After spending Easter Week with my parents in San Antonio, Texas, my travels and vacations finally came to an end for awhile. Aside from a couple weekend trips I’ve been in Tegucigalpa for the last 2 months. It’s been nice to be in one place for awhile.
Saturday, June 6 we inaugurated the Cuatro Comunidades treatment plant, which has been up and running for two months. The inauguration was a success, with a couple hundred community members and quite a few visitors from outside the community. There was live music and plenty of food for the celebration that ensued after the speeches were over.
We managed to get a full page article about the inauguration in La Tribuna, one of the main Honduran newspapers:
http://www.latribuna.hn/news/45/ARTICLE/66324/2009-06-10.html
(this link doesn’t seem to be active anymore, but maybe you can get a cached copy from Google)
Antonio getting interviewed by the media
Approximately 500 plates of food were served to community members and guests.
It’s not a party without a Run Chun Chun (traditional string and percussion ensemble)
The new plant has been running relatively well. We still have the same problems with the lack of an operator during the night, but other than that the operators have been producing very clean water. Since the community is small and uses hardly any water at night, the water board is experimenting with shutting the plant down during the night. So far they have had pretty good results.
The search continues to fund our next project. We have several potential communities but no money to build plants in them. Our main funding strategy has been to pitch the project to mayors and then count on the mayors to finance or find money to finance plants in their towns. We have submitted budgets and proposals to the mayors of Gracias, Lempira and Atima, Santa Barbara, two municipalities in western Honduras, and are hoping they will find some financing. Both are quite excited about the prospect of an AguaClara plant in their community, but also have quite a few other projects on their plates. If you or anyone you know wants to donate money to a good cause, let me know. With $40,000 you could give clean water to 350 families in Agalteca, a smaller community that doesn’t have access to sufficient funds to finance its own plants.
For the last 10 days Monroe, the director of AguaClara and a lecturer and researcher from Cornell, has been in Honduras visiting. This week he gave a 6-day course on sustainable drinking water treatment plant design at the Universidad Politecnica de Ingenieria, a new private engineering school in Tegucigalpa. Nearly 50 Honduran engineers, most of them from the national water authority SANAA, attended the course.
Just before leaving for Texas to see my parents, I moved to another apartment. I had enjoyed living at Ruth’s, but was ready to have a little more space and privacy. Ruth was also thinking of moving her bedroom into my old room, so the timing was good for a change. I now pay $105 a month for a one-room apartment about five blocks from my old place, still in La Guadalupe. Others have described my current situation as tenement housing, but I like it. There about 15 apartments in the small complex, which is behind a small restaurant called “Comedor Mina”.
My apartment building. The door is on the left. From the front it might not look like it, but there are about 15-20 apartments.
The scenery outside on the street the apartment building is on.
The steps up to my third-floor apartment.
The entrance to my apartment.
The view out my front door.
My third-floor 16’ x 8’ one-room apartment has a bathroom in the corner separated from the rest of the room with a curtain. The walls were painted and the floor was tiled before I moved in, so it has a pretty shiny look to it. My neighbors are friendly and there are always several kids playing or hanging out on the steps up to the third floor. For how many people are living in such a small place, things are really quite quiet. It also feels like a very safe place to live. The owner’s brother lives in the apartment complex and works as an all-night security guard at a mechanic’s shop across the street. Whatever time I come home he is always outside. The parking lot where we sometimes park the project pickup truck overnight is also just down the block.
My only complaint with the apartment is the leaky roof. Instead of having a normal peak, the part of the roof over my apartment slopes inward to a gutter that runs the length of the room. When the first big rainstorm hit, the gutter was filled with trash and began to overflow. At 11pm I woke up to a wet bed and a half-inch or water on the floor. Cleaning the gutter the next day resolved this problem, but there are still a few leaks in other places that result in a wet floor when it rains hard. These leaks are minor, however, compared with the problems in the neighborhood a few blocks away called Barrio de los Hucos, (neighborhood of the smelly people). The houses there are so close to the creek that when the creek overflows during heavy rainstorms they are flooded with smelly, contaminated water.
My room on the inside.
The not-so-functional roof design.
About 10 days ago I was awaken at 2:25 am by creaks in the roof and then a shaking bed. A 7.1 Richter earthquake off the north coast of Honduras was felt throughout the country. No serious damage was done in Tegucigalpa, but in the northern part of the country houses, walls and a very large bridge were destroyed.
It’s hard to believe that today I have exactly two months left in Honduras. Three months from now I’ll be in Berkeley, California starting grad school. It should be a change of pace.
