Two Central American Women

In November I ran into two completely unrelated Central American women who each made an impact on me.

A stranger in her own land

In November I traveled to Nicaragua for the high school graduation of a friend in Sabana Grande, the community where I volunteered a couple years ago. On the way back, just as the bus was about the leave the border for Tegucigalpa, three women got on. One sat next to me. Something was different about this woman, but I didn’t know what. When the bus attendant passed to sell tickets and asked her where she was going she said she had no idea, but that her travelling companions could tell him. She looked perfectly normal, like a Nicaraguan or Honduran, but didn’t appear to be very comfortable on the bus.

After being in Central America for over a year, I have made a habit of badgering complete strangers on busses. It makes the ride go quicker. I struck up a conversation with the slightly-out-of-place woman next to me. It turned out she had been livign in the United States, near San Bernardino, California, for about 20 years. She was now back in Central America for a visit, her fourth visit in 20 years. She was a native of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, but was on her way to visit a sister in Honduras. She had never been to Honduras–hence her confusion as to where she was going–but was traveling with her daughter and another one of her sisters.

The woman had left her daughter, now twenty-something, in Nicaragua when she left, and now has another child in the states. She said that although she still has a lot of friends and family in Managua, much has changed since she left. From what she said, I got the feeling she feels much more at home in the United States than in her native Central America. It must be an emotionally wrenching experience to return for such a short time to a country and a daughter you have only seen four times in the last 20 years.

 

Banana Vendor in the Dark

At about seven o’clock in the evening a woman passes in front of our house in the dark with a basket of oranges and over-ripe bananas on her head. She sells the bananas, probably rejects sold to her at a cheap price or given to her, at three for five Lempiras (three for 26 U.S. cents). When she passes I usually buy a few bananas, despite their over-ripeness.

Last week I bought some bananas and asked the woman where she lived. To my surprise, she lived about 10 miles away on the highway that leaves Tegucigalpa to the north, toward where I used to live in Tamara. To get home every night, she first takes a bus to Carrizal, a somewhat dangerous colonia (neighborhood) on the northern edge of Tegucigalpa. From there she looks for a ride on the highway back to her house.

I am apprehensive to wait for a bus in Carrizal in the middle of the day. To be on the side of the road at 8-o’clock at night hitchhiking is unimaginable. Her only protection is probably that anyone who would rob her knows that she has very little to of value.

I am struck by the apparent hopelessness of this woman’s situation and her determination in facing it. She travels miles and puts herself in danger to sell low-quality bananas in a neighborhood where many of the people buy bananas at nearly the same price in a shiny supermarket. Perhaps she has a day job as well in the neighborhood. I didn’t ask her. If she does, it must not pay much if it pays to supplement that income with banana sales. She’s fighting an uphill battle, but she’s clearly a fighter.

January Update

I’m in the airport on the way back from two weeks at home for Christmas, New Years and a real Minnesota winter. The year since I went home last Christmas has passed quickly but been filled with plenty of experiences. Here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to since last report.

 I continue to live with Dr. Ruth in La Guadalupe in Tegucigalpa. My room isn’t exactly a penthouse, but the location is amazing and Dr. Ruth has included Tamar (my co-worker who also lives there) and me as part of the family. There is also an amazing view from the roof at night.

Photos of Tegus from my Roof

The 18^th of October we broke ground on a new plant in Las Cuatro Communidades, several kilometers up the highway from Tamara, the site of the last plant. Even though we had been hoping to go bigger, this plant will be about half the size of the plant in Tamara. The innovation in this plant is in the reduced construction cost.

Since I’ve been here, Arturo Diaz, the second-in-command at Agua para el Pueblo, has been complaining that our treatment plants are too expensive and that we need to make the construction process cheaper for the plants to be more marketable. Initially we didn’t pay much attention to these complaints, since the AguaClara technology is much cheaper than any other treatment plant alternatives. Also, most of the cost of the plants is in indirect expenses rather than construction: the engineer’s salary, the technician’s salary, part of Arturo’s salary, transportation costs and training sessions. Our continual response was, “These plants are plenty darn cheap and we like them how they are!”

When Monroe, the Cornell lecturer and researcher who is the director of AguaClara, was visiting last June, Arturo was pulling out his usual complaints. He said that although these construction costs seemed cheap to us gringos, for a small community they were astronomical. The last day he was here, Monroe came up with the idea of scaling down the plants to make them shallower. Shallower tanks would be much cheaper to build. Even more important, shallower tanks would obviate the need for an elevated platform for the operator to be able to access the tanks. In the Tamara plant, the large, elevated concrete platform was a very large portion of the construction cost. Wil Serrano, the Honduran engineer we work with, had suggested we look for a way to eliminate the elevated platform in Tamara, but had been over-ruled by Monroe, Carol and myself. In the end, we have settled on 1.55-meter-deep tanks for the new plant and have managed to eliminate the elevated platform. It took a year, but the gringos finally got smart and gave into the Hondurans’ badgering.

The tank walls are already in place in Las Cuatro Comunidades and the construction should be done by the end of February. This time Tamar and I have much less involvement in the construction than Carol and I had in Tamara. Wil now has one plant under his belt and doesn’t need as much help from us. While it was a wonderful experience to live and work in Tamara, I am happy that the Cuatro Comunidades project has a more Honduran face to it. Living in Tamara sometimes meant that the water board and the construction contractor spoke to Carol or me before they spoke to APP personnel. I would much rather be working with the community through APP than be the mediator or messenger between APP and the community. The disadvantage is that we’re now inhaling diesel exhaust, fighting off thieves and answering e-mails in Tegucigalpa instead of getting our hands dirty in Tamara, where every cute little kid in town knew my name.

Construction on the latest plant in Cuatro Comunidades

 

Engineer Wilfredo Serrano supervising

 

Engineer Serrano and contractor Santos Martinez discussing the plans

As the project grows and our staff remains the same, the task-to-time ratio has skyrocketed. Deciding what to do next has become a triage process. Even if we stopped coming up with new ideas, stopped building new plants and stopped encountering new problems, I am confident we could keep ourselves busy for a year with what we have on our plate right now. With each plant comes the burden of “seguimiento” (follow-up). Even though we built another plant in Tamara and are in the process of building yet another in Las Cuatro Comunidades, we still need to keep tabs on what’s happening in Ojojona. On the back burner, we have the somewhat archaic-looking first, first plant that Cornell students helped design in the north-coast town called La 34. That plant was built before AguaClara was even a program and is now in a dubious state of semi-neglect. The community and water board say they are using the plant and that they are happy with it, but I doubt it is doing much to treat the water there. To get to the bottom of this situation we have been planning a trip to La 34 for a year now, but still haven’t gotten around to it. In the end we might write that plant off as a great learning experience, but a project that will likely not be successful in the long term due to various social and technical problems.

Another continual task is the development of future projects. We need to both select suitable communities and look for outside funding to finance the projects. We now have a list of potential communities and even have designs and budgets for some of them, so the community-research task has reduced recently. The financing part, however, is more urgent than ever.

 

A trip to a town called Jalaca to evaluate the feasibility of a plant there

Add to these tasks a project to improve chlorination in communities that don’t require treatment plants, the planning of a 2-week tour for the 15 Cornell students who came to visit in January, and the general logistical complications inherent to working in Honduras; and you can see that we keep pretty busy. The upside to this is there is hardly ever a boring moment. For the first couple months we were here, Carol, Antonio and I spent some long, slow hours at the Ojojona plant making sure it was working well. We may have spent more time operating the plant than the actual operators. Not so anymore. We now don’t have time to supervise that closely and have come to realize that while necessary at the first plant, it was also counter-productive in some aspects.

My mom and godmother Kathy came to visit for 5 days in November. They were able to get a whirlwind tour of the places I’ve lived and the projects we’ve worked on. Even more important, they were able to meet the people I work with and the people I’ve lived with. The ultimate irony was that I got sick to my stomach while they were here and they didn’t.

Visiting Esperanza in Ojojona

 

Visiting Reyna in Tamara

 

At the treatment plant in Tamara

 

A party with mariachis at Ruth´s house

 

Valle de Angeles

I spent Thanksgiving with a few U.S. volunteers Tamar and I have met and a group of U.S. marines that they know. The marines cooked a very tasty Thanksgiving spread for us in their massive house. The group of 10 or so marines guards the U.S. embassy 24 hours a day and lives a pretty comfortable life when they’re not on call. Their house is equipped a swimming pool, a pool table, a home theater and an amazing view. They even have hot water. As much as I like Honduran culture, I was glad I could be with some paisanos (countrymen) on the most American (American in the not-so-politically-correct United Statesan sense of the word) of all days. It was even better to be home with family, friends, and snow for Christmas and New Years.