Wednesday, January 7, 2009
As morning approached, Sarah, Nadia, and other girls plotted how to pull a prank on the boys. Instead of joining the plot, I went to sleep and waited for the girls to wake up to carry out the prank. I woke up early in the morning and stared at the dark room. Moreover, I waited for Nadia to move to confirm it is not 2am but 5am. When she started to get up, I knew that it was time to get up too. I went to take nice cold shower. In the end, the plot on the boys was never carried out.
We had breakfast in CEASO, and once again the meal was delicious. After we packed the vans with our luggage, we drove to Tamara for two hours. At Tamara, we met our host families while the driver goes to the Metromall to pick up the mechanical engineering student (Contact: Jorge Morazan 9906-6198).
I met my family. The name of my host mother is Reina Elizabeth Iainez 265-4370, Cel: 9734-6596; Familia: Jacome Iainez. She lives with her two daughters and her husband. In addition, there is also a little and a cute puppy. I had the same host family as Sarah. My host mother also has three sons in the USA (Indiana, Florida, and Texas). One of the sons is in jail and waiting to be deported in February.
After a short talk with my host mother with Sarah, Lalo, and Po-Hsun, I went to the Four Communities to check out the construction process on the water plant. The plant is made up of bricks, metal rods and concrete. The construction workers were using concrete to connect the bricks and to make the pillars. Then the engineer of the water plant introduced himself and explained the layout of the water plant. There is so much work to be done. After viewing the plant, we went to eat in Comedor Willy. I ordered potato salad, rice, and some meat. Then we visited Junta of Zambrano (9965-7089). Together, we went to the distribution tank to check on the CCC.
Once again, we have to climb to the top of the distribution tanks. There are two distribution tanks. One of the tanks is an older version that does not work. The older version uses chorine tablet. Since each tablet dissolved at different length of time, the chlorine treatment in the water is very poor. The second tank, which is the new one, uses liquid chlorine dripping into the huge tank. The operator explained the system thoroughly and answered our concerns. He also performed a chorine test to show that the chlorine level is not too high. However, the operators explained that the water in the community may still have high chlorine concentration because the water comes from this distribution tank and other tanks. So a problem still exists because the other tanks seem to put more chlorine into its water. Oh, I forgot to mention that this distribution tank is only treated with chloride because the turbidity does not meet the requirement.
While I visited the construction and distribution tanks, half of the AguaClara group went to the Tamara plant with the UNAH mechanical engineering students to build the dose controller developed by Nicole Ceci. Since everyone had different ideas and thought processes, there were many arguments in the Tamara group on how to setup the dose controller.
Around 6pm, the whole group attended the Tamara Junta Meeting with dinner at the Chinese Restaurant Via Orient. The bill for the dinner came to be around 3000 lempira. We ordered large plates of: vegetable fried rice, shrimp fried rice, chow mein, etc. When I thought most of the food are already seasoned enough, many members in the group dumped extra hot sauce, salt into the dish. Why? It is really plain? Problems with taste buds??
Then we drove back to Tamara to sleep with our host families. There are two full size beds in our room. Sarah and I each had our own bed. The room was decently clean. Our host family seems to be doing fairly well at the expense of the separation of family members overseas. In the past, my mother also experienced the same thing except her father was not great man. Her father, my grandfather spent most of his earning on beer and cigars. As a result, he did not send a lot or enough money to his family. In my opinion, the host family values family more than my grandfather.