Field Based Training

Yesterday was the Ides of April. It was also my 23rd birthday, a cumpleaños I share with Guy Fawkes, Thomas Jefferson, Butch Cassidy, Thomas Darcy McGee and Samuel Beckett. Good company, I think. My Water & Sanitation crew got me a delicious cake; special thanks to La Doppia for pulling that together. I even danced, which was a bit of a feat because I broke my toe.

On Friday I became the first casualty of my wave of Peace Corps. Having worked hard & late the last three days in a row, we took most of the day off and went to a newrby swimming hole. It was a lovely Honduran afternoon; breezy and sunny and warm. There was a some deep water and high rocks (can you see where this story is headed?) so I scouted the water and decided to jump. It would have been perfectly safe... except I jumped a bit farther than I intended. A submerged rock gave me a kiss on the foot. When I emerged from the water, I had a purple pinkie toe cocked at an interesting angle. The Gecko lent me some alcohol and medical tape to clean myself up. That evening a doctor in Tegucigalpa confirmed the fracture, and told me to keep taping it for the next three weeks.

The moral of that story: ... Ok, to be honest, it´s really fun to jump off rocks into water. If I were to do it over again, I would (just a few feet in the other direction). I can get around fine, albeit with a zombie´s gait. The only real loss is that I couldn´t play soccer yesterday, although I still made it out to watch my team. I have been playing on my host brother´s local team. They compete on a dusty field about half an hour outside of town. Like so many Honduran fields it is alongside a hill (for a decent spectator´s view) with a gorgeous mountain vista in every direction; just over the barbed wire & bushes, that is. There is one league for all ages. Younger and older players are disperesed thoughout the teams. They play rough, fast and skillful soccer. It is a really effective way to meet people in the community and I enjoy it immensely.

I spent the last week working out in the sun. We learned how to pour concrete and do some basic masonry, and then set to work building pour-flush latrines and pilas, which are storage basins for potable water. I used the trailer hitch on a Land Cruiser to bend rebar into horseshoe anchors for the chicken-wire lining of the latrine’s stone foundation. Then I jumped in the pit to hammer them into the hard clay, with scenes of “There Will Be Blood” dancing through my head.

When I left home I never imagined that I’d be missing construction equipment. A concrete mixer would have made our lives much easier, and out work more efficient. I spent much of my time mixing the concrete with a shovel, transporting it by shovel, applying it by shovel, and tamping it with the same. It makes a gas-powered automatic tamper seem as luxurious as a Bentley.

“I feel so primitive,” El Barbaro said to me. He looked the part too, as he pounded pitch (horse crap) with a wooden post. This was a week ago. We were mixing mortar for a brick, mud and steel oven we were helping a local bakery build. It came out quite well. Building things for people, by hand, is immensely satisfying (although not especially sustainable in the long run). And as annoying as the lack of certain tools (such as a level) can be, there’s a romanticism to it that’s not lost to me. I’ve cleared beds for seedlings at a tree nursery with an adze. Last Thursday, I was laying bricks for a pila with Juandrea and Cyber Alex. There were only two trowels, so I was laying mortar with a machete. We were working quickly, because there was a brisk wind bringing dark clouds flashing with electricity towards us across the mountains. Then, as the last bricks were being laid, the rain hit. It felt fantastic. We covered everything with corrugated aluminum and piled sweaty, stinking and satisfied into the back of the Land Cruiser headed back towards Sabanagrande, cold beer and dry clothes.

We get more equipment in water & sanitation than volunteers in other sectors do. We have Abney levels, teodolitos, GPS and total stations for doing topographical studies. Then we plug our topo data into a slick Excel spreadsheet to figure out if a gravity water system is feasible given the volume of water, a reasonable growth rate over a 20 year life span, friction losses in the tubes, and a host of other factors. We also have GIS software, AutoCAD, and EPANET at our disposal to design & present water systems. A reliable laptop is a necessity. In the field, I usually carry a pocket multi-tool, a sharp navaja, and a permenant marker on me; they get used practically every day. I need to buy a decent machete. A donkey too.

Our work naturally overlaps with the other Peace Corps project areas, specifically Health, Youth Development, Municipial Development, and Environment. To practice these competencies, as well as our Spanish, we´ve been working on Charlas. They are participatory presentations, sort of like live infomercials on various topics. Last week I taught a group of school children about sanitation, hygine, excreta-related disease and how latrines protect watersheds and the people who live in them. The previous week, I helped lead a 4 hour workshop on AIDS and sexual health with older students in a tech school. I get nervous in front of people when I have to talk in Spanish, because it´s hard to improvise; it seems I can only work the grammatical part of my brain or the imaginative part, but not both simultaneously. It´s coming along with practice though, and the student participants have been really enthusiastic.

In a week I should know the site where I´ll be assigned for my two year service.