La Tribuna Day 3

Monday, August 07, 2017
Joyabaj, Quiché Department, Guatemala
Today I woke up early to take a shower. I took my sweet time and made sure I was clean all over. It had been a week since my last one, and with all the sunscreen, bug spray, and construction work that went on, I was dirty. Being clean felt more different than I thought it would. 
Our translator, Esperanza, arrived earlier than we expected, so there was a bit of a rush to get upstairs. We all ate breakfast together and then waited on a truck from José. We were all told different things about where the community meeting was, so when it got close to 10:00 Esperanza called José. He said he forgot to call the car for us. Oops. We said we could walk, it's an urban community and it's just on the other side of town, about 20 minutes. We started walking, then José called back and said someone just arrived to pick us up. We walked back and hopped in the truck, Brooke was a bit surprised maybe that we ride in the back of pickup trucks to get places. 
The La Tribuna community building was right in front of the soccer stadium, and it was pretty big and nice in my opinion. We went to an open empty room and put some plastic chairs in a circle to talk. We started with introductions and then we asked their expectations of us. They kept stressing that they need clean water and right now there's no place to get it. They don't have water in their pipes from the municipality of Joyabaj, and so a water truck comes every 3-7 days as needed and fills up containers people leave outside their houses. If the truck can't get there, they get water from the river (where the truck normally gets its water), but this water is very dirty they say. Not good having dirty water stored in most likely not-sanitary-not-closed containers for days on end. The need is obvious. 
What surprised us though in talking with them further, was that the 300 homes we were given in our scope did not include all of La Tribuna. They told us today that La Tribuna in fact has 1,000 homes, and 300 could afford to chip in for the spring. Red flag. We asked what happens to the other 700 homes, and they replied saying that they hope to do a similar project in the future for them, whether it's working with us or not. Furthermore, the 300 selected homes are all scattered. From an engineering standpoint, you cannot build loops like that to certain homes, then come back later and construct loops for those in between. Not only is it inefficient, it's impossible. Then we start thinking "okay, what if we build for 1,000 but only service 300 now" but 300 homes was already a huge project for us. 1,000 would take a professional chapter 5 years at least. 
Another question we had for them was why they didn't want to be part of Joyabaj's system. Going from the spring to La Tribuna takes you right through Joyabaj. It doesn't make sense to drag a conduction line right through a town they're already basically connected to. They said that Joyabaj uses the same river water as the truck. Even more, they're not the only community requesting this type of project. More red flags. If Joyabaj's water is so bad that communities are putting in so much time, effort, and money into their own tiny system, why doesn't Joyabaj just get its ish together?? An easy thought coming from the States, but i couldn't get it off my mind. 
We walked back to the hotel for lunch to regroup and review everything from the community meeting. The La Tribuna project that given at this point seems unjust. Giving water to those who can afford it can make sense, but it is not ethical to provide water to these people, rendering the rest of their community doomed forever. Dramatic but basically what would happen. I understand their viewpoint, give water to those who can afford it (and have already paid and purchased the spring) now, then come back and buy another spring when the rest can pay. They didn't realize, however, with how the design of the loops and pipes work, that a second project would not be possible, not only for us but for anyone. It physically doesn't work. 
I brought up the question of ethics, and Kassie said she was thinking the same thing and that the best way to thoroughly solve this problem would be to filter Joyabaj's water. It's not anything anyone in our chapter wants to think about project-wise because it is so huge, even bigger than the 1,000 homes of La Tribuna, but it's obviously something that needs to be addressed someday. We can't let these little community projects go on knowing that in the end, there's dozens of springs to rely on and insane amounts of pipe and pumps to maintain. It's not the most efficient solution in the end, and as a chapter we can't do a project simply to do a project, stay busy, and put it on our resumé, we have a responsibility to make sure this is a sustainable solution. 
As it stands, this project is a no-go for us, but it doesn't feel like a hard no-go like it did last week. At this point, we will still work with the community and collect data but the solution is not straightforward. We have many ideas and we need to talk to people higher up in EWB to determine a future plan. The possibilities range from fixing all of Joyabaj to providing all 1,000 homes water, but just for drinking purposes (they were expecting 200-250 gal/day/house, but we can still provide about 60 gal/day/house if we reach all 1,000 homes. Then it gets sticky with those who paid versus those who didn't). There's an answer somewhere, it'll just take some time to reach it. 
In my opinion- this is my blog and I can say what I want- we should focus on fixing Joyabaj's water. Even if we get La Tribuna and the other communities on their own individual systems, that's a lot of inidividual maintenance and liability. I know that government is not a sure thing here, and that's what's hard. Joyabaj has chlorinated their water in the past, but it's been off and on depending on who's in power. And that's hard. We can design and implement all we want, but we can't engineer a new government. Luckily Joyabaj is the EWB-Guatemala headquarters, so we have strong influence in the town and they like us a lot; still nothing is guaranteed but it's more hopeful. Bigger-picture though, what happens to all the other towns in Guatemala? Their life is all messed up by power-hungry people. This is something we know, but it's frustrating being here and trying to implement something, but knowing that you can't go through with it because of a government you can't fix. We should be meeting with the mayor sometime this week, so hopefully we can get some more insight from him. 
Other possibilities were brought up that La Tribuna is going to go through with this project no matter if we're in or not, so we could opt out of designing a scattered loop system and just build the distribution tanks and filters instead, but I still feel uncomfortable supporting an unjust project. The most frustrating thing in all of this is that they already bought the spring. They already have an engineer hired and data collected for our portion of the project. Why are we needed? Why did they buy a spring without consulting an engineer? We can't give back the spring and take back their money, and they paid good money for the spring so I understand why they want water asap. The project has just already moved along so much before we're even getting involved. To me that's another red flag as communication has already been rough, it seems like it will continue to be that way. 
I dunno those are all my thoughts, jk just a fraction of them, but I feel more excited than discouraged at this point. Hopefully we can talk to Mike and Steve tomorrow about everything, they're high up in EWB, and they should be thinking the same thing. 
Later that day we walked over to a hardware store. Luckily Esperanza knew of a big one nearby, so we spent some time there taking prices and dimensions for parts, and they said that they give a special price for EWB and they gave us their card with a WhatsApp number that they said we could call and ask any questions. Super helpful and a nice positive moment after a shaky day. 
We walked back to the hotel in the rain, and stopped at the grocery store along the way to pick up some stuff for lunches so we don't always have to come back to the hotel. When we got back, we wrote an email to Mike and Steve and ate dinner. I was a lot more tired than I thought I'd be, so we basically just went to bed after dinner. Good day overall, everything changed (as it usually does) but I feel that there's a solution somewhere and it's not just a dead end. 
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