Day 4

Continuation of Blog days 4 and 5 October 23 and 24
Bonifacio picked us up at 8:30 to go out to the site of the workshop. Maria Elena was with us and we stopped to buy some fruit to give out for a break . With a nutritionist with us we really couldn't give out Coca Cola and sweet breads like they often do. We picked up Cecelia Barry from the house where she was staying with friends of hers and arrived at the site at about 9:15. There was not a soul there! I thought it was going to be a disaster. Some guys showed up with a bunch of chairs and a bit tarp for a sun shade that Bonifacio rented and they started setting it all up in the patio of the community center. I was semi – freaked that no one was coming but I started racing around fluffing up my papers anyway. As I looked at about 9:50 cars started arriving and people started walking up to the center, and in about 10 minutes it went from nobody to about 40 people. I couldn't believe that there were people standing in the back behind all the full chairs! It was a great mix of community members and various NGO people from at least 10 different organizations.
My outline was to start with the statistics about child mortality due to to drinking contaminated water, in some parts of the world up to 40% of hospital admissions for children are due to diarrhea and dehydration, and in Mexico 5% of children under 5 die of it. Then after that I started in on the causes of the deaths, mostly contaminated water. I asked the community members who filled up the front row to help me with my Spanish pronunciation, so it was like a Greek Chorus with me saying a word and them repeating in back in unison correctly!
After I talked about how we could test the water, I set up stations where they could practice pipetting. I added a little Coca Cola to some water so they could see what they were pipetting and had everyone practice being able to dispense exactly one ml of water. It's a little awkward at first, but eventually most of them got it. Then we passed out the testing kits. Dr Metcalf calls them Portable Microbiology Laboratories, and they cost me $65 each plus shipping. I only had 10 so I asked people to share and they did. I also asked Bonifacio to help decide who should get them so that they wouldn't be wasted.
The problem was that everyone was so excited to start testing that they weren't listening to closely and then had to asked repeated questions of me. In the future for sure I will need trained assistants to help, because I had to race around and help people. Some did better than others but everyone was enthusiastic. They all had brought samples of water to be tested so that was great, we had a lot of different things to try.
The punch line always is when I tell them how they have to incubate the samples for 24 hours and ask how they think they can do that. Then I pull my pouch out from inside my shirt and they all laugh. I show how they can tuck the samples inside their pants or down their shirt. I tell them to pretend they are incubating an egg like a chicken ,which they think is hilarious. Then we took a nice break where we served fruit and water.
After the break we got started on how we could make contaminated water potable. I had set up my solar stove with a pot of water in the morning, and by break time the water was really hot. I showed my wax temperature gauge – everyone called it a little thermometer, which was close enough. Then we started in making more stoves. I say started, but it really was a wild scene. Everyone racing around with pieces of cardboard and knives, cutting stuff up. I told them to be careful, I fainted at the sight of blood, which again they thought was funny. Maybe if my Spanish was better I could be a comedian. The sight of everyone down on the floor, cutting and taping things together was exactly like a third grade crafts project. After they made their stoves they covered them with aluminum foil and as much school glue got on them as on the stoves but it was definitely a great hands on project.
We set the stoves out in the sun to dry started cleaning up, there were several garbage bags full of cardboard scraps that some of the ladies took home for stove fuel.
Then I did one of several things I am proud of, I had everyone fill out an address list, with phones, addresses and emails. It was amazing that many of these NGO organizations didn't know about each other before and spent a lot of time at the workshop talking. I hope I started them networking a little at least.
I was so mentally exausted at that point that I could barely think, but everyone said that they had an interesting day and would be coming back tomorrow. I think it was partly to see how their water samples turned out and partly to collect their stoves, but I was happy to hear that they would be returning.
On the way back to town, Maria Elena and I stopped at the grocery store and picked up some rice and beans and vegetables for her to cook in the solar stoves. She also got a dozen eggs to hard boil, and some onions and other spices to demonstrate that families could make good tasting meals on their stoves. After we got back to the hotel I went straight to my room to take a nap. Unfortunately I was so wired that I couldn't sleep and so I got back up and started fussing about Saturday's program.