First work day in San Juan

Today was a very productive day! To start it off, Whitney and I woke up and ran 4 miles around the city of San Juan. Then my mom had an entire bowl of all different fruits for breakfast! I had mango, watermelon, banana, passion fruit (love it), and cantelope! I could not have been happier with my morning.

We then met in Lema to start our work! We were introduced to our new projects for the next two weeks here.

The project I am working on this week in San Juan is to make a Rocket Stove Charla. On Friday we are going to have a formal Charla with a bunch of local people interested in learning about our stoves. We are in charge of making a script all about how the Rocket stove can help improve the lives of the people and why it is a reasonable price given all the wood and health bills they would be saving.

But today we worked on the Stove catalog that is really important for our group. Since we are the stove group a deliverable we want to give SolCom at the end is an extensive catalog all about the logistics of how to purchase a stove and the health, environmental, and money savings a person gets by buying a stove. We made a complete outline and almost completely wrote all of the content for the catalog today! We struggled with some of the design layout but are so happy most of the content is there! It was a really productive day!

The other group is working with Lema, the weaving cooperative. The students that were in Solola before us were working with Rosa to try to help her get more foot traffic through her store because there have been a lot of competition with other weaving cooperatives nearby. They were working on trying to make a part of her store a café. Our group looked into all of their information and realized making a café is a very risky investment and needed more thought and planning. We thought a more short term goal was to create a tourism office out of her store. This would be an almost free service that could easily bring in tourists who are the main buyers of her products. They are working on making a catalog to promote her

After work in the morning we returned home for an amazing lunch! We had guacamole, salsa, steak and a huge bowl of fruit! I love my homestay! She asked what we wanted for dinner and breakfast the next day and I was sure to say chicken fruits and vegetables! At lunch we had a really interesting conversation. I was telling her about our work with stoves and all about the Rocket Stove and she was really interested and thought it brought so much to her community.

After lunch we got a tour of San Juan by Rosa, the owner of Lema. She showed us the beautiful murals that line the roads and we stopped at a part of the festival where there were a bunch of couples doing the Marimba!

A statue outside of the main building in San Juan

So many people crowded to watch Marimba

The Marimba dancing!

The band

For dinner we had scrambled eggs with tomatoes and tortillas. Overall a great day of food! There is another party tonight that we will probably go to! Until tomorrow!