Cow Bells and Mountains of Crap!

For all its city-like aspirations Oaxaca continues to be small and life predictable in all its unpredictability. Take for example TRASH DAY...

Trash pick ups on our street are Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. So as ridiculous as this might sound, here is a breakdown of trash day...

TRASH DAY BREAKDOWN

1) In order to get rid of your trash you need to be home or have someone there when the trash passes by. 

2) Your trash should be ready to go, close to the door.

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3) You should have a few pesos for tip in your pocket.

4) Don't forget your keys or you'll most likely be locked out of your home since houses here are behind walls and or gates.

5) You know the trash truck is coming when you hear a cow-bell rung, no, not the bellish sound of the gas passing (which you hear at least 3 or 4 times a day), but a much deeper and less frequent sound. 

6) Once you hear the right sound you have to make a quick call on what corner the sound is coming from, run out with trash in hand and the pesos in your pocket. Yes, good or at least descent hearing is necessary in order to avoid running to an empty street, trash in hand, a gust of wind piking up dust and some lone-ranger music playing in the background...

Ah! but that's not all. 

7) Frankly you will never know when the trash truck will come by. 

A few scenarios:

a) They can show up early in the morning as you are waking up. You frantically look for shoes, the keys, some pesos... HURRY! Oops! too late IT'S GONE! 

b) They might decide to show up mid-day. You're hungry so you dare to turn on the stove and make lunch. BIG MISTAKE! The dreaded cow bell rings and now you have to decide between your food and running out to get rid of the trash!

c) Later in the day. You've spent all day waiting and waiting and you have just about given up. You've been sitting around all day and you just want to take a shower for the love of GOD! You dare to get in and well... THE BELL!

d) Or it can just NOT SHOW UP! Leave you as they say vestida y alborotada, trash ready, pesos in hand, and a growing multitude of flies until the next time the trash truck decides to show up!

Good Grief!  Remember when bells meant an angel had gotten its wings like in It's a Wonderful Life?! Oh the perils of ones own MOUNTAIN OF CRAP!

Today is trash day. It is now almost 5 pm, trash bags have been waiting since 8 am this morning... Instead of the hot hairdryer wind there is a slight misty rain falling on the trash bags. Yeah, they are still there... sitting next to the front gate.

Adventures in COMPOSTing

Hombligo, Oaxaca, 2009.

Mauricio and I moved to Oaxaca about two months ago. We found a great house to live in with big open spaces, good light, a workable kitchen, some gardening potential despite the landlord's cement love-affair, and enough room for Maya our dog to rome around. The two other houses on the same property were occupied, one by a good friend, an Italian photographer, and the second by a peaceful earth loving, meditating, writer from Venezuela.

Not long after we moved in our neighbors began to tell us about their gardening aspirations on the property which included a communal rooftop garden for all of us. Our eyes opened WIDE as our friend showed off his home grown tomatoes and basil and with excitement in his voice explained how our other neighbor was in the process of reproducing worms!...

[A brief aside]. I can't say I was jumping up and down when I heard the worm reproducing scheme. To be honest my encounters with worms in my mother's garden were usually followed by a shriek! No, not shriek out of happiness like when you encounter a long lost friend, but more like, 'There's a nasty WORM WIGGLING and I want to puke!' sort of shriek. However our friend seemed so excited I figured reproducing worms must be a good thing. It turns it is a very good thing in the gardening world.

[Back to the story]. Anywho, our earthy gardening ecological neighbors also showed off their compost piles and we all even made plans for a large communal compost pile in our back yard... WOW! Now that was something! The thought of taking TRASH (YES TRASH!) and turning it into this POWERFUL plant food was exhilarating. The tons of new plants we had purchased in an effort to liven up the place would thrive. Not only that, but we would be less wasteful and in a very small way contribute (in my head) to the lessening of landfills. All this while giving our plants a boost! I thought about how the new jasmine tree we bought was sure to have flowers by the time of our wedding if we helped it along with some NUTRITIOUS COMPOST! Mauricio and I WERE SOLD!

It was not long before we went out to purchase our very own compost bin to try our hand at composting... And this is where the meat, or to be more exact, the GOO of this story begins...

Fast forward a month and half. We open our compost bin, the one where we have been throwing much of our organic trash into along with dried leaves and garden material... First Mauricio gets attacked by tiny flies... We think ok its normal... Then we see a bunch of little worms and we are told to leave the compost in the sun to get rid of them, and yes our compost looks great! I put the compost bin in the punishing Oaxacan sun for three days... Fast forward to today. After a lovely day with friends and our dogs and an evening of house cleaning and organizing we open the compost bin and...IT WREAKS OF SHIT, CRAP, NASTYNESS sooooooo BAD! That our dog Maya must think we are making sort of perfume for her pleasure.

I immediately get online to see what the hell we are doing wrong with the compost.  In my head I think, PLANT FOOD CANNOT SMELL THIS BAD, SOOOO BAD IT COULD KILL HUMANS!

I watch instructional videos and learn about the compost lasagna method, wood or brown material followed by dirt, then 3 parts green, then brown, dirt, and back to green... I learn about the organisms in dirt that compost needs and I think about the 3 days in the sun... I wonder if I killed anything that might have been living in our pile of SHIT! I watch British video and almost fall out of my chair when the woman in her British accent explains how long it takes for compost to become compost... 6 to 12 months!!!!!!!! Who has that much time?! I come to the conclusion that we  have been in fact making some sort of dog approved perfume (yes these are the animals that love to throw themselves on shit if you don't catch them on time) and hope there is some way of making it into compost before it kills us.

Just in case you ever want to make compost, first watch the following videos: