Re: SB: The obverse of Casas que Cantan ?

[billc_lists@greenbuilder.com]

Hmmm.  $1900 for 8 days.  Not including airfare.

You get a place to sleep, two out of three meals a day, and a couple 
of tourist excursions.

They get $1900(Canadian, I assume) AND 6 days of your labor.

Sounds like a Tom Sawyer "paint my fence" deal to me.  Supplying 
breakfast gets the workers to the job site, serving lunch keeps the 
workforce on site... go get your own dinner.

However, there are a fair number of deals like this around, where 
people who don't just want to go and sleep in a hammock by the pool 
can actually do some useful work while vacationing - planting trees, 
working in the fields, installing solar panels, etc.  I can't say I'm 
completely against it... if you want to learn and work on your 
vacation in Nicaragua or wherever, it sure beats shopping for 
trinkets, gambling, and drinking IMHO.  Opportunistic?  Maybe.  But 
assuming that he's actually teaching sound SB techniques - and noting 
the many differences between building in Nicaragua and say, Alberta - 
and he can get suckers...I mean paying customers to build homes for 
the needy locals (instead of his own Nicaraguan Getaway) then it 
ain't all bad.  I'd ask for a few more details, like what are we 
building, for whom?

You probably won't see me signing up.

I've posted this over to my friend Ron Mader, who runs the Eco 
Tourism in Latin America website (http://www.planeta.com) for his 
comments on "paint my fence" Eco Tourism.

Casas Que Cantan is another world entirely.




>When I read the piece appended below, it rubbed me the wrong way.
>The operation struck me as being opportunistic(and not in a good
>way) and an attempt at Greenwashing, probably largely because of
>my knowledge of what Athena and Beel Steen and the members of
>this List have accomplished with the Casas que Cantan initiatives in
>the past. (see www.caneloproject.com , "Mexico work")
>
>Upon looking at the article a  second time, I had to wonder if my first
>impression may have been off-base and more than a little bit weenie-
>ish. In any case, it's offered here for your perusal:



>
>Ottawa man starts "development  tourism" project.



>http://members.rogers.com/stoneis/ .
>
>The cost of an eight-day adventure is about $1900. That includes
>accommodation in a Nicaraguan beach town, breakfast and lunch
>every day and the workshop fee. Stone leaves dinner up to the
>tourists, so they can feed some money directly into the local economy.
>Field trips-one ocean sail and a volcano excursion- are also included,
>but airfare isn't.

-- 
Bill Christensen
billc@greenbuilder.com

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