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!