We got up early today to see the pole flyers at 6am... however it turns out we were misinformed and just saw people dancing which is fine but I've seen so much of that already. We went back to the hotel and ate breakfast and said goodbye to the bridge people. It was weird to have so many people and I was kinda happy to get back to the smaller group.
We called Steve at breakfast, and he gave us some good insight into everything. Then we hung out with a woman named Eloisa who is a peace corps volunteer and she took us to the hospital. We wanted to interview the staff there, no one was sick lol. One of the social workers gave us some great insight into the problems the area faces, and water-related illnesses are the most common, then respiratory problems. The lady we spoke with was so kind and generous with her time. That was really cool. After that we said goodbye to Eloisa and headed to La Tribuna to see the water truck. This time there was a working water truck in the lot, but apparently it was only used for road maintenance activities.
Apparently the drinking water truck starts coming in November. Kassie and I were shocked that no one had told us that before, adding to our frustration with everything and communication.
By this time it was lunch, and we had the great idea to eat in the stadium with seats and shade and good views. We did some water tests on the truck water and we were outta there. We met up with Mari and Francisco to do some last PMEL surveys. We got to interview two households that weren't included in the project so that was really interesting. One family simply couldn't afford it, and the other was working on the coast (as is common in the area) when the meeting was held, so he missed his opportunity to get in. He said he would've opted in if he had the chance. Not good.
As we were wrapping up our final survey, we noticed we were right next to a building with a plaque having to do with clean water distribution in La Tribuna. Hmm sounds familiar. We asked them a ton of questions and learned that they've been serving about 300 homes for 20 years.
We learned about their paying system and we even got to see plans- the first time in our eight months of working on this project. It was super super interesting, but also still raised some red flags. This means that there's two sets of pipe in the ground now (the muni pipe and this association's) and we would be a third. Cool. Inefficient. Expensive. Potentially problematic for construction/design. Fine. We walked back with everyone, and the PMEL and the translator were beat from the day, so they raced ahead to get to the hotel to order a limonada. Kassie and I took our sweet time talking to José, then we ran into Eloisa again, then we decided to get some ice cream. Not Federle approved. Oops. It was so good though.
We came back and recapped, then the Federle's joined us and we filled them in. We FINALLY got to ethics, and he was like "I was wondering when you guys were gonna start with that" and we were like "it's been in our heads since day 1!!" So we had a good conversation about that. I think he enjoyed seeing our brains work and putting things together. Still unsure what to do with the project.
2025-02-17