The staging was a little bit tough because the people in charge of the NGO got to it really late, and I think they thought it would be easier. Time was not enough for us to check every item we put in the list of materials, and we had to do that already there. They had to put everything on a truck and take it from Buenos Aires to Santa Victoria, more than 2.000km!!! Even the tires! Salta is going through a big conflict between people and government, so they sell tires to be burnt in protests, so we couldn’t get much there. We used almost 600 tires, 2000 glass bottles, 2000 plastic bottles and more than 15000 cans!! All these brought buy a cousin of mine from Bolivia!! Incredible! But he was very close, and as he works in the beer industry, he could do that for us…all beer cans were filled, some expired but many don’t.!!! Haha, imagine the face of the volunteers!

We had volunteers who ́ve been in Uruguay, and many were new, I ́m sending the list attached. They worked great, and had an excellent behavior, great to work with this people. As a team with Santiago, Tato and Juan, we worked very good, each leading on different grounds and every day after work we had our reunion to analyze where we were standing, and what was coming next day. We put the tasks on a board and set the number of people it should take and always counting on who will supervise each task. As we had some experienced volunteers, we asked them to do some supervision too.

The weather and people in the town were pretty rough, something we had to deal with, and took almost three weeks to improve…they even though we were going to steel their human organs, or take their lands, one day they wanted to take us from the shelter we were staying using police force. Luckily we made some calls and could stop them from doing that. It was on the first weekend. After that with great respect and joy the volunteers earned their love! And started to interact with the people there, making things much easy.

The construction was great, every day we made big progress and in spite of some complications with materials and tools, we could do well. We had to made some changes in the design forced buy lack of materials they couldn ́t afford, but it didn ́t changed in aspect or functionally. We finally set they grey water planter in the middle of the court to simplify pipes and pumps, and that was great, we gained much time and costs in doing that. We couldn ́t finish everything, we had to leave the second hut without plaster, but we finished all the rest. We left systems working and hut one ready to use, so we ended really happy, tired but happy.

I hope you got an idea of what and how we ́ve done it!!
It ́s been four amazing weeks, and we are sure it ́s just the beginning.

Article in the media: 

Voluntarios construyeron una vivienda con materiales naturales en una comunidad wichí

En el idioma wichí, uno de los pueblos indígenas más importantes de la Argentina, casa se dice ‘lewet’ y ese es el nombre de una construcción que 22 voluntarios levantaron durante agosto en Salta, usando materiales naturales y reciclados.

Thank you, Mike and people in Earthship Biotecture for trusting us with this project!

Best regards Gonza