Yeah, I can TOTALLY build you a water system…

12-17-10

As some of you may know, I came to El Salvador as a Rural Health and Sanitation volunteer.  I assumed that my job would be to teach about basic health and hygiene.  I believed I’d spend the majority of the time in the centro escolar of my town, teaching kids and teenagers and adults about health management and nutrition.  And I have done some of that.  But what my town needs more than anything is a new water system.

When my counterpart, Don Alfredo, told me that a couple of months ago, I asked the obvious question: Why?  What’s wrong with our current source that I have been drinking every day for the last 6 months??  Oh, he told me, it’s contaminated.

Excuse me?  Could we elaborate on that just a touch????

So it turns out that our water is bad because, aside from not running consistently, it’s contaminated by parasites, pesticides, and heavy metals like iron.  He then took me up to our water source and showed me the large deposits of iron that were visible throughout the stream that fed our system.  As always with Salvadorans, information is on a need to know basis.  Apparently, I didn’t need to know it when I was just drinking it, but when they needed me to build them a new system, I did.

Sorry.  That was bitter.

In any case, I recognized that having a degree in secondary education and American history made me just slightly less than qualified to design and construct a water storage tank and distribution system for several small communities in mountainous northern El Salvador.  (Why can’t people in developing countries ever have an urgent need to understand the political and economic events that led to the American civil war?  Or having a pressing desire to comprehend the industrial revolution and its far-reaching social consequences?  Just once, I’d like to meet a college grad who actually got to use their degree on a regular basis…)  Being just a tad out of my depths, I started with a phone call to my engineer father, who helped me start to ask the right kind of questions, and then I began an application with Engineers Without Borders.  For those who don’t know, EWB can be a bit of a hit-or-miss situation.  You submit your application for a project to the national board, which they can either choose to approve or not.  If they do, they then put your project on their website for the various chapters around the country to peruse at their convenience, and decide if they want to work with you.  Which leaves a lot to fate, but EWB still seemed like the best shot for a project this expensive.  So, I was working on the application, when…

Serendipity! 

I got an email from one of my bosses at the Peace Corps office, saying that the Rice University chapter of Engineers without Borders was finishing some work in El Salvador, and looking to start a new water project here.  I emailed the chapter’s project leader, and he called me back, informing me that they would be visiting me on the 16^th of December, a Thursday.  As the phone call came through to me on Sunday the 12^th, I didn’t have a lot of time.  I met with the directiva of my town’s ADESCO to arrange food and sleeping arrangements for the six engineers who would be staying with us for a day and night.

I was amazed at how my community really pulled together for this visit.  On two days’ notice, they arranged for the engineers’ meals to be cooked and a place for them to sleep.  They also got the word out somehow about a meeting that the engineers wanted to have with the community about the water project.  They invited people from five communities – our own, Los Alas, as well as Las Minas, Las Brisuelas, El Cablote, and La Loma – all of which are surrounding communities that would benefit from this water project.  Even though Thursday is a work day for most people here – whether that work is in the house, the milpa, or a job in Chalate – people dropped things at a days’ notice to come to the meeting.  We had at least fifty people there.  Our community has been soliciting various institutions and organizations to help with this project for ten years.  They really want this, and jumped at the chance to meet people who might be able to help.

The engineers (or rather, engineering students) got to Los Alas at around 10 am.  There were five students and one professional engineer to mentor them, David Howard.  We didn’t waste any time.  The directiva gathered, and we started the hike up to our new water source, a hike I made for the first time several months ago in the wet season.  It was mercifully dry this time, although as is usual for me, I puffed along at the rear of the line.  For some reason, all the students Rice sent were marathon runners and triathletes and hikers.  It’s like the universe is actually conspiring to make me look bad. 

Well, the hike was a real pain in the butt, but the ends justify the means.  The engineers got to see our beautiful, clean water source, running even after two months of dry weather.  We got back in time for a late lunch (and just in time for me to meet with the Peace Corps Safety and Security coordinator, whom I’d forgotten was coming to do my annual site visit that day).  After that, I showered and rested, and a few members of the directiva took the engineers to the waterfall to swim.  Later in the afternoon, we had the community meeting, which I took a heavy hand in helping to translate (I’m finally beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel with my Spanish skills).  It went well, and a number of community members stayed behind afterwards to chit-chat with the visiting gringos.  After that, we went to Cruz’s house for the always delicious pupusas.  We met with the directiva one last time.  The stressed again how willing they were to work, how much they wanted this project, and how glad they were that the engineers were visiting.  And then they whipped out this beautiful, 70-page solicitud for the water project that they had written three years ago for a different organization.  It had measurements, calculations, budgets, designs, cost-benefit analyses, and pretty much any other information a prospective NGO could want.

Which might have been useful when I was actually writing the EWB application.  Need to know, Emilie.  Need to know.

I was torn between being annoyed and thrilled, because the engineers were super impressed.  One of them said that the information in it was enough to save them one whole trip.  Apparently, the calculations were a huge part of their prep work.

While I hope this solicitud tips the balance in our favor (Rice is visiting 4 or 5 other prospective work sites this week), I’m not sure it will.  I don’t think that Rice will be able to find another community that could possibly be a better partner than mine.  My community wants and needs this system so desperately; they are willing to do anything.  They will do all the work required of them, and I’d bet good money (even on $300 monthly salary) that they’ll do it faster than these engineers could imagine.

But what they could find is an equally needy community with an easier project.  Ours presents several difficulties.  First of all, the water source is five kilometers away from the community, which is a whole lot of tubing.  Second, the walk up the source is difficult to traverse, only passable on foot, and even dangerous in some places, which will make it hard to get materials up there.  Although my community would be doing pretty much all of the lifting and hauling, I could see some of the engineers were a little concerned about hike up.  Third, we’re not sure of the altitude of the water source (they forgot to bring their GPS on the walk), but we have reason to believe that it’s several hundred meters, which means a hell of a lot of water pressure.  That in turn means that, instead of using PVC pipe, they’ll probably have to work with galvanized steel, which I’ve been told is not only 10-15 times more expensive, but a challenge to work with.  My community did everything right, demonstrated in every way that they would be the perfect partner for an EWB project, but they still might not get chosen to have their project done.

The morning the engineers were leaving, I sat outside talking to their professional mentor, David.  I told him I knew that my project presented difficulties and could see how it might impede their ability to help us.  And then I shared some of my own frustrations.

As Peace Corps volunteers, they send us out here and tell us to help educate our communities.  Teach them, they say.  Teach them to wash their hands before meals and after using the latrine.  Teach them to boil their water and eat more vegetables.  Teach them to go to the doctor and get regular check-ups.  Teach them about safe sex and why it’s important.  Teach them how to keep themselves healthy. Teach them to be healthy. 

Teach them to be healthy.  Teach them.

But how do you teach someone to be healthy when their body is being slowly poisoned by the water they’re drinking?  How do you teach them when their kidneys are failing them because they’ve been drinking water full of iron for 50 years?  How do you teach them when their children have parasites that make them vomit so much their bodies dehydrate and shrink?  How do you teach them out of that situation?  How do you take all that you’ve come armed with, your mind and intellect and desire to help them, and turn it into clean, safe water for them to drink?  How do you do it?

They need help that I can’t give, but they’re looking to me to find it.