Introduction

This is a blog about a trip that two MIT students (Steve White and Mary Masterman) took to La Vaquita, Mexico in the summer of 2010. About 100 families live in La Vaquita, a very small town in the state of Zacatecas. Most people in La Vaquita make their living by raising livestock and growing food for their families. This trip is a continuation of the trip made by Sivakami, Nancy, and Samantha this past January.

This trip began as an IDEAS Yunus Challenge team of some members of iHouse. The Yunus challenge changes from year to year, but this year the theme was handwashing, and the goal was for teams of students to come up with novel ways of incentivizing handwashing in developing countries. We had two ideas: one, to produce an alcohol-based hand sanitizer locally using available ingredients; and two, to do an educational campaign in the schools in which students learn about the benefits of handwashing and then monitor their behavior themselves.

Steve and I arrived in La Vaquita on August 12th after flying into Aguascalientes, staying a night in a hotel, and then taking a bus to Ojuelos, a nearby town. We stayed several hours in Ojuelos before arriving in La Vaquita. Ojuelos is a town considerably larger than La Vaquita, where there are small restaurants, grocery stores, pharmacies, street vendors, and several shops with computers and internet. A bus leaves every day to drive to La Vaquita from Ojuelos. We ended up missing the bus and taking a taxi our first day.

Most people in La Vaquita (maybe everyone) make a living by raising livestock and growing corn and beans. Right now, people are just finishing the beans harvest. They pick the bean pods, pile them up, let them dry out in the sun for about a week, drive a car over them in order to make the seeds come out of the pods, and collect and bag the seeds. They are always worryiing about whether it will rain, because if it rains too much the seeds will rot and turn red. They watch the weather and when it looks like it will rain, they go and put a rubber tarp over the beans to try to keep them from getting wet. They also try to work as fast as possible to bag the beans so that they don't lose too many from rot.

Piles of the bean husks, showing the black tarp they use to protect them from rain.

Lupe is turning the beans so that the ones on the bottom can get dried by the sun.

On the left are the fresh beans that haven't dried yet. On the right are the good beans that have dried for about a week in the sun.

These beans are the rotten ones (they look reddish brown) that got wet.