Reduce, Reuse.... ahh just recycle it already!

Hola!

So first off, sorry it's taken so long to actually update this thing. It's been a crazy couple of weeks--homestay weekend, a camping trip, the whale festival, a couple of day trips, and a bunch of projects and presentations to work on. Then midterms. All good things (well... I guess the midterms were good as midterms go...), but definitely not conducive to updating blogs regularly. It feels like there's so much going on that it's hard to choose what to write about in here. I know I won't be able to convey every exciting, interesting, fun, or otherwise notable thing I do here, and prioritizing is tough. It's all new, all momentus, and I want to share all of it with you. I was going to talk about my directed research project, but I just published a column about whales and turtles in the Colby Echo (the weekly student newspaper. The article is also posted here as my last entry). I know you all have many things to do in life other than read my blog, so I try to keep these entries short. Which I guess I just failed at by rambling on about topic selection for a paragraph. Oops.

Saturday afternoons find 2-4 SFS students hanging out in a dilapidated, roofless building on the outskirts of Puerto San Carlos, waiting.  While I would love to delve into a sketchy story that explains what we're doing there, no such luck. From 4-6 every Saturday afternoon, the Recycling Center of Puerto San Carlos is open.  This center was started last fall by Brady, the Student Affairs Manager at SFS, as a way to begin dealing with the problem of trash in Puerto San Carlos. (See my photo album/will be a photoessay as soon as I have time to edit it:http://picasaweb.google.com/Emma.RachelKanji/DownInTheMexicanDumpS#) The center buys plastic of all kinds, aluminum, and cardboard, and will take glass as well, but won't pay for it. Brady pays the same rate that the recycling truck from La Paz will pay her when it comes to pick up everything, once we have enough collected. The financial incentive to recycle is small, only about 10 pesos per kilogram (about 35 cents per pound), but works well. There are some people who come every week to recycle, bringing plastics and cardboards in huge quanities, collected from businesses and other people around town. Others seem to see it as a way to get rid of their trash that happens to be plastic/aluminum/cardboard and get some money for it.

On one memorable occassion, we noticed a car driving towards us with what looked like a bumper on its roof. We thought it was strange, but not entirely out of the ordinary in this town where it's a shock that some of the cars drive at all. As the car got closer, we realized it was coming for us. A family with a few small girls piled out of the car (nobody wears seatbelts and I doubt any of the cars would pass a US inspection), and opened the trunk. It was an old station wagon, with all of the seats folded down to fit in the tangle of black plastic and assorted junk inside. As we mobilized towards the open back of the station wagon (which was propped up with an old pipe stored in the trunk for that purpose,) we were able to make out some of the shapes inside. Cupholders, vent covers, a glove compartment, bits of dashboard, and the rest of what had clearly been a car started coming out. As we pulled things out to weigh them, it became clear that the entire interior of a car had been shoved into the back of this one and dragged to the recycling center. Some things were clearly not plastic (though we couldn't identify what they were) others we gave the benefit of the doubt, but none of it would have been recycleable in The States.  As we darted around, unpacking the greasy mess of trunk, the family milled around watching, clearly amused. Once in a while, they would lend a hand with a particularly bulky piece of siding, but mostly the little girls played in the tall grass of the empty lot next door, and the parents leaned against the station wagon, watching. Old toys, bottles and cans, and a pile of cardboard rounded out the contents of the trunk, and we weighed it all. 

[This is all I wrote, but I figured I'd publish it. Not that anyone's still reading this...]