As I wrote to my daughter “The outreach trip was great. Hard work, but gratifying. Not as many fleas as expected.” The trip was organized for a group from a church in Ottawa, who came to Oaxaca for a two-week mission trip. They had supplied the funds for several works and this two-day trip was one of them.
At the left is a map of the state of Oaxaca. Each color represents a distinct indigenous language group, e.g. Zapoteca. Each bubble is a dialect within that group that may be distinct enough that communication is limited or impossible.
The village is seventeen miles as the crow flies from our base, but a three plus hour drive. You go south on paved roads until where we previously had turned off to the Hierve del Aqua mineral springs. No turn this time ,but today we keep going down into the valley on paved road until time to start doubling back on dirt roads on cliff faces and over mountains and down through valleys and across streams.
I started out riding in the back of the van but began getting motion sickness. Somebody gave me a Gravol pill (Canadian nurses on board – American nurses would have given me Dramamine - same thing) and a plastic bag. I clutched to my plastic bag, but thankfully didn't need it. After a while I got to trade places with somebody in an SUV and ride the rest of the way in the front seat of that.
Breakfast had been a little rushed so I had eaten a couple of pieces of Canela (cinnamon) flavored Oaxacan chocolate before leaving on the trip. It didn't help things. Recently, since leaving Mexico, I discovered half a bar in the fridge and ate a small piece. I could barely keep it down. I asked Juanita if she was able to eat it. If not, we might as well throw it out. She ate it over the next few days.
The country is rugged without too many towns that you go through, but you often are driving through corn fields in the middle of nowhere. Most of the "fields" are close to vertical and there are stories of people falling to their deaths planting, cultivating or harvesting their corn crop.
Once we got to our destination, Santa Catarina, halfway up a mountain, we dropped off our personal gear at our hosts' house and got set up at the missionary's house. This was a house that somebody had loaned to the missionary. She had been working with the group for a couple of years and now had reached the level of acceptance in the village that she was allowed to live there and not just travel there from Oaxaca. She had recently married a Guatemalan. Shortly after we had met them he had to leave to go to Guatemala to renew his Mexican visa. It put a couple of faces to the work we were doing.
The nurses set up a drop-in clinic at the hosts' and we got to work building the ecological latrine and putting a floor in the missionary's house. People had been living in that one room adobe abode for years, but the floor was dirt and there was no outhouse (what are fields for, anyway?). Some of the crew emptied the house and raked and leveled the dirt.
Others dug a trench for the latrine foundation and then carried stones down to fill it and mixed cement to cover the stones and then mixed mortar to lay blocks on the footings.
The ecological latrine has two compartments for the solids. One compartment is used for six months or more if it takes longer than six months to fill. Then the ecological toilet is moved to sit over the other compartment which is filled while the material in the first decomposes. The toilet is designed to separate liquid and solid wastes. The liquid is piped to a seep pit which we dug and filled with large rocks and covered with mesh and then dirt.
While we were working there was an old man collecting burro and horse manure and sifting it before putting the sifted material in sacks. That evening I noticed him running one of the corner stores that open at odd hours. The next day I watched him mix the dung, plus dirt and water by walking through the pile until it was thoroughly mixed. He then took handfuls of this wet mixture and slapped into a mold in such a way as to avoid air pockets, screeded the mold and lifted it off, leaving the bricks to dry in the sun. He joined us for lunch with his pant legs and sleeves still rolled up. He had washed, but there were still high water (or whatever) marks on his limbs. I didn't ask him to pass me anything.
After an evening of fellowship and food we retired for the night. All the women slept in one room upstairs and most of the men slept in another. A couple of men slept downstairs in the area where the clinic had been held. There were fewer fleas upstairs and far fewer fleas overall than we had expected. Flea season must have been ending. I had my sleeping bag and a quilt spread on the concrete as a mattress. In addition to the firm "bed" sleeping was not aided by music and announcements from the town loudspeaker. I think they were in Zapoteca since I didn't understand much of them and I generally can follow the gist of Spanish even if not provide a precise word for word translation.
The roosters, of course, were active early as well as the town broadcast center. After breakfast we went down to the missionary's house and started work where we had left off the day before. I helped mix and spread mortar for parging inside and outside the latrine compartments. There were three local men who came by and helped mix concrete for the floor.
Mixing concrete Mexican style is to pile the ingredients (so many sacks of sand, rock and cement) in a big mound then dry mix by hand using shovels and then start adding water and wet mix it. The locals were better at it than any of us, but they were only there for an hour before they had to go off on a community roadwork project. Then Matt and Ian did most of the mixing. Matt was feeling pretty sick, but he worked like a Trojan. I helped a few times as did a few of the team from Ottawa, including one of the women, but most of the team was not up to the sustained physical effort required. Ian was talking afterward of getting a smallish electric concrete mixer that could be brought along for future projects.
We had brought Pablo and Moises along with us from base, but they mostly laid block and did parging. They helped with the house floor when the latrine was done and then poured a new floor in a wash house (an about five-foot by five-foot brick building that you stand in and pour water over yourself after you have soaped up) when the house floor was done. Somebody had laid in a supply of sand and egg and smaller sized rocks before we arrived. That wasn't enough so team members took the truck down the mountain to the river in the valley bottom and filled sacks with sand and rock. The old man and woman who owned the house also scavenged rocks from the road up the side of the mountain, but none of us Norte Americanos wanted to get involved with liberating rock from public roads.
During the day the two nurses held a couple of drop-in clinics and they and the other women went to the local school and did some skits and handed out some stuff they had brought. It was said to have been well received. The home we were staying at belonged to some people who had become Christians in recent years. Oaxaca has many communities in the mountains that speak distinct local dialects that may be understood by only a few villages and may be the primary language of most residents. Schools tend to be taught in Spanish, but life is conducted in the local dialect. Even though Spanish is the language at school is not uncommon for school to be too expensive to attend for more than a couple of years if at all.
Basically, villages are run as closed shops under the control of the local "presidente". Even state and federal officials step somewhat lightly in some areas. Missionaries cannot just come in and start doing things. They need to visit, make friends, make converts and take years before the community trusts them and values them enough to allow then to live in the village or do any works for the village. In advance of an outreach to build an ecological latrine at a school in a town in Chiapas the local missionary had to convince the local authority that they wanted to meet with her and that it was a good idea that the school should get a latrine and that the team shouldn't build latrines for the officials first or at all.
During the morning, we poured the floor for the latrine. It was poured on plywood. The plywood pieces were sized to come out through the clean out doors after the concrete cured and the temporary supports were removed. In the afternoon the team cleared the area uphill from the latrine, paved a path to the latrine with stones, and dug a seep pit and ran the hoses to it. The four walls and roof had been prefabbed back at base out of corrugated metal on a lumber frame and been brought with us in the trailer behind the van. They went up relatively quickly and the latrine was done.
A missionary from Oaxaca would come out in a week to remove the forms and the section of buckets we had formed the toilet holes with. This missionary is a civil engineer who has been working as a missionary in Mexico for the last seventeen years. He supervised us in the latrine construction and worked alongside us, working as hard as anybody. This, despite having had a kidney transplant back in the States two years ago. He is a ghastly color, eats a couple of handfuls of various hued pills a day, but doesn't seem to make any concession to his condition.
After we finished our projects as much as we could we filled the trailer with our tools and piled into the van and headed down and across the valley. The last rays of the sun for the day were just hitting the village when we got halfway up the valley. Much of our drive was in dark as we shared the sandwiches the women had made at lunchtime and the roasted pumpkin seeds one of our hostesses had handed as we got into the van.
The village is only a couple of hundred feet higher than Tlacolula's 5,300 feet but the road between them goes much higher. We had wanted to see how high the road went to get over the highest pass, and I was annoyed with myself when I realized I had packed my GPS monitor in my pack in the trailer we were towing. To my even greater annoyance I later found it had been my jacket pocket all along and we could have solved the mystery.
We arrived back at base after ten, unloaded the van and went to our separate quarters. Juanita had left a garbage bag to undress in with a note to go upstairs in the visitors' center to shower, but I hadn't noticed any fleas, so I showered in our rig. Found a couple of dead fleas in the following week but never had any flea bites on that trip or afterward. Neither did we find any other fleas. I did get a number of bites on my arms around my elbows from no-see-um's but they eventfully cleared up.
