Contents are personal opinions, not official Peace Corps policy.

Monday, June 30, 2008

What I do...

It´s night in Santa Ana, an aldea of Colomoncagua, Intibucá, Honduras, and I´m sitting exhausted on a two-inch foam mattress in a door-less bedroom. There is a fan behind me blowing air at the clothing I wore surveying today. It took an hour to scrub all of the mud out of them alongside a neighbor´s pila (water-basin), but now I am dry and finally starting the blog update I´ve put off for a month and a half. It won´t get posted until I get back after three or four days of surveying. Telecommunications, like practically all other infrastructure & public services, are spotty and unreliable in remote areas like this. My cell phone thinks that I am in El Salvador. That´s because the frontier is about an hour´s walk over and around a mountain; probably not more than a mile of airspace away.

"When they start out strong, they end fast," the president of the Junta de Agua (water board) told me. We were talking about rainstorms, as people are often inclined to do when they find themselves sitting on a hillside in the middle of one. The hills we had been measuring were beautiful, but the water running down my glasses made it hard to see much more than the waterfall, about three inches from my eyes, pouring down from the transom of my white Honduran cowboy hat. We were drenched. My hat provides me with about a cubic foot of dry space in such situations, and precedence was given to my technicolor campo-bag containing a zip-locked notebook and my Abney level. The soaking was, in retrospect, probably a good thing because at least some of the mud that had caked onto my pants and boots must have eroded.

I´ve understood for a long time that, when one or two people in a group complain enough about something, their perspective and attitude wear off on those around them. As I found out in the rain today, the opposite can be true as well. When nobody complains about something uncomfortable or annoying, like being outdoors in the rain, it becomes bearable; accepted for what it is. As we sat, waiting silently, I remember noticing the color of the wet trees and moss, the swiftly-moving cloud formations overhead, and the gleam fresh steel on the edges of machetes tarnished black. It was... wait... are those raindrops falling through the ceiling on my new computer?

Goddamnit!

Yes, I went and bought a new laptop. My previous "new laptop" was not especially new and never really that reliable. It needed special tricks to keep it charging, until the charging mechanism in the computer (not the battery) burned out. Twice. I wasn´t terribly disappointed at the loss of the machine, since I had acquired it by trading a pair of skis that weren´t going to be used during my Peace Corps years. Central America is not known for its ski resorts, although the runs here are notorious... The loss of my music and files was a more painful blow. So I treated my sorrows with a trip to Tegucigalpa, complete with good burgers and drinking and dancing and Indiana Jones. Between debaucheries, I swung by Office Depot and bought a cheap but practical Toshiba. Friends quickly donated MP3´s, and within a week I had a respectable library to listen to.

Harrison Ford is still a badass, what with surviving a nuclear blast and not even breaking a hip. I share his fear and loathing of army ants. Although there are no Siafu in Latin America, the local ant militias are not to be f***ed with. There are nice, civic-minded and industrious communities (exemplifying Peace Corps´ vision for developing countries) of the leafcutter ants that nature shows in the states seem to love. A column of them take leaf bits from the mango tree in my host family`s back yard, looking like a fleet of tiny green-sailed ships navigating across a concrete sea. They are nothing like the roving hordes of big black army ants, which may or may not be the “bullet ants” that are said to haunt these hills and which supposedly have the most painful bite or sting of any insect. When I ran into a swarm of the inch-long fiends the last time I surveyed here, I wasn´t keen on testing this theory. Unfortunately, we came across the two and a half foot wide river of ants streaming around and over the freshwater spring that was the first point in our survey line. And after a long, hot walk we were thirsty. So I hung from a stout branch with one hand and leaned over the marching horde to fill my bottle with the other. Then we tossed a tape measure across their line and began our work. Later though, as I was jumping a barbed wire fence (which one generally does every hundred or so yards in Honduras), I put my hand on a tree covered with them. I felt them scamp immediately and swept them off almost as soon as I hit the ground, and somehow managed to avoid being bitten.

Second day of surveying finished. It rained again. These are strong thunderstorms. They form over the Pacific and run up the hot lowlands and foothills of El Salvador until the hit the mountains and cross into Honduras. In the afternoon you can hear them coming for an hour, deep rolling thunder that sounds like it´s coming right out of the ground. But then, if you happen to be up really high like I was today, you see the bright blue sky giving way to big grey-black dreadnoughts steaming inexorably towards you. As they approach, it gets cooler and the wind picks up. It drizzles a few minutes before dumping the ocean. From our high vantage point we could see that this was not a storm to wait out for half an hour, but we were far from shelter. Still, we took off down the mountainside. I picked my way between the rocks and high ground until I sunk to my knee in a cow field. We had to ford a waist-deep stream to get back into town. I went back to the house I´m staying at, intending to wash and dry, but there were no lights again. There still aren´t now, in the evening; I´m typing on battery power. I wrung brown water from my socks and sat and watched the rain. Then I made my way down to the corner-store where a family gives me hot meals. I drank a few cups of coffee in the dusty back room and chatted with their son -in English- for an hour or so before heading back.

The third day is done, and it´ll be the last for now. I´ve measured routes between three springs to the site where a concrete box will built to combine their three flows into one conduction line leading to a reservoir tank just above the town. The town doesn´t have the money to do all this in one shot, but planning the current two-source system to be expanded will make their lives easier three to five years down the road when they do. The next leg of the conduction line between the box and tank will have to happen in two weekends. The distribution lines throughout town at I can do at the end f the month. This is how water systems are overhauled.

Or at least, that is how they should be done. The previous four studies were much shorter. I was rushed through them at an unnecessarily breakneck pace (three in four days) without feasibility studies, without being informed of the type of system (or anything else besides the town I´d be going to), and without spending much time in the communities or with their water boards. I rushed into then thinking that it would be desirable to produce something as soon as possible to prove my worth to my host organization. With some time to talk to people, and seeing that they were maintaining their current system fairly well and understood what the project would entail, I could make useful recommendations and I could do it with confidence. On the previous three, I have topographic studies for systems that I am not certain should be built. Two involve pumping water out of rivers, which I am not sure is safe (given lax maintenance and minimal treatment) or affordable, much less sustainable, for the communities in question. I´m not sure how to approach those, but I have to do something about them soon. The third is short gravity diversion to a clinic and a municipal building. Easiest of all is the fourth.

There´s not enough water. Game over.

As much as I like to go on about the sloppier aspects of surveying, it is the easiest part of my job. I get to tramp around in remote, beautiful areas. I get to work directly with the people living in the rural communities. I know what I´m doing, and people respect my professional opinion… and that I´m working with them for free. It´s an adventure with a goal, and I can accomplish it. Once the study is completed, though, the hard part begins. What I really want to do is transfer these skills, both the surveying that I have down and the designing that I am still shaky on, to people in my organization. There are plenty of highly qualified engineers in this country, but they all seem to live in the two biggest cities (San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa) and aren´t necessarily interested in bussing, then trekking out to water sources. Here in Intibucá, there are plenty of well-funded NGO´s that employ a number of skilled local people, but often it is someone from outside who does the initial study. There seems to be enough demand for these skills for a few trained locals to make a living off of them, and reduce dependence on foreigners and urbanite engineers. In a week, I will start teaching surveying to four people.

With four people doing surveys for me, I´ll REALLY have to get to designing.

On my way home from Santa Ana, I stopped off in Colomoncagua to catch the bus back to Camasca. The bus driver informed me that he would be leaving at 10:30 and that he would save me a seat. With several hours to kill, I had breakfast in a small comedor (hole-in-the-wall family eatery) and a few cups of coffee. I got back to the bus, which was really a van-minibus, twenty minutes early. With its door open and people hanging off, it was literally full to the brim. So much for the saved seat. Luckily, people in Honduras are very obliging, and safety regulations are rarely (if ever) enforced … assuming one passes a policeman, which is very unlikely out here. Eyeing a spare tire strapped to the top of the bus, I politely asked the yeing a spare tire strapped to the top of the bus, I politely asked the ayudante (money-collector) if that seat – the tire – was taken. While not perfectly safe, these buses rarely top twenty miles per hour on these dirt roads. He smiled and told me to climb aboard. It was a lovely sunny morning; the air was cool and clear, and from my landlubber crows-nest I could see for miles over the mountainsides.

It´s the small adventures, be they surveying in the rain or riding atop a bus, that keep me on my toe and make my life here awesome.

Oh, and I killed a tarantula on my bedroom floor. With a machete.