1-28-11
I had a meeting last night with my town’s ADESCO directiva and the comité de agua. We needed to discuss the legal rights to the land that we’re proposing to use for our new water system, as well as some the points of concern that the engineers from Engineers Without Borders raised with me last time I spoke with them on the phone.
Sounds boring, right?
Try sitting through a three hour meeting about it. Truthfully, the three hours were completely unnecessary. All the business we had to do could have been finished within forty-five minutes, tops. But in a Salvadoran meeting, everyone gets a turn at the microphone, so to speak. Actually, everyone usually gets five turns. (And by everyone, I mean every man – the two women present didn’t utter a word all evening, despite the fact that one of them holds the position of vocal – spokesperson. I can’t imagine what they think of me – I’m a loudmouth and the loud things that come out of my mouth are usually in exceedingly poor Spanish.) While I commend the democratic process, it does make for some very long meetings. Last night, for example, we spent thirty minutes – thirty minutes – trying to decide whether to have the next meeting on a Friday or a Saturday. And you guys that my life was all glamour and pit toilets.
My part of the meeting only took about fifteen minutes; I had to relay the concerns of the engineers and get some feedback. I told them that the engineers wanted to know if it was possible to build Bio-sand Filters for the old water source, rather than build a whole new system. The Bio-sand filters sift out parasites, metals, and some types of chemicals,. The directiva didn’t agree on much that night, but they were all quite adamant that no, this wouldn’t do. According to them, the problem isn’t simply the contamination, it’s that the water source almost completely dries up from mid-February through April (which I’m so looking forward to).
Fair enough, it doesn’t make much sense to build expensive filters for a water source that may, for all we know, dry up completely in a few years. If we’re going to go ahead and stick with the new water source, I told them, there were some concerns on behalf of the engineers. First of all, they want us to destroy the old spring box, which is (according to the engineers) a bit too precariously placed to be safe. My community were hesitant at first, balking at the word “destroy”, but I promised them we wouldn’t do anything until we had a firm promise from the engineers that they’d do our project. But is it possible? The comité de agua assured me that it was, although they pointed out that, if they destroyed it, the engineers would have to pay for the materials to build a new one, since they don’t have money for it.
Sounds like a fair compromise to me. The second (and largest) concern was the state of the path leading up to the water source. I told my community that, while I understood that they would be doing the work of hauling materials, the engineers would still have to go up there occasionally, and the national board of EWB wouldn’t approve a project that they perceived to be dangerous to their volunteers. Everybody looked a little confused for a minute, and then someone said, ¿el camino? ¿peligroso? The path? Dangerous?
Yes, I said, the engineers were worried about a few spots close to the water source…
Then Benjamin, the treasurer, nodded knowingly and said, Oh, sí. Los norteamericanos son muy estrictos sobre la seguridad. Oh, yes. The North Americans are very strict about safety.
If by strict you mean that most Americans would see it as mildly dangerous to haul tools, metal tubing, and bags of cement up an eighteen-inch wide path on the edge of a thirty-foot, bracken-laden cliff with sharp rocks at the bottom, where said path is so badly fallen away in spots that it’s required to jump to safety – yes. Yes we are.
With some reluctance, the rest of the group granted that Benjamin was probably right – the sad reality of working with an American NGO is that you have to make sure people aren’t going to die and stuff during your project. So, it was finally agreed that, if the engineers insisted, they could fix the path to make it safer before the project started. Well hoo-ray for the art of compromise. Someday, I’m gonna make an awesome diplomat. If I can get ten Salvadoran men to agree that perhaps safety should be considered in any capacity for any reason, feuding nations will be a walk in the park.
