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The Agua Clara Trip was an enlightening trip on a social and academic level. We spent three nights in the small town of Agalteca, where us students were paired up and sent to live in the town's people's homes. A woman named Petrona graciously opened her home to me and Katie. She had three children who were all grown and two married with children. They all lived in town and some even lived in her home, but she kicked her grandchildren out of their beds so that we could have somewhere to sleep. In our limited Spanish, we tried to convey our thanks to her and spend time with her family.
Her second daughter was inspiring because she was attending a university in Tegucigalpa to become a professor in the natural sciences. First of all, the city is very dangerous and few people want to send their children there, even though it is one of the few places to get a good education. After our stay in Honduras, we realized that education was a huge need. Especially since many people would not use the clean water we produced because they feared the chlorine. As American Engineers, we realized we could only do so much to help, but this Honduran woman who was educating herself, could connect to her people so much better and hopefully educate them to better their standards of living. That one women, raised in a poor town with no clean water, will probably end up doing more for getting clean water to Hondurans than I could.
I think this project is great because it is all about empowerment of the Hondurans. Our stay in Honduras has given me new energy to devote to the project and help the people we visited over winter break.

Steve Southern's Journal Entry

I know some people actively wrote in journals while on the trip, but I have never been one to write down my thoughts from day to day. Thus I will give my overall reflections on the trip relating to both AguaClara and my personal realizations and bring in events as I remember them.

Prior to visiting Honduras, my only time off U.S soil was a little trip through Canada that served as a shortcut between New York and Michigan. Needless to say, not a vastly different cultural experience. I knew two weeks in Honduras wouldn't even be close to anything I had ever experienced, yet even with this mindset, I still was blown away by some of the things I saw. Perhaps the most striking of all activities was the first day's visit to a remote village up in the mountains. We drove for what must have been over an hour up a winding unpaved road, and when the vans could go no further, we hiked for another half an hour or so. Yet despite being in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, there were these people, just going about their lives, and it really helped put some perspective on what AguaClara is doing. It's one thing to have someone stand in the front of a classroom and tell you that there are x number of people in the world without access to safe water, but to actually see a village of real people just like any of us with a water system that consisted of no treatment and a what amounted to hoses running into each house really drove home the necessity of doing what we could to help those without the most basic of human needs.

The family stays were also an invaluable experience as we got to spend three days seeing what life was like in a village where one of our plants would soon be operating. Cold showers, sleeping with the ants, and eating the same food every day were not the most enjoyable activities, but my host family was the nicest group of people. Even though they didn't have much, they gave us all they had to offer to make our stay as pleasant as possible, and through our dinnertime conversations with them (translated by Nicolas of course) we learned a good deal about Honduras and its people.

One realization that I had while down there was that our team was only a small fraction of the solution to providing clean drinking water to all. There were numerous other organizations that were doing their best to tackle the same issue in a variety of ways. Along with seeing functional AguaClara plants (which was awesome), we also saw conventional plants, the FIME plant, ADEC's tanks, and the filtered pots. It was nice to see so many other caring people working in a variety of creative ways to achieve the same goal. It was just a shame that some of the methods involved perpetual dependence on foreign help instead of helping the Hondurans help themselves.

I would say that going on this trip is by far the most important thing that a member can get out of being on this team. This does not mean that people should join simply to go to Honduras, and obviously there is plenty to be learned doing design and research work. But long after each of us has graduated and gone on to do something else and long after the AguaClara technology has evolved to the point that our individual contributions to the team have become little more than an historical curiosity in a old report, we will remember our experiences in Honduras and for me it will always remind me that I should use my education to solve problems that will help people less fortunate than myself.