Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Hola desde El Salvador #12 / Filters are here!

Dear family and friends,

I hope that this email finds you all enjoying the holiday season and looking forward to time with dear family and friends. I am a little sad that I will not be able to make it home for Christmas this year to see my U.S. family and friends, but I am thankful that I will be with my Salvadoran family – all of the wonderful people of El Amatón that have supported and upheld me during these last three years. My time here is growing short (I return to the U.S. in April) and I want to spend as much time with my adopted community as possible. Of course, the invitation is still open to anyone who would like to come and visit during my final months!



Bio-Sand Filters Project

I write with good news -- the bio-sand filters are finally here! In October I trained the Health Committee, and together we held community meetings on basic hygiene and sanitation and filter use and maintenance. The filters were delivered from the Pure Water project in Honduras near the end of November, and I am currently in the process of installing as many as possible with the Health Committee. We are hopeful that these filters will nearly eliminate gastrointestinal diseases caused by bacteria and parasites. THANK YOU to all who helped make this a reality!


HYGIENE EDUCATION PHOTOS:

Carlos identifies good hygiene practices in the Health Committee training


Marlene explains filter maintenance in the all-community training on filter use




FILTER DELIVERY PHOTOS:

Photo of the filter with logos of donors and technical support organization: Wildwood Presbyterian Church (left side), Holden Village (above front), the Burnt Hills Rotary Club (center front), Pure Water for the World (bottom front). The Peace Corps logo is on the right side of the filter because we also received a donation from the Peace Corps Partnership Water and Sanitation Fund.





Delivering filters by hand-cart to the homes

Loading filters on don Santiago’s ox-cart for delivery




FILTER INSTALLATION:

Alexander adding the sand to a filter while kids watch

Girls with their family’s newly installed filter, as they begin 5 days of pouring water through to clean the filter



We are still battling the Ministry of Health bureaucracy to get them to express support for the biosand filters project before the municipal authorities. (We have had some problems because the Ministry usually only supports chlorination systems. However, since we suspect that the water has organic material, chlorination without pretreatment is not recommended.) My patience is wearing a bit thin, but I have to think that the months of phone calls and presentations and meetings will convince them in the end.

If you are interested in more information and pictures of the progress of the bio-sand filters project, click here: Project Report – El Amaton Biosand Filters – Dec 2007.


Water System Infrastructure Project

We´re also still plugging away at the legal issues with the help of the Institute for Human Rights at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA). Right now the Mayor has agreed to sign a shared administration contract (which would give the community control over all decisions regarding the project) and our main challenge is trying to obtain legal permission to the well.

Fundraising for the solar panels project (to decrease the energy costs of pumping water from the well to the community and make the project more sustainable) is going slowly and I am getting discouraged. We have the support of three Rotary Clubs and four Districts, but we are still far from our Rotary goal. We also have a proposal in with the Ministry of Foreign Relations to see if we can obtain support from international donors, but with such a small community I am afraid we will not be competitive. If you are interested in helping (and especially if you have Rotary contacts), please visit http://www.waterforelsalvador.blogspot.com/.

For now, the water from the project is not falling regularly, and even when it did fall a few times people were so worried about how much it will cost that they were hesitant to use it. Since dry season is setting in, water is getting scarce and has stopped completely in the public tap several times. We were without any water two weeks ago, so it was down the bluff to haul water (one hour per trip). Now that the creek has dried up, we can only obtain drinking and cooking water from the natural wells. For washing clothes, we are making the trek to the river contaminated with human sewage...something that will continue unless we can get this solar panel project off the ground to pump water from the well to the community sustainably. It´s frustrating to have been here three years and not yet see a change in supply of this most basic need, despite my best efforts. Sigamos en la lucha…We continue in the struggle.




Soil Conservation

On a brighter note, the soil conservation project has had great results! We did some monitoring visits to the fields where we dug the acequias (water infiltration ditches) in April. Farmers have already seen improvements in their crops and in water infiltration. One farmer reported that the cornfield in the lower part of his field was always buried with eroded soil before the construction of the acequias. This year, however, he has not observed soil erosion and the corn in the lower portion of the field has been very productive. Another farmer told us how in years past, strong currents of water passed and swept away the bean plants, but this year no strong currents have passed and the beans have produced very well. I wasn’t expecting to see such immediate results (just one growing season), so this was a nice surprise!


Farmers with their water infiltration ditches among corn and bean crops, Sept. 2007.



Home Gardens

We reaped the majority of our harvest of semi-hydroponic tomatoes, sweet peppers, radishes, and broccoli in September and October. Fresh tomatoes and sweet peppers are soooo good … tomatoes roasted, peeled, and mashed up with mint in a yummy sauce called chismol and peppers roasted on the plancha.

Me with harvest of radishes from my flat

Linda harvesting tomatoes in her aunt, Tita’s, garden





Youth Environmental Group

The Youth Ecological Club finished up a really active year with an Earth Celebration Day of environmental dramas and a hike to the cloud forest of the volcano (inactive, we hope) that towers over the village. It is a beautiful, if demanding, hike. The path begins winding through coffee farms and rocky fields of corn and beans, then shifts to tropical dry forest, and at the highest elevations, moist cloud forest. Upon reaching the summit, we hiked down to the bottom of the crater, where the kids had a great time playing soccer and swinging on vines! A fun end to a year of hard work on their part.

Left: Magali weeding around one of the trees we planted in the community water sources

Right: Cristina and I about half way up the Cerro (she’s already a little tired!)






Harvest Time

Harvest time is now in full swing here in El Amatón, a bit late due to the delayed onset of the rainy season. There has been a whirl of agricultural activity as people pull up and thresh beans and mound up and de-grain dried ears of corn in their fields – and then, without hardly taking a deep breath, plunge into the coffee-picking frenzy that will last until early February. After all the paperwork and bureaucracy and politics of the water projects, it has been great for me to engage in real, physical work of the various harvests. I’ve gone to pick coffee with Lidia on her father’s farm, a basket strapped around my waist to catch the red-purple beans as I run my hands down the branches. Then it was off to the frijolar to pull up and thresh beans with don Aroldo and his sons. And last weekend I went with Melvin and his family to tapizcar corn, or break off the dried ears of corn from the stalk (still in their husks) and toss them into piles, to be mounded up into a single pile at the end of the day for de-graining. Since each pile we made drew from a pretty large area, my third-base to first-base throw from my softball days (wayyyyyyy back when) came in pretty handy! There is nothing like working in the fields in the fresh air to leave behind all the frustrating bureaucracy that accompanies community development projects – and to really feel like a part of the family and community.

COFFEE HARVEST:


Left: Elias and me picking coffee

Right: Lorena (Lidia’s niece) picking coffee




BEAN HARVEST:

Aroldo and son Marcos threshing the first bean crop in August




CORN HARVEST:


don Mamerto and Rudy tossing dried ears of corn into a pile

Aroldo and Melvin pick ears of corn below their pile



Congrats to those who have made it to the bottom of the latest issue of “Hola desde El Salvador.” I wish you all a very merry Christmas and look forward to hearing from you.

Con amor desde El Salvador,

Megan

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