lo que estoy haciendo

san telmo, buenos aires

years back, before beginning my year as a teacher in namibia, culture was explained to me as an iceberg: there is a fair amount that is visible above the surface (food, language, architecture, etc.), but there is a far greater mass below (customs, values, manners of perception, etc.). these unperceived cultural differences make themselves known frequently, especially when someone has the tall task of working with people from another culture. still, i do not think the subsurface cultural matter can quite explain our situation with carlos.

carlos is a sweet man. an adorable man. he is absolutely brilliant. but he inhabits a land that one could not possibly travel to. yesterday, we entered our reunion with him optimistic about the proposal for our remaining weeks. we left scratching our heads.

our proposal for work was to construct a small addition, approximately 4 square meters, complete with several of his brilliant innovations. we were going to have a mini-biogas plant that converts biomatter into energy, fashioned out of discarded barrels. the outside was going to include a solar water cooker made from tetra pak, a small garden, composting area, and a few other potentialities. additionally, we were going to look into securing funding so that people from the villas would learn how to weld and thereafter be able to create mini-biogas plants as a career endeavor. carlos approved our idea as proposed via email, he just had to see our drawings yesterday.

it was about 45 minutes into our reunion before we were able to finally present what we had done, or even to talk for that matter. he used the initial time to draw mountains, talk about bending iron bars, show us a beehive on his deck, and display how people can walk under aquaducts. you don´t need to ask, it didn´t really flow for us either. when it came time for us to show him our plan, he had some constructive criticism and i must say that he clearly knows what he´s talking about. i tried to suppress my frustration that we hadn´t hit the mark and then we had our breakthrough after telling him we weren´t architects.

¿you´re not architects?

no carlos, we´re not architects. this cleared us of the responsibility of designing the apparatus, and i think we´ll still be able to follow through with the rest of our plan. but i have to say, it was pretty fun to pretend to be an architect for a few weeks there. it was fun to design, to take these materials and think of a way to improve lives by constructing something. now we have to return to being idealistic policy wonks.

we have a couple days here to devise the way forward and i´m optimistic that we can offer value to a pretty cool project. in the meantime, we´ll just continue to scratch our heads, think, and just laugh at planeta carlos.

that, and prepare for our national television appearance that he has arranged for us tuesday morning.