Allison Reiko Baugham

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

After a group reflection we were allowed to explore on our own. Nothing too exciting--souvenirs, baleadas, machetes. However afterward we were given several options of things to do that afternoon. I opted to go to the Marcala Plant & then hike to the water source. Being the eager students we are, we raced ahead and left behind those that actually knew the way...We traveled through a coffee plantation and spoke to people along the way, trying to ask for directions. More or less we were headed in the right direction.

Soon we stumbled on an old mud house and met a man. He had missing teeth, a dirt floor, and the biggest smile you could imagine (Eladio, i need your photos!). It was amazing to see someone live so comfortably in a place so remote and separated from the rest of the world; or so we thought.

We thanked him for speaking with us & hiked further to find the water source. We eventually came to the river and decided to head back since it was getting dark. When we passed the man again he invited us into his home & shared fresh plantains with us. We offered to give him money and he refused, but we did it anyway (good deeds are lost on Americans, it seems). He then told us about an accident in the U.S. involving a plane. Little did we know that he knew more about world affairs than we did!

I really wish we could have had more time to speak with him, but being the apprehensive person I am, I couldn't keep people waiting. To think if we had waited and took the correct path we would have missed this opportunity. It was such a wonderful experience and has really summed up my trip to Honduras: people can surprise you, there is a beauty in simplicity, and what makes people happy can redefine the way you will live the rest of your life.

Amelia Symonds

Anastasia Rudenko

Eladio Lopez Rodiguez

Haley Viehman

Heather Hunter

Heather Reed

Henry Zeng

Jeffrey Katz

From Day 5: Tuesday, January 6th

Although we've had three days of four hour van rides this is the first time I've felt like I've had any time to write in my journal.  And it's definately an appropriate time after tonight's reflections.

Thus far we've hopped from New York to San Pedro Suelo, to Copan, to Gracias, to Siguatepeque where I lay now in a bunk bed beneath Po-Hsun writing in this journal and sampling vino jovan de Mesa, from the CEASO ranch.  In this time we've seen two treatment plants, chlorinated cisterns, natural "wells", have ziplined a length of 5 kms over the canopy of Copan, explored the Copan ruins, and ate several reiterations of rice, beans, eggs, and tortillas. And this banana flavored wine is harder to stomach than the aforementioned. "Ugh, terrible," says Chris. "It's not that bad says Julia."

The people of Honduras are all really welcoming and pleased to have us there.  My elementary Spanish is enough to communicate with some efficacy.  Not being proficient however and the different tonalities of Honduran speech make it difficult to gauge emotion, but mainly truth in speech. [Ed: I go on to discuss the mayor of Copan who says he doesn't care about politics just only what's best for the people. I wishfully agree with him and if he's legit then I'm anxious to start designing for them but when the words come through a translator it's hard to gauge if he's just being a good politician.]

Our first water related stop was in a village with no treatment, just literally a hole in the ground.  Still there are smiles on their faces.  They "know about chlorine" and the need for clean water, but they still believe what they have is fine and that they can continue to drink it.  The weird thing is, they probably can.  Which cannot be said for us and the banana wine.

I can see why the people here can see why they don't need treatment plants.  Especially when a plant can be dropped in from Spain, with high technology, but only runs at 1/2 capacity or when the power turns off at the plant and nothing comes out of the tap.  Kids get sick without clean water but there is "no data" clearly showing this so when people cite that "less kids have diahrrea" we can only believe these reports instead of like good engineers looking of the numbers that say "200 cases in 2007 before AC, 50 after the plant. Woo hoo!" Still, numbers, charts, and tables may not appeal to the people that have drank water that looked like chocolate and lived to tell about it if it costs them less to have an ecru alternative.  Hopefully when we get to AguaClara plants we see clear results (and water) and hear the people talk about their experiences before and after (once again, hopefully) clean water. 

.......

 Editor's note: The wine was for cultural and educational purposes as it was locally and organically made at CEASO.

Julia Schoen

Kellie Kress

Friday, January 16th, 2009

I think our last day in Honduras was one of my favorites. I ended up riding in the truck with Antonio, Heather Hunter and Henry. Since we had to make a stop at CEASO to drop off the key someone had accidentally take and pick up Lalo's dob kit(which really looked like a clutch purse), we were separated from the group for the afternoon.
As we drove from Marcala to San Pedro, the landscape was beautiful. We could see trees and fields everywhere we looked, which doesn't sound all that special, but there was so much green! I guess I'm just used to seeing so much gray: from cement, from smog, from exhaust. We drove past some people by the side of the road, so I asked Antonio what they were selling, and he replied "sandilla," which Heather then translated: watermelon. He asked if I wanted one, so we stopped at the next one we saw.

After a few more hours in the car, we went to these caves that were pretty cool. Henry almost died by stalactite... just kidding. They had all these lamps so that we could see where we were going, and little plants had started to grow near them! We also encountered a bat!

For lunch, we stopped by a restaurant overlooking a lake. Antonio picked out three fish for us from a cooler of frozen tilapia, and then they fried them for us! After lunch we stopped by the side of the road to eat our watermelon! It was delicious! We had a great view of the lake in front of us, and the most vibrant green foliage on the mountain behind. We confirmed that I can throw watermelon rind much further than Henry, despite his several attempts to prove otherwise. After returning the knife and some watermelon to the woman, we were on our way.
We stopped somewhere to wait for the rest of the team, but managed to keep ourselves busy in the meantime.

Kevin Kircher

Ling Cheung

Nadia Siles

Po-Hsun Lin

Rustom Meyer

Tuesday, 6 Jan 2009

    Visited SANAA water treatment plant in Siguatepeque. It was like a poster for the need for appropriate technology. It was overall a good plant, but they wasted a great deal of potential energy, and used a lot of pumps at a high electricity cost. Also, one of their mechanical mixers was broken, and they had already waited like a month for a replacement (that was due to the plant being under warrantee by the builder as much as supply chain difficulties).
Later in the day we went to CEASO, and had lunch and a tour. At first I must admit I was not impressed. Their main room/dining hall/meeting room/environmental education center reminded me of nothing so much as a Boy Scout campground. But the real reason for visiting the place was not inside. On three acres of farmland, CEASO was pretty much self sufficient, and they used everything for something. Anything that one would normally think of as a byproduct or waste was turned into a resource. The kitchen and agricultural wastes were fed to penned animals (a cow, pigs, goats, and chickens). When their pens were washed, the animal waste went into a giant plastic bag, which functioned as an anaerobic digester. The methane generated in that bag was piped back into the kitchen for use on the stove. The digested liquid from the bag flowed out into a worm compost heap, which used that and more scraps to produce rich organic fertilizer. The whole farm had much richer soil than the surrounding lands.
The coffee was shade grown under nitrogen fixing trees and above nitrogen fixing ground cover, with the result that it produced as well as coffee plants that get artificial fertilizer twice a year. The citrus orchard also doubled as an area for more composting, and instead of insecticides, the owner just removed the fallen fruit (most of the fallen fruit had pests in it, and removing the fallen fruit interrupted the pest's life cycle), which he then fed to his chickens, for whom pest larvae were a good protein source. Speaking of which, he ground up the eggshells after using the eggs and put the eggshells back in the chicken's feed as a nutritional supplement to keep them in calcium. I get the feeling that there were a lot more little details of closed loops like that that we didn't even hear about.
Using a big ferrocement tank, rainwater, and a simple sand/charcoal filter, CEASO produced drinking water for the whole year during the rainy season. There was a similar setup minus the filters for irrigation water, and that tank doubled as an aquaculture tank for raising fish. All this plus bananas, beans, and other crops on three acres! Sadly, the CEASO produced fruit wine was terrible. I tried a little bit, and having done some home-brewing myself, I could identify lactic acid bacterial contamination. Also the containers weren't sealed, so the yeast had converted most of the alcohol to vinegar using the available oxygen. The bad wine was kind of grounding, as I was beginning to feel like I had dropped into some kind of ecological fantasy world. But no, CEASO is a real place, and like any real place, not everything is perfect.
 

Sarah Long

Wenqi Yi

Sun Jan 11, 2009

This is a superb trip!

Yesterday, Amelia and I met our second host family, Ruth, her brother Samuel and Samuel's wife Jorsan, Ruth's two boys, 6 and 3, and Samuel and Jorsan's 15 months' old daughter. After a brief introduction and greeting, we were shown to our room. The house had no electricity. A candle stood on the floor in the middle of the room. A glimpse could tell this was the best room of the house and it was normally used by the young couple and their baby girl: a lacquered wooden shelf and a wooden drawer stood against the walls, which were the nicest furniture; a curtain divided the room into two parts and behind the curtain laid a double bed with mosquito net (which are not commonly seen in other families) and a crib. The walls were decorated with cartoon drawings that somewhat lightened the air of this dark room.

This morning I was woken up at 4am by a warm-up conversation among roosters and the barking dogs. I struggled a long time with the decision of whether to go to the bathroom or not, as I remembered Amelia didn't make it there last night because the dogs were provoked somehow and they barked nervously at Amelia. (The bath room was separate from the main house.) I decided to go anyway, and it turned out that I barely make it there only because the dogs were barking at me from behind and my only escape was the bathroom.

On the way back to our room, I saw Amelia brushing her teeth at the gate, standing there all alone and looking ahead into the sliver-grey at the horizon. "I feel more comfortable here." She said. It was indeed an interesting spot to brush teeth, as I found out later on, standing at the same spot brushing my teeth. The silver-grey at the horizon turned a little brighter, but the moon and stars could still be seen. A jagged road bended around the house and extended further into the weeds of the uncultivated land. Flumes of smoke rose from the kitchens here and there, diluted and disappeared in the grayish twilight of the morning. I had never felt I could see this far, this clear, I had never felt such a broadness and calmness in my heart and my mind, and I had never known brushing the teeth could be so cool under a sky full of stars at dawn.

I remembered how hard I tried to adjust myself to the fact I would be living without electricity and living on muddy water for four days, how ironic I felt when seeing a high voltage power right above this household without electricity and how going to the bathroom could be such an adventure; I remembered how guilty and grateful I felt using the best room of the house while the young couple and their baby girl would have to share a room with Ruth and the two little boys, and mean while I remembered the simple happiness and satisfactory I saw on their faces, when we were talking and having dinner together last night. I remembered how scared I was about mosquito bites on the one hand, and was afraid to use too much bug spray on the other. And I still remember how proud I felt to be on this trip, especially for today's health fair, where we were going to promote AguaClara plants in the community. Nevertheless, amongst these messy and complex mixtures of feelings, I just can't help feeling that this had been and would be a superb trip!