More Down Time

So basically I've had a lot of down time between yesterday morning and tonight (it is Tuesday night here). I've been finding stuff to do though. Last night I went over to Stinky's apt and her, her old roommate, and I all hung out. We had some chicken and veggies and watched a movie. Today has been pretty much wide open. I had a chance to do some shopping and basically wandered around Old Town all day. The town I'm staying in has a large preserved part of town that is all the old style of architecture and there are no cars or bikes, only walking. It is a nice place to spend the afternoon just checking out the shops. I met up with Stinky tonight and her and one of the local C's ate dinner with me. I had met the girl that she brought on our last trip here a few years ago and she became a C then. It was really good to get to catch up with her and see how much she's grown. We ate dinner at a Muslim restaurant. For some reason they were out of what we wanted to order so we ordered this other thing. They brought out something totally random and we tried to explain it to the guy but we ended up just eating it anyway. I thought it was actually pretty good. It was this dumpling stew kind of thing and then we had the whole spicy lamb bbq on a stick thing. Basically if you dump enough spice on anything it'll taste ok. I've been told that in developed countries the food is more bland because they traditionally have better quality meat, whereas in the less developed world stuff is way spicy to cover up the taste of the meat. So stuff here generally has a little kick to it. I'm also realizing that there isn't much to do other than walk around. We did go down to the town square and got on these scooter types of things. They are built like old school scooters but instead of having one board that you stand on they have two that will go in and out. The way you make the scooter go is to pump your legs in and out and you move forward. These things also weren't built for wheelies. I tried one and ended up eating it. Don't worry, Stinky had my camera and got a video. The rest of the night was spent walking around Old Town and doing some gift shopping for people. Her roommate had a bunch of things that she picked up (and I think I'm going to end up taking back to the states) and I think I got most of my gift shopping done. As far as my plans for the rest of the week, they are still a little up in the air. I talked to my friend out here who is in charge and we are supposed to meet for lunch tomorrow. He said that he is trying to get some thing together for the rest of this week for me but it still isn't a for-sure kind of thing yet. Hopefully we'll know by tomorrow, otherwise there might be a lot of just doing things around town until I go out again this weekend. I'm not going to complain about the downtime though. It has been nice to get some rest and just have a laid back schedule for once. The past couple days are forcing me to slow down some (since I can't really drive, or go anywhere, or meet anyone). It is a little like a forced vacation for a couple days. So I'm going to live it up. Since I've had so much down time I have had a chance to reflect on some of the things I saw this weekend. Since there is a little bit of a class element to this trip and I need to take a look at some environmental issues, here are some things that I've noticed from my trip to the village:

• Toilets - basically these things needed a lot of work. The first thing that I would do is to move the toilet from being uphill from the house to downhill. It rains so much there that basically everything gets flushed out and ends up in a big pool that is right next to the house, which eventually ends up going through the courtyard. M_ and I were talking about possible ways to improve their toilet system and having the standard flushing isn't really possible. They don't really have the capability of doing that out there and they also need to use the poop as fertilizer (yeah... using human waste is the preferred way of fertilizing out here). So M_ had this idea of using a two chambered system where you could have two holes dug out under the toilet. Basically you use one and when it becomes full you cover it up and slide the toilet over onto the next one. They would need to be kind of deep to help keep out the flies and he said there is a certain way to rig a pipe into it in order to funnel the smell out. So that is something that I can try and look into when I get back home.
• Animals - It seems kind of obvious but it would keep the house a lot more sanitary if they just put the animals into pens. The chickens poop in the house and the dogs are always getting into everything. At one point during the weekend we were watching T.V. and first a chicken came in the room, a few minutes later a dog came in, and then a little girl walked in carrying a cat. A lot of the sanitation problems that they have could be controlled by keeping the animals in a certain area.
• Flies - I don't think I've ever been around more flies in my life. I think a lot of this can be cleared up by fixing the toilet issue. Probably the biggest problem is that no one understands about flies carrying diseases and people don't even notice them crawling all over food laying out and things like that. Education really is the biggest key to people understanding all of this. Also some things like fly paper or some kind of traps coud cut down on them. Luckily the people are high enough in the mountains that there are not any mosquitoes.
• Crops - I talked to our friend about the crops we were planting and he said that he only adds fertilizer and waters them. I've already mentioned that they use human fertilizer, but I don't see convincing them to use anything else anytime soon. They could probably use some pesticides though. On a lot of the tobbacco there were small bugs all over them and they looked kind of chewed up, but our friend swore that the bugs didn't eat the plants. So a cheap pesticide and some different fertilizer could probably help things a little.
• Water - I've tried to come up with some ways that they can have a better water source but water really doesn't seem to be a huge issue out there. They have running water in the courtyard and they basically take all of their water and boil it. M_ and I have tried to think of a few cheap ways of getting cleaner water. One of the things that could be used would be a rain catch. It rains A LOT out here and the people have a rain catch but it basically is a hose coming off of the gutter from the roof. The water isn't exactly clean. Another thing that M_ came up with is to make a type of container that heats quickly in the sun light and keep the water in there all day so that it basically boils out everything. The main problem is that it is always so cloudy.

Anyways, those are some things that I have thought of so far. If any of you amatuer enviromentalists come up with any great solutions please let me know.