I will be in Honduras from August 6, 2007 to August 7, 2008. I´m here working on a water treatment plant project called Aguaclara. The project is a joint venture between Cornell University and Agua para el Pueblo (APP), a Honduran NGO (non-governmental organization). Carol Serna, who just graduated from Cornell with her masters, is also here working on the project.
We will spend the first couple months in a town called Ojojona about 40 minutes outside Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. Aguaclara already completed construction of a water treatment plant in Ojojona, but the plant is still not working reliably. The treatment plants we are working with are a new design from Cornell, so there will be plenty of trial and error. Our task in Ojojona will be twofold:
- Help the plant operators to get the plant working well. If this requires modifications, we will help with the design of those modifications.
- Give the plant operators sufficient training so that when we leave they know how the plant functions well enough to operate and maintain it.
If things go well in Ojojona and we (the team from Cornell and APP) aggree that the technology is effective, we hope to begin construction of another plant in a different town within the year. APP has considered several locations, but the town or Moroceli is the most likely.
One purpose of this blog will be to let people know what I´m up to. But since you might get sick of hearing what I had for breakfast and where I went over the weekend, I also want to write about some of the issues Honduras faces. I hope we get the opportunity to talk to a variety of Hondurans and learn about their opinions, problems and dreams regarding everything from politics to family life. So far most of the Hondurans we´ve met have been ready and willing to speak about nearly everything. Hopefully, this trend continues and my Spanish improves so I can speak and listen in a more inteligent manner.
To improve our Spanish, Carol and I are in the town of Santa Lucia for two weeks taking some pretty intensive Spanish classes. We have four hours of language instruction in the morning and two and a half hours of practical experience and fieldtrips in the afternoon. The program was billed as eight hours a day, but since the schedule calls for only 6.5 hours, and we often start a bit late and end early, it´s been about 5.5 hours a day so far. I haven´t spent this much time in a classroom since high school, so 5.5 hours is fine with me.
Santa Lucia, a bedroom community of about 7,000 a half hour from Teguc, is the training grounds for all of the Peace Corps volunteers that come to Honduras. That means people here are pretty used to gringos walking around. It´s a nice place to test the water (metaphorically; we won´t start actually testing the water in Ojojona for a couple weeks) and get aquainted with Honduras.
My Family in Santa Lucia (L to R: Ana, Fernando, Me, Irma)
The View from Irma’s House
Our Spanish School
