gabe (the AT PCVL) found a GREAT picture that represents what a compost latrine IS NOT, which is a picture of a compost latrine with no caseta with plants growing out of it that is not being used by the family. The picture will be going into the video.
The notes that I will be taking will also be useful for a facilitator's guide that I am writing about composting bathrooms projects. The facilitator's guide will be useful for volunteers that want to implement bathroom projects within their communities and will be a "how to" manual on project implementation.
Besides that, we poured a toilet with our mold today so that I could give it a test drive before taking it to Isla Saona this weekend to pour. Our plan is to pour the molds in Bayahibe and bring the actual toilets with us on the ferry to the island. I have recruited another AT volunteer working with composting toilets to assist me in this venture because as much as I hate to admit, I am still a woman (with a herniated disc on top of that) and I am not about to be lifting and grunting and mixing cement alone trying to show people how to do this stuff. :) A pair of man hands will be greatly appreciated.
Que mas..A friend of mine from the peninsula is getting a site change to the capital, so yesterday we went back out to Samana to pack up her things and did a quick stop at my old site, Villa Clara. I was happy to find my women's group slaving away at their new oven and picked up some fresh baked bread to bring home to the capital. They seem to be loving their new oven and are baking and selling more than before, so that was great news! I plan to do a trip out there possibly in January to do some more work with them on the side.
Stayed tuned, sorry to bore ya'll with all work and no play. :)
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