2010 Honduras Trip Journals

View the pictures from this trip.

Yoon Choi's Honduras Journal

Copans Ruins
We arrived at San Pedro Airport on the morning of January 9, 2010 where we were greeted by Sarah, Dan, Leo, Antonio, and Jorge. The team then moved to Copans where we hiked to a town without any water treatment process. The hike was a great team-building exercise and I was really impressed with the tough people who have to endure this beautiful but rugged terrain every day. I was also able to get a tour of the Mayan ruins.

Santa Rosa
We visited and explored the town of Santa Rosa. We met with the mayor and received a tour of the water system there.

Gracias
The team was welcomed by the mayor and several members of the Gracias community who provided us with free meals, a stay at the best hotel that we will have at Honduras, and a trip to the local natural hot springs. Nice. I attended Dan's Aguaclara briefing to the mayor of Gracias.

Siguatepeque
Besides visiting the local conventional water treatment plants, the team visited the site for a future Aguaclara plant. One important observation that various team members found was that almost all Honduran families always seem to gather together around night time to talk. This was a reoccurring refreshing sight.

Agalteca
Dale and I stay with a Honduran family who demonstrated the depth of generosity and compassion of the Honduran people. Our family actually moved a member of their own family to another room to make room for us. During our entire stay the Lady of the house was like a mother to us who always ensured that we were well fed and in clean clothes(she taught us the right way to do our own laundry). I also helped out at the local health fair and participated in one of the most one-sided soccer game to occur in Honduras. The Doser Team and I also set up the prototype doser so that it can be put to use when the plant goes into operation in March of this year. I was truly impressed by the hospitality of our host family.

Tegucigalpa
The team checked out the local SANAA plant and the Aguaclara plants at Tamara and Cuatro Communidades.
I was very impressed with both plants. The compactness of the plants really appealed to me. The nice flower arrangement at Cuatro Communidades was a plus.

Marcala
Enroute to Marcala, we visited the FIME plant at Tutale. I was interested with the simple ingenuity of the multifiltration process. We visited the Aguaclara plant here. It is currently the largest Aguaclara plant in service. The plant employs two dosing systems based on tube head loss since the alum flow required from a single doser becomes turbulent and unable to be delivered by a system based on tube head loss. Our nonlinear doser based on orifice which handles both laminar and turbulent can eventually replace that. I also met Fred who started out in the first Peace Corps back in the 60s! It was an experience to hear his stories from back then and impressed with this great man who is continuing his service even in retirement! Marcala has the best coffee in Honduras. I got to buy some cool local modern art. Dan took us an awesome hike and I swam under two water falls: it was awesome! We returned home to Ithaca on Saturday January 23, 2010.

Honduras is a beautiful country with an even more beautiful and gracious people. Our hosts could not have done more. I got to learn a lot about my great team members and about myself. This was one of the best trips of my life.

Matt Hurst's Honduras Reflection Entry

I really enjoyed my time in Honduras. While visiting water treatment plants, attending meetings with important officials, and learning how NGOs work and communicate in that country were wonderful experiences, however, I think I gained far more from the experiences I was fortunate enough to have with the people.

The food, the external beauty of the landscape, and the inner beauty and openness of the people made the trip. The host family we stayed with in Agalteca welcomed Jeff and myself with open arms and allowed us to share a part of their life.

Of course, being there, I saw many cultural differences between us and them. In some ways, I could see parts of the Honduran culture that was gradually being lost to an ever encroaching global culture. In many ways it reconfirmed to me that while there are cultural differences between different groups of people, many times we have similar innate desires. One such commonly held desire is to have a safe and secure world for yourself and your children. Another desire is to allow children to dream and believe in big ideas. The host family had a nine year old named Mario who dreamed of becoming a doctor or a Spanish professor in spite of the hardships and the challenges of doing this.

I realized how fortunate I am to live where I am at and to have the experiences and education that I have. I reflected on something that Jorge, one of our guides on the trip, that AguaClara is a light to shine on Honduras and give hope. I think that the project is successful, but even moreso, beyond the success, is the hopes and dreams of the Hondurans that want their children to be happier and healthier. I think that what makes this project different is that we can inspire people to dream and hope of a better future.

Now more than ever, I am motivated because I saw that our presence could inspire and give hope, powerful human emotions that have overcome much adversity.

Josiah Pothen's Honduras Journal Entry

2010.01.19
Breakfast today was a plato tipico with beans, plantains, tortillas, and chorizo (sausage). We went out in the morning to visit the Tamara plant - our first visit to a functioning AguaClara plant.

When we arrived, it was incredible to see particles in the flocculator - you could see them going up and down! The operator told us that he was not adding alum to the water - just dosing it with chlorine. He also mentioned that they only had water from one of the two water sources. Effluent turbidity was the same as influent: about 6 NTU. Goes to show that even if our technology great, the community has to address other problems in the system.

Cuatro Communidades was next. I noticed how beautiful the plant was - it was aesthetically pleasing and it had a small garden with hydrangreas. Little things like a garden make it a much more pleasant place to be. This plant was dosing with alum but did not have a properly working chlorine doser. Again, another communication issue - we've run into several on this trip. Our doser team played with it and figured out that the Chlorine had eaten through part of mechanism.

After the plant we got a rare chance to hang out by a pool - after lunch (more beans, tortillas, rice, and meat) and a lengthy meeting with the local water board and a member of Agua Para El Pueblo. He mentioned that Cornell students should:
*Consider recruiting business students
*Link business people in so they convince their colleagues to help the developing world through AguaClara
*Consider hiring an expert fundraiser

Julie Pierce's Journal Entry

There were several things I took away from this trip. One of the most important was the opportunity to bond with some of the students who are working on the AguaClara project. I think new friendships were formed that will hopefully last well beyond the trip. I was also able to see how much everyone truly cared about each other even if they had only just met.

I think everyone should take a trip to a country like Honduras at least once in their lifetime, if not more, to remind them just how lucky they are. The things we take for granted are incredible. Clean water, laundry, safe food, a warm bed to sleep in, heat, warm showers with normal pressure, an ability to say whatever we would like without living in fear. Now I actively think about these things every day and hope that the work we are doing in Honduras will at least be able to provide one of those things.

One of the more memorable experiences was on the first day when we walked up a long, muddy trail to get to a small village. It was quite a struggle to get up there and it made us realize that the people who lived there had to do it every time they needed to leave the village. The children all came out of their homes and were fascinated by us. It struck me so much to be in such seclusion, to imagine what their lives are like being so hidden from the world.

It was also great to see some existing water treatment plants. I was able to see a horizontal flocculator (which is what I am working on for my M. Eng. project) in person! It looked almost exactly like the one I had designed using a computer, and it wasn't even an AguaClara plant. That gave me a lot of comfort that I was going about my task the correct way. It was also interesting and somewhat sad to see how many design flaws there were in many of the plants that had not been built by AguaClara.

I hope that anyone who goes on the trip in the future enjoys it as much as I did!

Alex O'Connell's Honduras Journal Entry

Looking back on the trip, the one thing I still can't get past was the very first day of the trip. As soon as we had arrived and eaten breakfast, we jumped in the vans and drove four hours out to Copan Ruinas, our first stop on the trip. After a brief rest at the hotel, we headed back into the vans and drove into the mountains as far as the vans could go...and then we hiked for another half an hour or so to this tiny village in the mountains near the Guatemalan border.

It was amazing seeing this place after having been in New York City less than a day before. People were out working, preparing the coffee beans by hand, and some were running corn down from the town to be sold. It was really an eye-opening experience. Life in this community was so different from everything that is familiar to me.

While we were there, the leader of the village showed us the school they had set up, a simple building the size of a single classroom. The school taught grades one through six, and essentially covered Spanish and the local language in its curriculum. This was very different from what I remember school being like. Next, they explained how people in the village got their water. They had a distribution system which used hoses and pipes to run water from the springs to the homes without any treatment. It was simple, but people were very excited about having this system and continuing to build it. I probably remember this day best out of all the days on the trip; to me it really captured the reason why we are doing what we are with AguaClara.

In addition, it was great to see some of the plants designed by AguaClara in action. The Cuatro Communidades plant was so well maintained and operated that it was clear how much the people cared about it. It was pretty impressive what could get accomplished with enough support.

At the same time, we saw how much the success of the plants could be connected to local politics. In Marcala, the plant operators were very dedicated to keeping the plant running. However, many times they have gone without chemicals because the local government won't purchase them. Despite this, the level of enthusiasm I saw for the plants was encouraging, and they appeared to be making a difference in people's lives.

Carloyn Evans

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.

Travis Stanislaus' Abridged Honduras Journal Record

I keep an almost daily written record of my day and I continued it in Honduras more or less. For this personal interpretation, a sequential log of the day may drown the points I try to convey and my personal journal is not for public viewing. Aside from my personal journal, I keep an abridged journal, a French journal, and (now since Honduras) a Spanish journal; with my French journal being the weakest of the four.

On to Honduras. Just so you know I left my house at 12:15am to get to JFK and I got stuck in traffic on the Belt Parkway and I was afraid I would be late meeting you all... . I digress, TACA is a pretty solid airline imo, and it was my first exposure to being manhandled by Spanish (I would equate it to a nudge). The lack of sleep one of the most interesting parts of beginning the AguaClara student trip.

I did not account for the Spanish divide when we arrived in Honduras, it was my first interactions with Antonio that punched me in the face. Antonio came up to me and shook my hand and began talking to me and I could not listen or respond to him. It was the first time I heard Spanish directed at me in a conversation and my ears could not handle it. Sarah had to respond for me, I felt the way you feel when you cannot defend for yourself. The next time I spoke to Antonio, was when we walked to the village later on the 1st day and without even thinking, I spoke to him in English and he looked at me and I looked at him and we said nothing for a few seconds, all the while I was thoroughly embarrassed for assuming he spoke English when I opened my mouth. Going back to the not being able to defend yourself feeling, it was the same when we were exchanging money with the mafia, Dan had to look over the transaction for us and he was speaking to the man, I had no concept of the words they were saying and it left me with that feeling. In my preparation for Honduras, that feeling caught me off guard.

I will say, all the time we spent in the vans, I enjoyed, I do not have mention the way things looked since we all appreciated it. Honduras crammed many things into my head. Let me jump to the horse ride on the second day, we went to a project town on the top of a mountain, it had some unearthed Mayan structures, and in the town some children walked with us. We went to workshop in the town which was a women's work cooperative, where they made garments and dolls and sold them to tourists who came to the town. At this point my Spanish was not worthy of being called debil, and Sarah was talking to the girls in the town (I only know what they said now) and Sarah said one of the girls asked "can I have some of your luck?" (only now I know she said something like, puedo tener un poco de su suerte?). This Spanish thing was becoming a big deal for me. I still could not even talk.

Also in Copan, I got this chill of the environment being inherently familiar to me. I recognized it because of my mother, she is from Kingston, Jamaica and I felt what she has conveyed to me about where she is from through Honduras, but the speaking part was a big missing piece. I will tell you, the days picked up, the next day was faster than the previous one. Also Monroe's departure from the trip gave it an interesting feel. (I have more to write)

Vanish Grover's Honduras Journal Entry

Tegucigalpa

Today, two images really struck me. The first was when I was outside of Dan's apartment. I looked up and saw the top of a power line. What should be (and in the states actually is) a tidy set of connections was here a messy, tangled, dangerous knot of wires. I was told by Dan that poorly planned connection like this repeatedly caused power outages due to the overload. This wasn't rare in Honduras. For me, it summed up the magnitude of the lack of planning that plagues many parts of the country.

The second image I saw was at a basketball court. A few of the taller guys on the trip and I (the only one shorter than six feet tall) went to go play basketball with some of the local basketball players. We started playing at dawn, and the sun shortly went down. That is when we realized that there was only one street lamp (on the corner of the block) to light the entire court. Poor planning, I thought again. Then the light went out during a basketball game. I figured that everyone would go home and wait for a government official to fix it, when Dan told me that this was a light that the basketball players paid for. One of them (called "the doctor" because he was a pharmacist) collected money from everyone in order to support the electrical bill for this one street lamp that they needed to play basketball twice a week. I saw that the Hondurans didn't leave or get upset. They simply waited for ten minutes until the light flickered back on, and resumed playing. I think I saw the resilience and patience of the residents of Tegucigalpa.

I'm not sure whether or not these glimpses into Honduran life helped me learn anything, but I now believe that we have much more work to do, and that there are people that would truly benefit from what we do in the future.