I would be lying if I said that this trip to Bolivia has been all fun and games. Our frustration with our experiences here peaked in the past month, when I picked up a parasitic infection on a trip back to Santa Cruz from our project site to battle through another chapter of sorting out our immigration situation (which needless to say, continued to be a bureaucratic nightmare). I recovered from it fine, after an educational visit to a private Bolivian hospital (my illness wasn´t really that bad, but we didn´t know any doctors and the hospital is conveniently located a short walk from our beloved Hotel Aeronáutico) and Janaki and I restarted work again later in the week (our new employees diligently continued in Ascensión without us, they´re good kids).
Our frustrations resurfaced a couple of weeks later when someone snuck into our room in Ascensión and stole the majority of the money that we had with us to pay for project supplies and the wages of our employees (we are getting reimbursed). This was especially inconvenient because we have no way of accessing our bank accounts in Ascensión. We ended up being fine, however, and work with the project has continued as normal.
Which brings us to the project...
Back in October, when we were still building practice filters in Santa Cruz, we thought that the pilot project would be just the beginning.... get it done in a month or two, write up a report for funding organizations about how great everything went, and wait for the real funds to start coming into CEAGUAC to cover future projects... right...
Now, more than 4 months into our trip, and more than 3 months after we first disembarked from the now all-too-familiar 5.5 hour ride on the Trans-Guarayos bus from Santa Cruz to Ascensión, we still haven´t installed the first of our 30 filters.
How can this be?
Well... we have faced, and continue to face 2 major obstacles to installing a filter in someone´s house.
Making filter boxes - we were so excited in Santa Cruz, when we first build a working filter box, but the problems that caused the first ones to break have continued to haunt us. Of the 34 filter boxes we have poured in Bolivia so far, an unimpressive 14 have been successfully demolded without breaking. The problems, we have learned, come from the molds themselves. The concrete gets stuck in grooves and minor-looking imperfections in the molds, causing the filter boxes to break as we try to take the molds off the filters. We have done our best to fix this problem - taking the molds to 3 different welders in Ascensión, and more recently, using metal sand paper and a grinder to try to smooth out the bumps, and now epoxy to try to fill in some of the troublesome grooves. We´ll try to make some more on Monday to test our latest attempt, but so far, our efforts have only brought sporadic success.
Getting the proper flow rate - For the filters to work water needs to flow through them at about 1 L per 60 seconds. If it´s much faster, the filters won´t properly treat the water, and if it´s much slower the users might become impatient and not want to use their filter. To get the right flow rate, the employees and us have spent countless hours preparing media and installing practice filters at our work site. Finally, on about our 12th attempt we reached that illusive flow rate of 1 L per minute...Wonderful! Except that we recently found out that CAWST is now recommending a flow rate of a 1L per 100 seconds to ensure that the filters work at optimal efficiency. This has lead us to have to go hunting around Ascensión for the right sand for the job... a process that is ongoing.
Add to these problems the fact that the beginning of the project was delayed for a month for various reasons (see October and early November blog entries), we lost half of our potential workdays in November to getting a run-around from immigration and the Santa Cruz branch of INTERPOL, and we were rendered inefficient in December by a labour dispute with the organization´s sole paid employee at the time (who is now preparing to start working in Switzerland).... and you start to see why we are in the position that we are in.
But... there is a bright side... our new employees, citizens of Ascensión, are continuing to show a great deal of promise and enthusiasm. We´ve finished training them, so they now know everything we do about household water treatment and the biosand filter, and the general principles of hygiene and sanitation on top of their extensive knowledge of local customs, hygiene practices, sanitation issues, and the health problems that face community members.
We now have 4 minds working through our above-mentioned 2 major problems, instead of just 2, as was the case in December.
From here the goal is to get those filters installed, sometime before we go back to Canada in May, and leave them with the know-how and resources necessary to continue working in other communities in eastern Bolivia, and teach others what they have learned.
Wow! long entry, hey? I hope that makes up for the fact that I haven´t been heard from since November.
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2 comments:
Keep up the good work, guys. Good luck.
Traveling in a third world country has numerous challenges, but trying to accomplish anything is obviously much more difficult. It is hard to believe that relatively small problems can be so difficult.
I am impressed by your stick-to-it-ness. You two are obviously up for the challenge. You will probably never again complain about the pace of change in Canada!!
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