Can you be mired in a quagmire? Or is that redundant?

Can you be mired in a quagmire? Or is that redundant? I feel like we have hit limbo here this week with our container homes.

Years of land feud and disagreement have put the future location of our shelter project in question.

That being said we are moving ahead full bore to get the 4 containers we DO have fully built out with roofs and trusses- Earlier in the week our last 2 container homes arrived (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUpCdYmmZPo) and we are now working dilligently to place them.

They will sit on site at the west side of our composting site.

I have spoken very little about the "human waste composting" aspect of our project - (Joe Jenkins would not be happy if he heard me say "Human waste"; there is no "waste" here- only organic material freely available to be converted in to viable compost)

At any rate our shelter project has encompassed sustainable green practices from the beginning- including water reclamation, agriculture and human excrement recycling..... but now the waste component has really come to the forefront.

As the overall sanitation issue in PaP comes to a head, the entire peri-urban region is searching for solutions; What to do with all the garbage? Where to put all the human waste? How to process it so it is safe?

Right now most of the relief toilets are pit latrines (leaking in to the water table- just covered over by dirt and left) or tank toilets that are (supposedly) pumped out regularly. Apparently the poop-tank contents are dumped at the dump- which sits about 3 km from the beach- NICE!!

Needless to say, a sanitation solution is in high demand.

Patricia and her GiveLove.org have imported a fine group from 3 continents to address this need here in PaP.

At any rate, our guests arrived on scene last week and we have had 7 straight days of "shit-wrangling"; and its been a huge success. These folks have a full pilot system up and running on our site- ready to begin piloting our dry-composting toilet system (well, dry AND wet as I understand). We have had guests by the site all week and everyone's WOW factor is piqued by the poop-system.

It may turn out that this is the most important thing to come out of the GiveLove shelter project.

More details/photos and on process to come- and on the GiveLove site at www.givelove.org

In other Happenings; David Arquette (below) and Balthazar Getty visited us last week to spend time in the camp and initiated a process to help us safely triage and select the most endangered members of our camp to drier areas... or to return home.