Day 11

It is early in the morning as I try to organize my notes. Today in the afternoon we will go to Trebol for a meeting with their club. I am afraid we won't have enough banners for all the clubs. We aren't halfway through and half the banner are used. There are a lot of small clubs and geographically this is a huge district. Next year they will divide the district up so that people don't have to travel so far and more inter club activities will be possible.
This morning we visited the marble factory, Tinka. It is the only such factory in South America. They use recycled glass, employ 15 people. It is a family operation that started 60 years ago when there was a lot more industry in San Jorge, including four factories that made crystal glass. Now there are none and so the glass they use come from recycling of both crystal and bottles. They sort by color and type because not all glass bonds well with or has the same clarity and strength. They make both marbles for toys and also for industry ( aerosol cans). About 65% is for toys. They run different colors and types of glass each week. The furnace starts heating early Sunday morning and is ready Monday at 14,000 C.  In a week they can produce 400,000 of the small marbles, 16 mm, or 160,000, of the large ones, 25 mm, but I also heard them say 2,000,000 a week. They only sell in Argentina, but they could produce more if they could get more natural gas for the furnace, but supply is limited by the pipe line size and the cost. They are the biggest consumer of gas in San Jorge , 17,000 pesos  a week. A few years back the government started a program of encouraging old fashioned games in the schools and this was promoted on tv with Tinka marbles prominent.This helped counteract the decrease of children playing marbles, but they still have the problem of not being able to increase production. The have one furnace that feeds the two marble machines. Fascinating to watch. The bagging and boxing operation is only partially mechanized at 160 boxes per day. The right machine could take that up to 500 boxes a day of 25 bags each box.
We visited the Escuela National a public school from preschool and kinder to three levels of secondary school. One of our Rotary hosts graduated from this school 32 years ago. The students in microbiology won the regional science fair with a project identifying the larva of the mosquito that transmits Denque fever, distilling eucalyptus oil and figuring the concentration needed to kill the larva.
Lunch with out host family. SanJay has made a pretty complete study of agricultural practices of the region, before he started his  agro- chemical  business 6 years ago. San Jorge is in the middle of a region that is about 100 kilometers wide and 300 kilometers long that has the perfect combination of soil fertility and water to produce soybeans, 5-6 tons per hectare. The national average is 2.5 tons per hectare. The arrival of soybeans has dramatically changed the nature of the communities. It only takes about 90 days of work a year to produce soybeans. A person renting their land out gets $8,000 a month for 200 hectares (400 acres) and some one working their own land would realize $15,000 a month with only 90 days of actual work in a year. That has changed the dynamic between rich and poor and also has created an unemployment problem. The big chemical farming uses very few workers compared to the dairy operations that used to be common. In San Vicente where we just came from, the land is a bit drier and so milk and dairy operations are still somewhat cost effective. There used to be a big Harvester plant in San Vicente, but it closed and the smaller plant that our host there, Guillermo, owns sells to Venezuela, but has trouble competing with John Deere in quality. The university in Santa Fe as isolated the gene in sunflowers that allows them to grow with less water and they are going to splice that into soybeans to expand the cost effective zone for soybean production further changing the culture of these communities.
We visited El Trebol in the afternoon, a community of 14,000 . It is a manufacturing and farming community with big dairy operations and manufacturing of many stainless steel products including silos, all kinds of tanks, and the first milking machine in the country was made here. There are two Rotary clubs here. The older one is men only and about ten members. They did not join us. The El Trebol Solidario club is 17 women and is six years old. They are very active, especially with projects in the schools and with women's health, and poor single women households. They took us to the public library where the local tv and radio interviewed us. The library director and some others had just come back from the nation week long book festival in Buenos Aires and had books to show us. We talked about library services, story time, children's bilingual books. Nice library and active in the community. We walked around Trebo , the central park is lovely with a nice fountain, a good looking church, a new cultural center that will open soon and one beautiful 80 year old colonial house on the square. The municipal building is lovely and new and we were greater and given gifts. We went back to the Rotary building and talked and snacked. 
The rest of the evening was spent hanging out at the house of Stuart's host family. A rich house with a big yard and enclosed eating area that seats about 30. Jorge was in charge of making pizzas and the production started about 9pm and the eating, drinking, and talking ended about 1:30. They are giving us tomorrow morning off as most of the group is noticeably tired and needs some time to recuperate.