December 11, 2007

Blog

Hey all, Feliz Navidad.
I haven’t blogged in awhile and I think that is directly related to the amount of exciting things going on. Its been a little slow lately, but that is ok I think things are going to speed up with the new year and maybe life will be a little more exciting then.

I also haven’t blogged anything work related lately so this is a little work update before the holidays, hopefully all of the office-bound readers will check before heading home.

Anyhow, like I said things have been a little slow. My counterpart organization just finished up a round of water projects that I had very little to do with since I got to Honduras pretty late in the project but they are starting a new round of projects in new communities in January (hopefully January, but I’m afraid that means February). If things go well, I can manage to be an integral part of those projects.

Last week in an attempt to prepare for the new projects I gave a surveying class to the 3 technicians from the JAM (my counterpart agency). All of the new water projects will be gravity-fed systems with a conduction line and tank followed by a distribution network. Someone is going to need to survey all of these in order to properly design flow rates and such, so I decided to try and train the technicians so that I wouldn’t have to do all of the surveys. I like surveying and I wouldn’t mind doing them all myself, but that would also be a little risky since I am a PC volunteer and can get sent home for such ridiculous things as riding a motorcycle or not taking a god-awful amount of malaria medication. If I can train someone else to do it then there is less of a problem for the organization when I get a medivac for getting hit by a car (very probable in Danlí) or contract bird flu (I bought 2 ducks last time I went to the campo). So I wrote up a little manual and had a 3-day training in surveying with a theodolite. I invited two other PCV wat/san volunteers to help. The classes were about 7 hours long with class time and field work each day. My Spanish hits a really big wall at hour 3 so having the extra help was really a good thing. The class went surprisingly well and I will follow up with more field training after the New Year. I will most likely go with each technician on their first survey and make sure everything is going well. After I can see that they are capable of doing an accurate survey, I will make up some diplomas so that in the future they could potentially find work surveying for other organizations. If this works I will feel pretty good about it. Check out the pics below:

Preparing the night before in casa

In the field, notice the world war II era theodolite in front

Two of the technicians