Two Days of Firsts

New clothes don’t make me happy. Fast, new shiny cars don’t make me happy. Meat doesn’t make me happy. But getting my recyclables picked up makes me immensely happy and such was my happiness today at the end of the day when these guys arrived:

For weeks I’ve been asking different people about recycling centers, pickup services, anything to stop the madness of the trash we’ve beem generating in our house for the past two months. Everyone’s says “Oh yeah, La Antigua recycles.” or “Have you tried that place in Ciudad Vieja?” “The capital has a few places, go there.” All so vague and unhelpful that it made me question whether  it was sheer urban legend.

So we go to these places and all they take is tin and glass (but that’s ten percent of the trash we generate) or they only take it on certain days, oh, wait, you have to go to the capital. I looked in the yellow pages, I Tweeted, I asked other “greensters,” but nothing satiated my need for convenience, conservation and practicality.  So I spent a few hours on Facebook looking for Facebook groups with the keyword “Guatemala” in them and poured through 500 pages until I found these folks:

http://www.guatemalagreen.com/how-works.html

We called and spoke to Pedro Morales  Tel: 5104 8447 (there’s also an English speaker – Becky Harris (English Speaking)  Tel: 5778 4009) and scheduled a regular pick-up from our home on Tuesdays. We neede  to improve our sorting/storing methodology, per their requirements, but an hour of sorting, washing out and rearranging everything did the trick. We got some neighbors in on it and they brought their recyclables over. I will be checking our their facility next week and making a longer video, so stay tuned. Update: One of the junta members of our residencial is presenting the recycling idea to about 50 homeowners, most of them Guatemalan, who are interested in learning about this recycling program. In preparation for the meeting I created an English and Spanish information flyer.

The other “first” for me was getting my first bank account with my hot off the press (ok two months later) DPI. From my little cubicle with the BI rep who took almost 90 minutes to set me up with a checking account, I sat and watched the endless lines of people trying to pay their electric bills, credit cards bill, deposit money, everything they had not done during the almost five days of banks being closed: