Tip-Toeing To The Tire Turtle

It all started two weeks ago. Actually, the ‘mother project’ has been executed several months before, but the hatching of our turtle could be traced back to the first trip to a dump.

Santa Clara dump

Yes, a dump. We (the Rising Minds team) were to construct a playground for very young Guatemalan kids, and we were to do it in a sustainable, cheap, and empowering way. Inspired by endeavors like the “enTIREly fun playgrounds”, we set off into the tangled roads up the mountains and did a little pinchazo (a sort of tire/car parts shop) orientation. In the towns of Santa Clara, San Juan, and surroundings there were quite a few of those ‘shops’ and with equally clueless expressions, their owners promised to let us take their… trash. All we needed were used useless tires that didn’t have any metal stringy parts sticking out of them. Lesson #1: tires have metal in them. Not always, but when they do, they’re not the safest playground building material. And no worries, we figured that way before anyone got hurt.
So with the good word, we counted 22 promised tires and went back home, very satisfied, and very excited to confirm our sandbox/turtle design.

Things in Guatemala run slightly differently than they do in, let’s say, US. That’s the sole reason why the next day we ended up with only 15 out of those 22 promised tires on top of a Rising Minds’ friends’ van. That did not seem like enough, so decisions had to be made: with very adventurous hearts the three of us (plus the dedicated young son of the driver) slid down the slope and into the Sana Clara dump. We knew there were recently-thrown-away tires there, and all our hopes seemed to lay in there too. A rather questionably hygienic hour later, we had 6 tires more, very dirty hands, and sweaty foreheads. Us rolling the tires up the hill was excruciatingly similar to Sisyphus’ work, and believe me, that comparison was not motivating. But it didn’t matter. Mission accomplished!

It took two more weeks of waiting for the rains to go away and for my co-worker’s engineer dad to come, but we were more than ready and extremely excited to get the actual job done. Upon our arrival in the village of Panyebar, where we were constructing, 11 mothers were waiting for instructions with their kids wrapped in blankets around their backs, and hoes in their hands.

Empowerment: Mothers of Panyebar working on a playground for their kids

It was all work in progress that we needed to figure out as we went: trials and errors, realizations about tire structure (they’re very flexible and not that easy to put a screw in, as the rubber closes on you before you put a bolt through), and capacity/reality checks. Those are just details, though. We got on the job without a blink and finished the same day despite some lags revolving around the lack of washers that would prevent bolts and screws from pulling through the tires.

For stability, we stacked 4 tires on top of each other as the main turtle body part, constructed two-tired legs/shell parts around it, and put two tires half way into the ground to make up for the neck and tail, which brought about a wave of laughs amongst the mothers, as our sometimes-poor Spanish skills made us confuse ‘tail’ with ‘butt’. Cheerful.

The head was a whole new project altogether, and with a limited battery power tools, we had to fight for the eyes to be done out of separate tires rather than painted on. It might have been challenging for two college girls dealing with slim tuk-tuk tires, but the effect was well… well worth it:

Our soon-to-come-to-life Turtle

We came back the next day to paint the playground and make sure the turtle comes to life. Even though the sun there was striking hot the entire day, we still managed to convince the kids to put the play off for one more day to allow it to dry, but I must say, I was curious and excited myself to see them climb the turtle and give it a good endurance test. We’re back there Wednesday, so nothing missed. For now we’ve just decided to stay in the office and stare at our screens, this time decorated with the bright green TURTLE pictures.

THE TURTLE: Recycled Tire Playground

More photos of the process HERE.