18 July 2015
This Tuesday we finally got to meet Gloria, the Sumpango cooperativa’s president. We learned that the cooperativa has had a few issues with communication and transparency in the past. They haven’t had a meeting as a group in three months, but they’ve planned one for Saturday during which they will discuss the issues they’ve had. Gloria promised us a detailed summary of the meeting on Monday. Hopefully we’ll be able to help them work on communication plan!
Later that day, we visited another cooperativa in San Bartolo. They have a great system in place for their vermicompost business. They raise rabbits and use their excrement to feed the worms. There are six women who work at the cooperative and each woman goes once a week and they take turns going on Sunday’s so the rabbits get fed everyday. The scraps the rabbits don’t eat are also fed to the worms so there is no waste at all. They have customers who regularly buy their fertilizer and they also sell the rabbits too. We were delighted to see that the empowerment workshop last years project team did with them is still on their blackboard and they loved it so much that they don’t want to erase it! We’re planning a date where the women from Sumpango and San Bartolo can visit each other’s cooperativas. We’re really excited because we feel like they can learn a lot from each other.
On Wednesday, we finally got the rest of the wood that we eagerly been waiting for so we finished creating the frames for each bed! We also used the new wood to replace some of the beds that we had made last week using older, less sturdy wood. We also installed the irrigation system on one of the beds that we will try out next week. We also spread macadamia shells between the beds to create pathways and prevent weeds from growing in between the beds. We’re really excited to focus on the irrigation system next week and start planting the basal especially since we got really positive feedback from some of the women from the cooperativa Petrona asked me when we were leaving and said she wished we could stay longer. Fidelia told us she’s really happy with the work we’ve done so far and she really likes how the project is turning out.
We drove to San Lucas on Thursday so that we could help Maria present another vermicompost workshop on Friday morning. The workshop was for another group of women from an organization called Puente a Puente which provides various trainings for women and encourages them to join different projects ranging from beekeeping to sanitation.
After spending some time seeing San Lucas we had a meeting with Maria and Jose and we went over the detailed budget breakdown. We’ve agreed to spend less money on the workshops so that we can invest in infrastructure at the cooperatives. Right now we’ve budgeted the same amount for both San Bartolo and sumpango but we’ve decided that we can adjust the budget so that more is invested in sumpango if we feel the need to do so later on.
The workshop went really well. Some of the women came prepared with their own boxes and some even had little bags of compost prepared so that they could feed their worms. Maria is wonderful at explaining how to care for the worms and produce high quality fertilizer. Her workshops are amazing and we love seeing how excited she is about vermiculture! The women were engaged and asked great questions throughout the workshop. They all seemed excited to use the compost to improve their gardens and hopefully make extra income.
Written by Wendy Renteria