Today we went to a village called Vi Chibala – about 40 minutes away from Nebaj. We went to do the publicity for a campaign to promote glasses, water filters and light bulbs that last about 5 to 8 years. Vi Chibala is a beautiful town in the mountains of Coxal, where I saw the most diverse and exotic plants. It was great publicity, and people seemed very receptive and interested in our products.
Hopefully they respond the same way to our projects, which I am so excited about. We are making peanut butter to sell with the youth at the Centro Explorativo (Community Center) we will be working at. We already bought the peanuts and roasted them which to our surprise turned out to taste really good without any burning flavor. This week we will actually make the peanut butter which we’ll see how it turns out. Our desired outcome for the peanut butter project is to create jobs and income for otherwise unemployed local people as well as the introduction of low price and high quality nutritious snack. Hopefully we are successful enough and our project becomes sustainable after doing the walk away test.
We are also building a green vegetable house with little kids at the Centro Explorativo. For right now this idea is not as developed as the peanut butter project but it is approved by the teachers at the Centro. We were thinking of ways to compost and the best thing we thought of is worms and kitchen scrap. We had no idea where to find the worms but turns out that the brother of one of the guys I am staying with grows coffee and he has worms for his compost, so he is going to let us have some. Our desired outcome for the garden project is to introduce vegetables into the Guatemalan’s diet.
