Climbing the hills

Monday started out really early, about 6:30 for breakfast in the hotel dining room. I'm not sure but they seem to be the slowest restaurant I've ever been in, even coffee takes 10-15 minutes. The other side of it was that even though our minder said she wanted to be going by 7:30 it was really closer to 8:30 by the time we actually left.
We drove to a small town a few miles from Cobán, San Juan Chamelco, where the head offices of Food for the Hungry are located and met the local Director Shane Hoffner and his wife Cali. They are both young and just learning Spanish, but seemed very dedicated and competent. His background is Civil Engineering and hers is Health Promotion, so they have good backgrounds for their work. We were only in the office for a few minutes and I was racing around to get the supplies for my had washing demonstration. We had purchased some soap and nylon stockings to put the soap in the night before and a bottle to use for the “tippytap” demonstration. Then we all piled back into the van for a trip on a very rough road to a small mountain community where the health promotion was taking place.
When we arrived they were already involved in the program, with a very animated woman giving an pep talk on hand washing to about 60 ladies from the area. She was speaking in the local native indian language and the woman were paying very close attention and responding to her talk. She was in modern dress but the audience women were all dressed in very elaborate, traditional costumes There were many that were hand embroidered, and some in traditional styles but using modern materials. The clothes were beautiful and I took a number of photos of them, which they seemed to be proud to pose for.
After the lady spoke, Cali, Shane's wife spoke. She is a beginning Spanish speaker but gamely gave a talk about hand washing and children, then did the old trick of putting hand lotion on her hands then glitter. Then by shaking hands with another person, some of the glitter and lotion came off on that persons hands who shook anothers hands and glitter came off again and the third person, and so on. It's a simple but effective game to play to demonstrate how bacteria are transferred from person to person. Next I did my demonstration with my water bottle. We used the same ladies to show that washing can remove the glitter/bacteria. I spoke in Spanish then someone translated it into the Indian dialect. It went okay, but my point was that it didn't use much water, and most of the women in the audience had running water in their homes and didn't need to conserve. It rains a lot and there are lots of springs so many villages have some sort of water system. The part about washing the glitter off their hands made more sense to them, it had a practical purpose. In all, I thought my presentation was sort of lame next to the ladies talk. She then followed my with an elaborate skit about a baby with diarrhea and had everyone's complete attention.
After I spoke I set up the solar stove outside to try it out. In my rush to get going I didn't bring a small pot so the one I ended up with was too large to heat up the water quickly, but the outside of the pot got hot. The ladies were really interested and crowded around wanting to know how it worked, so Susan and I took turns explaining it. That turned out to be the big hit of the day, so that was good. There is a lot of cloudy weather and rain and many people feel that a solar stove can only be a backup to wood burning. There is quite a lot of deforestation going on so that is a big issue.
Stan Withee was there looking at the water system. They have a chlorination system there but it doesn't work very well and they don't know how to manage it. Stan collected a sample for me to test for bacteria.
After that Stan and Shane were going out to look at a couple of other water systems and asked if I wanted to go along. With such short notice Susan and I had to race around to get our stuff collected and we got scattered . I ended up leaving my pack with my water bottle and laptop with Susan and took off in the van. We went to another community further up the road. They had a system where they had to pump water up to a high distribution tank. It was very expensive to run and didn't provide enough water for the people. The question was whether the pumps were working right or whether there were leaks in the system.
We hiked up the whole length of the pipe through very dense brush to measure the distance to the upper tank. The local men guided us up the hill, chopping the brush with machetes. There were beautiful flowers and plants everywhere but it was a struggle and very slippery and muddy from the rain. On top we took GPS measurements of the elevation and checked the tank. Everything seemed to be okay with their water system. Stan offered advice to them about simple things like making sure there were no leaking water faucets at peoples homes, or that they make sure they don't overfill the tanks and waste water they have pumped. He also examined their pumps to see that they were working adequately.
I thought that they had a very sophisticated and complicated system for such a small community, but that they seemed very comfortable with running it.
We then looked at another community even further up the road at a higher elevation. Our van couldn't climb the steep road and so we ended up walking up to the houses. There was no electricity there and the only year round functioning spring was below the homes, and it was small so there was no opportunity to pump adequate water up to the homes. The best that Stan could offer was to do a simple survey to show where the water pipe could be brought out to the edge of the road so that they could have a more convenient tank to store their water. Also we made suggestions about how to fence off the area to keep animals out and to cover the spring so that mud and debris didn't get into the water. We also took a sample to check for bacteria.
We finally got back to Cobán about 6 pm. I was really tired and muddy from all the climbing, plus I had several water samples to set up and incubate. It had been a long day, but it was fun. We rested for a while and took showers and got to bed about 11. I'm still concerned about my workshop on Thursday and need to go to the mercado to look for stove parts to build a rocket stove for a demonstration. I hope we will have time on Tuesday to look.