Lesson learned

As you may know, I've taken on trash (err, solid waste) as a project. The first step in our plan is to get all the vendors in the new market to separate their organic and inorganic waste so that we can start a municipal compost pile. The assumption is that most of the trash in the market is organic from all of the fruit and vegetable vendors. Thus, we can eliminate a large portion of waste being sent to the barranca (ditch) [which hopefully will be a sanitary landfill one day] and produce organic compost for the local crops... But we all know what happens when you ass-u-me something!

I started distributing materials about trash separation today which stirred up some conversations. I explained what I was doing to my fruit lady who stopped me cold when she said that she doesn't have organic waste. "Como?!" was my response. I was confused: the fruit lady should ONLY have organic waste. She explained -- she does have organic waste, but a woman with a pig takes it from her for her pig to eat. Hmm, okay. Does everyone do that?

I then chatted with my vegetable lady. Well, yes, she sells her organic waste for Q5 a box. Looks like we were quite wrong with that assumption we made. The waste from the market is mainly inorganic.

How did this happen? How did we completely miss this? We had analyzed it amongst ourselves in the office; I had mentioned the idea to my Peace Corps supervisor; we had talked with the trash collectors; and just by looking at the market, it had seemed obvious that the waste is mainly organic.

We didn't talk to the vendors, the people there everyday all day long. We were going to, but we wanted to have everything organized first. The plan was to teach them to sort their trash, then we would do a study of the waste produced for a week, weighing all of the organic material to see what size area we would need for the compost.

It should be frustrating that we completely overlooked this, but to me it's just funny. I'm constantly surprised here, but not always positively. This, though, was definitely a positive surprise. The people are already dealing with their trash problems, to an extent. Now we can tackle the market trash faster and move on to household waste a lot sooner. This just shows that when it becomes a necessity, people will solve their own problems and live more in harmony with the earth.

This experience is also metaphor of how international development can fail. Take the market as a small community. We went in from the outside, didn't get to know the day-to-day life, decided what project they needed, how we would do it, then told them what we were doing. Completely backwards. NGOs and other agencies need to meet with the people and get to know them, diagnose what they need together, then try to come up with solutions. Now, in my defense, the market is municipal and I am working with municipal employees on this project and we were specifically targeting the trash problem. It's not quite the same as going into a community with no local knowledge and throwing a project at them, but still a good lesson to learn.