Monday – July 22, 2014

Necils, Tom and I packed up our computers and headed over to the garden. We met up with Saul and the community to listen to their updates. Unfortunately Kirill couldn’t be there because he had to go home to visit his family in San Francisco. Maria brought up the fact that the person who had the tractor wasn’t answering any phone calls. That worried us a bit, but Arturo did mention that he knew someone else who has one that we could possibly ask. Our team got really excited when Maria brought out our mini posters of various sustainable strategies and talked about the different ideas we had. As a whole many of the community members felt some concern about the potential leakage of arsenic from the tires, but we backed up the tire idea with the possible solution of putting adobe over the tires. Adobe will also gives it a very pleasant aesthetic. The community is all for the recycling of glass bottles for retaining walls as well as making mixed-in paper cement or paper adobe bricks. A couple more ideas were also introduced: using earthen structures such as hay bale and sand bags (in potato sacks). Although many people were on both sides for the shipping containers, Arturo made a great argument that proposing this idea will not only make a statement but it will set precedent in this community. According to Arturo, no one has ever proposed shipping container structures in Ontario. It is on us to take the initiative and really work hard at getting every piece of information we can about the regulations and positive outcomes of the shipping containers. On a side note, some of the community members (even a couple kids) were helping weld together an arch for the walkway. Anyways, we left the meeting and got some drinks at Tortas Sinaloas and then tried a new place to eat that combined Chinese food and Mexican food together. Personally Tortas Sinaloas was yummier, but new places are always worth a try. We came back home and planned our goals for the next week.

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