Resource Conservation in Guatemala

I haven’t blogged in a while, and I am thinking that that is because life has become almost normal here. At first everything was new and deserved to be written about, now things don’t jump out at me as easily. It can’t be that things have stopped happening to me, maybe I have just forgotten to notice so much.

I had a dream the other night that I was in a giant supermarket and was overwhelmed to see all of these foods that are out of season here. Perhaps it is now normal to me that what I eat depends on what season we are in. The mangos that so enticed me when I first arrived at site are gone, and have been replaced by apples. There is broccoli everywhere. Avocados are harder to find. There are less watermelons and pineapples. I kind of like this eating by season, but I had just managed to perfect my mango curry, and now I have to wait until next year to eat it again. At least I will have perfected eating locally.

It have also fallen into the habit of unplugging every appliance that I am not using. Phone charger, toaster oven, laptop. I can’t believe that I used to leave my computer running with an away message on my IM while I went to class. Here conserving energy is not just an ecological, but a financial priority. Thus, people only plug in their microwaves and TV’s when they use them. Perhaps this is a wise energy saving technique that we should adopt in the US.

Not only energy saving, but water saving is also a priority in households and communities here. In schools that don’t have water, the kids bring it in bottles from home and brush their teeth with water from a cup (yay kids are actually brushing their teeth!!). This technique saves a lot of water versus letting the faucet run while we brush. I am less surprised, although still exasperated, when I occasionally come home from a run, to find that I have no water, and have to go to work to tell people to bathe themselves, without showering myself.

When thinking about the practices here of buying in season and conserving energy and water, I remember that here these things are done out of necessity because of limited resources. I wonder if we in the US will conserve our abundant resources by adopting the same practices willingly, or if we will wait until dwindling resources force us into them.