I do a lot of that here in the DR. I scrambled around with preparations for a charla (chat) about gardening and compost today, running over to the next community to borrow a thermos so I could have coffee at my meeting and painstakingly coloring visuals with my new markers (thanks to those who heard my cry and responded!). Small tasks like that take infinitely longer here, not to mention days of planning. Getting coffee and cups for this small outdoor meeting was nearly more stressful than planning the material itself! It worked out in the end, as things somehow do here, but not exactly as I had planned. The man I had asked to come speak arrived on time, gracias a dios, but he forgot the tape he was supposed to bring to put up our visuals. Luckily I'm the super-over-prepared-and-organized-Americana and had brought my own. We waited around for nearly an hour until about 8 people had shown up, then got the show on the road. About 20 minutes later, as he was concluding his talk, the bulk of the meeting showed up. I don't know how they do that, all show up equally late, but it's like there's some sort of unspoken agreement about how late you can be to different events, and I apparently haven't cracked the code. Anyway, we ended up going through the whole thing again, and those who had been there since we started surprisingly stayed for the 2nd go round. All the schlepping around I did to make sure there was coffee at the meeting paid off, because they seemed to enjoy it and it gave us a nice little break in between charlas. Running in between towns during the heat of the day, making flyers and visuals tediously by hand, and hunting down a coffee thermos like a seasoned hound-dog all for one informal little meeting about gardening! Never again will I take for granted the ease with which all of these things could be done in my native country. Sometimes it's rewarding to work so hard to make an event like this happen - but other times it's just downright frustrating!
We also had scheduled a trash clean-up with Brigada Verde for 5:00, and head spinning from the gardening charla, I had decided I wouldn't be overly disappointed if my kids didn't show-up. This frame of mind of course resulted in a turn-out of the youngest, rowdiest, most eager-to-pick-up-trash bunch that I could have mustered if I hand picked them. So off we went! Before long, we were much more spread out along the road than I wanted, trash bags busting here and there, but over all they did an enthusiastic job of collecting as much trash as we could. This didn't even put a dent in the amount that exists in the community, but that's not exactly the number one point. I want Brigada Verde to set an example for the rest of the community, every single person of which has it completely ingrained into their mind that throwing trash in the street is completely normal and acceptable. It's going to be a hard habit to break, especially until we get some trash bins up in here! But hopefully those that saw us working today to clean-up the roads will think twice next time before they throw their trash on the ground. They'll probably still do it, but at least they'll think twice.
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