In the tiny village of San Marcos on Lake Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands there are houses built out of plastic bottles. Yes, those same awful water bottles, the scourge of environmentalists everywhere, have found new value because of a German woman who started out in fashion and ended up in garbage.
With International Women’s Day coming up on March 8, a day to celebrate the contributions of women around the world, I thought of Susana Heisse and how she’s made a surprising difference.

In this small lakeside village where Susana moved 10 years ago there are a lot of plastic bottles because there are many people who live here and visit who can’t drink the water. Even someone with a Northern California sensitivity to all things plastic is relieved to find a bottle of water waiting in the hotel room so you can brush your teeth or quench your thirst with something besides Coca Cola, Gallo beer or Chilean wine.

San Marcos and other small villages have no trash pick-up. There are no giant green trucks to go through neighborhoods once a week and pluck various bins of sorted garbage from the sidewalk. Plastic bottles end up being tossed into the magnificent lake or burned with other household waste. When Susana came to San Marcos she was horrified to see all that plastic going up in toxic smoke. Germans were savvy about recycling and household pollution long before most Americans.

Some still call her that “crazy gringa.”

So Susana started her own campaign which she calls Project Pura Vida (www.puravidaatitlan.org) to introduce the villagers on the difference between good garbage and bad garbage. She wrote a book about recycling and distributed it to villages all around the lake. And then she took on the piles of plastic bottles along with other discarded plastic in the form of candy wrappers and chip bags.
She did some research and discovered that plastic bottles, because they seemingly last forever, could be used as insulation in construction. She taught some of the townspeople to compact clean, dry plastic trash and put it into used plastic bottles to make what she calls “plastic bricks” and convinced a few local builders to try them.

Today in San Marcos you can see houses and fences and walls built from plastic bottles which are stuffed with plastic bags. Sometimes there’s a peek-hole in a wall so that you look in and marvel at all that plastic inside.
The bottles are stacked inside the wall like conventional insulation, sealed in place with chicken wire and then covered with cement. Susana says the walls are cheaper than those built with cement blocks. And they’re less rigid, too, in case of earthquakes which Guatemala has to worry about. When Hurricane Stan wiped out part of the town, a wall made out of plastic bottles survived.

Tall, curly-haired Susana in bright beaded earrings and gauzy skirt used to be a fashion designer in Germany. When she’s not mucking around with plastic she creates and sells necklaces and bracelets made from recycled jewelry.She told our visiting women studies group that when she moved to Guatemala she fell in love with its beauty. But she couldn’t enjoy it without helping to preserve it.

Some people still think her ideas are wild, she said, and call her “that crazy gringa.” But in a world looking for ways to save itself, Susana has devised her own style of stimulus package. Little kids bring her their old candy wrappers. She gives them a marble or another toy. Then she makes a brick.

Pura Vida photo with Susana Heisse at left

I notice that President Obama is a “guys” type. He uses the genderless collective term “guys,” to address the men and women of the White House Press Corps. At an inaugural ball he greeted his supporters, in both gowns and tuxedos, with “Thank you, guys.”

The last time I flew the Continental flight attendant addressed the planeload of passengers as “guys.” Our workout instructor at the gym calls us “guys” even though there’s not a man on a spinning bike.

“Guys,” however, does have its detractors. For some it’s too informal. For some women, even though “guys” has morphed into genderless usage it started out solidly male and still doesn’t sound inclusive. When you think about it, there is no female-based word that’s come to cover both sexes. Except for maybe “hottie.”

A university professor of gender studies avoids “guys.” Walking into her class she’s more apt to say “Hi, gang.” Another feminist professor I know says “Y’all,” but she’s from Texas. “Gang” is fine with me. So is “y’all.” And so is “guys.” If I’m at a table of all women at a restaurant I’d much rather be greeted by “Hi, guys,” than “Hi, girls.”

“Girls” has a suspicious history for those with a long-time feminist sensitivity to the politics of language. “Girls” was not an aware or respectful way to address adult women. How could you be a full grown, full bodied self-supporting family-providing tax payer and still be a girl? Girl sounded diminutive, unformed, less worthy, second sex-like. And yet it seems to have new acceptance.

There was Meryl Streep accepting her award for best actress from the Screen Actors Guild and complimenting the other nominees, saying she was “So proud of us girls.”

Meryl? “Girls”? Truth is, it depends on who’s using the term. Woman to woman, “girls” can be sweetly affectionate. Mickey Rourke couldn’t get away with calling the likes of Meryl and Kate “the girls.” On the other hand, if Meryl Streep had said she was “so proud of us guys” that would have just been confusing.

Activist and author Gloria Feldt is part of a group called Women, Girls, Ladies which blogs about issues important to feminists of different generations. Only occasionally do they fuss about the language, she said, and with each other they tend to use the terms “ladies” or “gals.”

My daughters, who are in their 30s, favor the term “ladies.” For them “ladies” doesn’t sound as fussy and entitled as it can to some of my generation. But I’d rather be a “lady” than a “girl.” The same with a friend who teaches middle school. She calls her students “ladies and gents,” and uses the collective “guys.” But no girls, no way.

Okay, but when Hillary Clinton was running for the presidential nomination she said “I’m your girl.” When the poetic, eloquent Maya Angelou endorsed Clinton she called Hillary “my girl.” When I speak of the women closest to me I call them my “girlfriends.” And when we go out to celebrate each other’s birthdays it’s a definite Girls Nights Out.

When our women’s studies group was in Guatemala a Mayan guide started out calling us “girls” and we suggested alternatives, like “women” or “mujeres.” How about “feministas”? He ended up herding us through the jungle with “Vamonos, Womans.”

Had April and Frank Wheeler been sorting out their unhappy suburban lives today instead of in the 1950s things might have turned out better. Right off, they could have gone to couple’s counseling. Maybe even had separate therapeutic life coaches, depending on Frank’s employee assistance plan.
Frank’s men group would have understood his need to go find himself. April would at least have been able to talk to her Facebook friends - “April is sitting in her knotty pine kitchen today wishing she had a different life.”

Instead of dropping everything to move to Paris, they could have gone online and swapped houses. Maybe found someone eager to trade a cramped Left Bank walk-up for a sprawling four bedroom with woodsy backyard.

I know it sounds like I’m making fun but that’s only because I walked out of the movie “Revolutionary Road” giving thanks for being too young in the 1950s to worry about adult things and having Betty Friedan waiting in the 1960s before I turned into an un-liberated April.

The 1950s were a pretty good time to be a kid, however, especially a middle class kid having the run of a safe neighborhood where most of the dads drove off in the morning and most of the mothers stayed home and the streets remained silent until school let out.

The 1950s were a good time to be a kid.

I had no idea if the parents in my own woodsy Connecticut suburb were feeling stifled and stuck. Last year when my book club discussed the Richard Yates novel, on which the film is based, we talked about what we as kids were doing in the 1950s. Who lived in the suburbs? Whose parents played Canasta and drank whiskey sours?

My mother, like every mother I knew except for one who sold real estate, didn’t work. I never questioned that she might have wanted to be something besides a housewife until I was in college, and she told me she always wanted to teach high school. My father was a company man, working his way up the management ladder at the same manufacturing plant as a lot of friends’ fathers. I never thought to ask if he had other dreams.

One movie reviewer of “Revolutionary Road” referred to the 1950s as “the alleged graveyard of American hope,” which is pretty ironic considering that the generation before had lived on little more than hope as they struggled through the Great Depression, World War II and the Korean War to make a better life for their kids. Many of those kids went on to become middle class home-owners with secure jobs and cars and Danish modern coffee tables, and, maybe for the first time, the luxury to ask “Is that all there is?”

Frank and April Wheeler rejected the common comfort of suburban life. Naturally, their peers both envied and resented them for daring to be discontent and thinking they were special. Today the Wheelers would be in good company, another couple of anxious Boomers trying to find themselves, with dreams they can’t afford. Of course in the current financial crisis, most everyone’s self fulfillment is on hold, at least until the 401ks bounce back. In the meantime you’re grateful to hang onto what you have, especially your house, even a faux colonial on Revolutionary Road.

Photo Courtesy of Interview Magazine