Kendra stayed in the community working on the stuff that still needs
to be solved. Among those are the missing leaks that they system still
has, and the planning sessions with the water board and the president
of the community about going to the other communities and the
responsabilities of each member of the ¨Junta de Agua¨ on the meeting.
A little overview on our last week:
On Monday we had a community meeting where we were welcomed once
again, and where we proposed our plans and time frame in this stay. We
stated that although we will help them in the immediate future to get
their water system running continously but we want to focus on
building water board and community leaders capacity on helping others
with similar problems. We asked for their patience, time and effort in
our stay in the community to have a better working relationships and
better results. In the afternoon we worked with the operators on
finding leaks, and just getting a better sense of how their work was
coming along since we left.
On Tuesday, we met with Telmo, the president of the 33
community-organization and arranged the meeting in the other
communities, Encañada and Yanamaru. We are going to Yanamaru, this
Tuesday, and to La Encañada this Wednesday. He said that walking to la
Encañada will take up to two hours, so , that day will be pretty much
done with that activity. With the water board and Telmo we planned
that based on the other community-our Junta de Agua´s interaction and
working ability, which we believe will be good, we/Junta de Agua will
have future and more focused meeting-workshops in the communities.
On Wednesday, we went to Mera, the city where the officials and the
engineers auditing the project work. We had a meeting with the mayor
and the engineer in charge of the audit. They called the
contractor-constructor and urged him to attend to the communities
needs of a finished water system as soon as possible. We went with
Esteban, Basilio, Telmo Parra, the new elected president, Leticia,
Elizabeth, and Tito. In other words, we had a good turno out, and I
would say were succesful communicating what we wanted. I can only say
that they are very good dealing with the authorities. I can only hope
that it will have the desired effects.
On Thursday we worked on the system chlorinator. We cleaned it, and
made it almost functional. We were required to drill a hole into the
water pipe coming from the filter to the first storing tank, in order
to obtain cleaner water to be used on the chlorinating mechanism.
Still, we weren´t able to completely succeed, since the water flow to
the chlorinator tank is too slow. We are already thinking about making
another hole to get more head and higher flow. We haven´t done it.
In the afternoon we planned the meeting with the community of La
Encañada and assigned roles to the members of the water board on
specific tasks such as moderator and final plan master.
Friday. We took the kids and several adults of the community to the
captation were the water enters the system to a ´minga-capacitacion´
where we worked on cleaning the system as we were explaining the
importance, functioning, and care of that part of the system. We had
news that some kids that live nearby take showers and play in the
river, upstream of where the water enters the system. We talked
specially to those kids, but never singling them out. We let the kids
work with the adults and with us on cleaning the area and the tanks.
On the afternoon we cleaned the clogged filter and hypothesized about
the causes of the rapid clogging of it. We think that algae play a
big role, and bought plastic to cover from the sun and prevent more
algae from growing.
Today, I came to Puyo to buy paint to paint the water tower, and to
find a hose to improve the way water enters the filter. I couldn´t
find the right hose in all of Puyo, so I´m going to call the
contractor, who supposedly is coming this Monday and ask him to bring
it from his city. Kendra stayed, probably washing the sand we took out
from the filter yesterday and still looking for more ways to find and
repair the leaks the system has.
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