Trabajo
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I arrived at work at the prescribed time yesterday, a little after noon, but my first task didn’t come until 5:30. The director, Juan, was compiling a list of this office’s computer equipment:
1 486 – HD removed (doesn’t work)
2 HP Deskjet 810 printers – out of ink
1 HP Deskjet 610 – missing color cartridge
1 pentium 133mhz, 16 MB RAM – works!
etc.
The office has 2 computers that work – the Pentium and a functioning 486 – but because their printers are out of ink it was impossible to produce a typed document. It was also impossible to connect to the Internet because somebody had changed the passwords and hadn’t given anybody in this office the new ones.
My job was to get a printer to work. The easiest solution – take a cartridge from the printer attached to the broken computer and put it in one of the printers attached to a working computer – didn’t work, of course. So I tried to switch the printers themselves around. This would have done the trick, except that the working computers lacked the driver for the older HP 610. My search for the installation disk was fruitless, and I couldn’t download the driver from the internet, since I couldn’t connect.
And so I failed.
Juan finished his list, sighed, and pounded a fist on his forehead. “I spend most of my day fighting against these obstacles,” he said. “Sometimes it’s enough to take away your desire to work.” He runs Area Padrinazgos – a wing of the parks department that tries to find private sponsors to adopt parks. Unlike, say, adopt-a-highway programs in the US, the “godfathers” of Buenos Aires parks don’t themselves organize cleanups, but rather hire private cleaners/horticulturalists. This costs them in the neighborhood of 250-300 pesos/Ha (about U$S 31/acre) – I think that’s per month. No money is passed through the government, which appears to be an important feature of the program’s design. The program has been around 12 years. At present, 100 parks are maintained by private entities – from generous individuals to Argentine schools to McDonald’s.
The number of groups adopting parks seems to have gone down somewhat since the economic crisis set in, but not drastically. Not yet. Slowly, Juan is reaching out to new potential park “godfathers” to replace those that falter. But without money for stamps to do mailings, and without money to design or produce promotional literature, the challenges are substantial.
antes era urgent
despues tenés phonebook
comentarios
Mom
Jeremy-- you might try contacting Ted Soldan - <tjsold at mtu.edu>
[enviado el 13 Nov 02]