Adventures in Manure

The evangelists work together to make compost

Last week I got back from an exhausting trip to see our CHE evangelists and do some more training with them. It was only three days, but it took a lot out of me and my co-trainer. Despite being tired, I couldn’t help feeling the continued sense of adventure as we rode back five hours on a bus to our town. I know I am so lucky to have such variety in my life, to be able to travel to unusual places, to have all the new challenges and hassles of going out of our comfort zones. Sleeping on a hunk of foam on a church floor and taking a “bucket bath” in the rough enclosure of an outdoor latrine are not the things that I yearn for in an adventure, but they do make life interesting. I would not have expected that working with manure (something I don’t like) and farming (something I don’t have much experience with) would be very high on my list of adventurous activities, but it does become rather exciting when the people you’re working with get excited about how much it can help them. The last element of the adventure is more natural to my way of thinking, how to respect a culture and tradition that doesn’t like change but help people actually integrate new ways of doing things into their lives. I know many have tread this path before me, but it always feels like we’re doing something new and unexpected.

This was the adventure we had with the four CHE evangelists as we discussed “what is real health?” After talking about a story of how true health is related to both your physical and spiritual state of being, we did some lessons about washing hands and growing vegetables in the dry season. For this farming training we taught them ways to make organic compost with their available materials. The most exciting way is a method that lets you make small amounts of compost for a garden in only 21 days. It’s easy to remember because you need one bucket of ash, two buckets of manure, and three buckets of plant material. Then you seal it in a big plastic bag or by burying it in a hole with dirt totally covering it. It was fun working together with our hands and having the evangelists show me how they do certain things. Their families have done compost from time to time in the past but only with chaff and manure that is quickly mixed and then put straight on a field. So, this was a great example of something practical to teach them that can help them see the immediate benefit, and see it only takes a little extra knowledge to use what they have in more efficient ways. It also gives a great example that teaching people about health issues can really help them and open them up to further conversations. We talked with one of the evangelists on the phone yesterday and heard he’d already taught five of his neighbors how to make the compost!

-- El Padre