Oil and Water Project

Special thanks to the Ritz Carlton for putting us up in the best rooms of the trip! The day of March 4th might have been the craziest one yet. It started with a live interview on national television, and a visit ot the University accompanied by the US Ambassador, the Minister of Aggriculture and President of the University. After a couple more media engagements, we were at the US embassy to meet a team of 3 embassy mechanics who unveiled the problem with our Raidiator as a faulty water pump. 900 bucks later at 10 pm, we were filtering vegetable oil in front of Mcdonalds…..our last fill up of the trip. We also collected 15 gallons of Soy Waste Biodiesel from Biodiesel Chile…thanks guys.  After, we drove most of the night south…..still overheating.

We can´t thank Dinah enough for the wonderful job she did in Santiago coordinating our activities.

Sunday afternoon we had another presentation at the Centro Integrada de Santa Isabel (or
C.I.S.I) in San Lorenzo, Tarija. The C.I.S.I is home and haven to about 65
Bolivian children ranging in age from 7 to 18 from poor adjacent areas, which provides
shelter, food, and guidence to the students.

It was the first day of summer camp for kids in the beach town of Mancora on the North Shore of Peru.  For the first day of the kids got a presentation from the OplusWP.

Afterwards, they lined them up and headed on down for some play at the beach!

It must be tough being a kid…

Joe Carberry, one of the managing editors of the newest kayak mag, Paddling Life joined us for a one week ride´a´long. We paddled 3 rivers in the first two days he was with us, and hucked a sweet 25 footer. The coolest thing about it was that he is a rippin kayaker, so he would just jump first and take pictures from the bottom.

We had a jam packed week for, veg oil collection, school demonstrations and then topped it off with some Surf in Santa Catalina.

The school was a technical high school.

We got to teach the diesel mechanics class the ins and outs of running on veg oil.

Stay tuned for Joe´s photos in the the Paddling Life issue.

It is kind of wierd, Costa Rica is so much different then any other Central American country.  We haven’t even spoken spanish since we’ve gotten here.  We met up with some kids from this school in San Jose, and they invited us by for a presentation.

Talking to people like this can be super positive, because they are experiencing other countries first hand, and realize how lucky they are to have opportunities like going traveling and going to school abroad.   This can be a great motivating factor to do something more and give back to the world.

Si a la vida is a school dedicated to taking kids off the street in Nicaragua, giving them a home and an education.  We found the program very inspiring, which could be used as a model for places around the world.

This was a no-nonsense group.  They were all very well seasoned, and had way more experience then normal kids from having to fend for themselves on the street.  They were all so happy to be involved with a program like this.

It was a ultra-competititve, super athletic bunch.

We spent almost two days in their community, and got to know each kid.  They had some great questions for us when we finally did our demonstration, and we had their total attention.

We feel that kids like this have even more opportunity to excel in life.  They know what it is like to grow up and have nothing.  Now they have been given this amazing opportunity, and I didn’t get the feeling that any of them were taking advanatage of it.  It seems like kids like this can really funnel the problems they’ve had in life, and turn it into super positve motivation.  That is what we saw at this school, and the project was a good way to show them some alternative ways of thinking.

Sorry the digital images for these schools bit the dust….bummer.
Seth woke up really really sick this morning (it took us 4 more days to figure out he had Malaria).

Our first presentation was in the morning at Central America University, (UCA). It was a big wake-up call talking in front of hundreds of college level students in Spanish. Much more overwhelming then we are used to with all of other presentations.  We really stick together in these presentations, and pass it back and forth to get it done. All these kids were Environment, Sciences and Technology students, and they had very good questions for us. It was great to be able to demonstrate for them something that they hadn’t ever seen, but most had studied.

It was great to work with Lizzet Gonzalez and Benjamin East from the US Embassy. They formulated a full college level curriculum in Spanish that went with our presentation. It was Brilliant.

Our next presentation was at the Instituto Nacional Tecnológico CECNA. This was an all male technical school teaching 16-19 year old specific trades. We had a great group at this, and they were all psyched. We demonstrated the availability of jobs in the up and coming petroleum free world.

We were invited to visit this school here in Santa Ana, El Salvador. An American woman came to the area a while back and started APROSAR, in an effort to provide better health care in El Salvador. It has led to several projects including the barefoot angels. This school is sponsored by international volunteers to provide these kids with a better education. Our visit was very well recieved by the students and faculty. It was among our top 3 favorite school visits to date.

We started with a presentation to the younger kids, which ended to be more of a motivational speech then anything. We really try to get the kids interested with our humor before moving onto the more serious stuff.

With the older kids, we played some latin music and we all danced. We replaced the words of Demme mas Gasolina (give me more gasoline) to No Necicitamos Gasolina (We dont need gasoline).

We joined them for recess afterwards and had a blast. All the kids got on top of the rig and loved it.

Seth started teaching them all how to skateboard.

We had a heck of a time finding the place (the local police had to escort us there in our vehicle). But we are sure glad we made it. These are memories that will never go away!

We had the unique opportunity to visit the local high school in San Ignacio, Cayo, Belize.  It was really cool to stand in front of such a large, attentive audience.  This group of graduating seniors was the most excited about the prospect of available jobs in the alternative energy field.  We explained to them how much waste vegetable oil gets poured down the drain at all the restaurants and hotels each night, and the jobs that are readily available for anyone interested to start collecting it, making it into fuel and selling it.  Petrol in Belize currently costs 10$ a gallon.

We were invited to visit the CCSP program a long time back.  They promised to gather a bunch of oil for us, and they came through.  This is a little private college tucked back in the hills of the Cayo district, Eastern Belize.  It´s a Christian school jammed packed with a bunch of motivated 18-22 year old students that all seem to be thinking on the alternative side of things.

For our demonstration, we showed them how to make pig lard into usable fuel.