I am amazed at how much people reuse things here. Instead of just throwing something away a lot of thought goes into if it could still be used. It could be used for another purpose or fixed to keep using. For instance, This week two things happened. First, the clothes shelves we worked so hard to get, started molding. Yes, a lesson in furniture manufacture. If you get lumber straight from the lumber yard here, it's green, therefore wet. It's rainy season. This adds up to mold. A lot of mold. It took me a couple of weeks to acknowledge my mistake. Finally, a few days ago I went to the secretary at the school, Karin, and asked her if she might be willing to help me get something built for our clothes that was actually dry and treated. That is all going to work out fine, but my point was about reusing things. The man who is building our new shelves also took away our old, extremely moldy ones to refinish and sell. He paid us for them.
Then the shower started not draining. A plummer came and cleaned everything out. Then he spent some time telling me he was going to take away the drain cover and do something to it and bring it back in 15 minutes. I had no idea what he was saying, but figured he knew what he was doing. So I just said Si, Si (yes, yes) and waited for him to return. He came back and had somehow drilled new holes in the drain and cut the whole bottom lip off of it. It's working great. I did feel a bit put to shame though. I used to feel like I was fairly good at conserving resources. I am learning from the people of Panajachel that I haven't even begun to know the meaning of conserving. Jill
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