August 17

The summer program is now over. The presentation has been given, the reports handed in, and the students have gone back to their homes in the US and Honduras. This summer I learned a lot, grew from new experiences and enjoyed myself thoroughly. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been given this opportunity.

This experience helped me understand how important engineering is. Here in the US we take many processes, such as waste treatment and drinking water purification, for granted. I knew that these processes were important, but seeing what life is like without them made me really appreciate how essential they are to the basic wellbeing of a society and the environment.  There is a lot of work to be done to provide people in developing countries with important civil and environmental engineering systems. This experience has lead me to consider working for an organization such as Water for People as a career choice. It also began to prepare me for this career by making me realize the challenges to implementing sustainable systems and taught me methods used to overcome these challenges.

I really enjoyed working with and generally being around each person in the group. It was a very diverse set of students and we all learned a lot from each other. Each student brought his/her unique strengths and personality to the group, which helped us reach our project goals and grow as students. As we shared goodbyes with the Honduran students at 1:30 AM Friday morning, it dawned on me that I might never see them again. I had grown quite attached to them after being with them almost every day of a seven week span. I was then comforted by the thought that we are all launching our careers having been lucky enough to be involved in a program that we shared a great interest in. I will not be surprised if, as we go forth into the world, our paths cross again as we perform our important work.

I would like to thank the National Science Foundation, Water for People, Diana Betancourt, Francisco, Professor Jones, and all the Honduran and Lafayette students for giving me this opportunity and making this such a great summer.

August 9

This past week we focused on finishing up our projects. Diana and I analyzed the data from the water collection questionnaire and time study and wrote a report on the results. We were able to get a diurnal curve (a curve that shows the rise and fall of water collection throughout the day) for the rural communities that we studied. The equation related to this curve can be used in the computer model being developed to predict the economic and health effects of a rural water system in a developing country. The time study resulted in a decent set of  walking speed and water collection values, but there wasn’t enough data to make any other conclusions, such as how the slope effects the walking speed and what the average walking speeds are for different age groups. We can use what  we have for now, but the study would greatly benefit from a larger and more varied data set.

The work we have been doing here is much different from what we were doing in Honduras. We have been doing a lot more sitting and thinking in front of a computer and a lot less hiking and carrying things in the mountains. While it may be less exciting, this part of the research process is just as important, and it is rewarding to see results from what we have been doing.

It has been fun hanging out with the Honduran students, and it is sad that we only have one more week to work  with them. Hopefully we have kept them entertained by inviting them to our apartments, going bowling, going to the movies, and playing soccer. Diana has been a very good partner to work with. We have managed to have fun while being very productive and she has been helping me with my Spanish.

I can’t believe there is only one week left! Hopefully it doesn’t go by too fast but I know it will.

August 1

Our first week back at Lafayette was spent adjusting to our new schedule and surroundings, introducing the Hondurans to the U.S. and working to finish our various projects.

The week began with a few field trips. We gave the Honduran students a tour of Easton and went to the city’s famous Crayola factory. The next day focused on civil and environmental engineering, as we got a tour of the Easton waste water treatment plant and the Grand Central Landfill in Penn Argyl, which uses the methane produced by the garbage to run electricity-producing turbines. I had been to both of these sites before with my Introduction to Environmental Engineering class, but it was a good refresher and I had a greater appreciation for what these facilities do for our health and the environment after seeing that they do not treat their waste like this everywhere. In San Pedro Sula, most of the wastewater was deposited untreated into the river and a lot of trash was thrown into the river or burned. We also made a day trip to New York City, which was great for me because I am not that familiar with the city and had never been to such civil engineering landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge or the Empire State Building. We also visited a skyscraper museum, Central Park and of course Times Square. We enjoyed the beautiful weather, noted the many differences between San Pedro Sula and the huge metropolis we were in, and shared the Honduran’s excitement to be in the place they had seen and heard so much about. In Central Park, Diana was thrilled to recognize the setting of a movie she had seen, and in Times Square Alex took great pleasure in “having a cigarette in the center of the world”.

For the last two days of the week it was time to get down to business. Each Lafayette student has been paired with a Honduran student to work on a project. I am lucky to be working with Diana on summarizing the data from our water usage questionnaire and our time study of the water collection process. We have entered that data into Excel spreadsheets but we still have to extract the core results and make judgments on whether the data is reliable and what assumptions can be made in its evaluation. We did not have much time in Honduras to collect a lot of data or perfect our data collection method, so I have some concerns about the reliability of our study. Whatever the outcome, I will have learned a lot about the research process.

July 26

A month has passed and we are safely back at Lafayette. On one hand my time there seems to have passed by so quickly that it is hard to believe that it was a whole month. On the other hand, I am amazed that we accomplished so much and had so many new and interesting experiences in just four weeks.

This past week consisted of doing some preliminary monitoring exercises and finishing the latrine project. On Monday, we began the monitoring project that will be ongoing for the next couple of summers. Water for People changed their strategic plan in 2007 in an attempt to make their projects more sustainable and ultimately beneficial to the communities they serve. Our IRES program is working to perform monitoring surveys to evaluate systems that were built before and after the new strategic plan to see if it has achieved the results that WFP were looking for. By performing the survey we were hoping to get results for the beginning of this study, but mostly finalizing the procedure so that next year’s group can hit the ground running. Fernando, Alex, Ana (a WFP employee) and I went to a community called Las Breas, where we surveyed 29 houses, most of which had a WFP latrine built in 2007. Finding out where the houses were would have been impossible without the help of the president of the local water board and his friend, who were very friendly and knew all the paths we had to follow. I spent most of the time running between houses and marking the points on a GPS, which was quite a workout in the hot Honduran sun.

On Tuesday we went back to Las Casitas to finish the latrines. The family had done a lot of work on the bajareque one since I had seen it last, and by the end of the day it was almost done. The adobe latrine still needed construction time so it was decided that we would return Thursday to finish up. Sadly, I did not return Thursday because I was in the office trying to finish our report on the building procedure for the latrine. While this work had to be done, I was disappointed that I could not see the completed latrine and that I did not get a chance to say goodbye to the community members we worked with, especially, Don Escolastico, Don Andrés, Irma, and the children. Joelle did deliver the roll of toilet paper that I had won at the Feria Juniana, so I did get to say goodbye in a way. The procedure ended up being more work than was expected, because we wanted of make a thorough and comprehensive report. I ended up devoting my Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and even some time in the plane on Saturday to completing the report. We finalized it today and it has been sent to WFP. Hopefully, our designs can help improve WFP’s services by providing more sustainable and cost-effective latrines.

As I watched Honduras fade into the distance out of the window of our plane, I was struck by how lucky I was to have been given this opportunity. The experiences I had, the people I met, the things I learned would not have been possible if I were a tourist visiting the country or a student studying these subjects back in the US. Not many people get to do something so interesting and rewarding for their summer job, and I don’t take that for granted. I will miss the great food, the friendly atmosphere of the rural villages, and people. The WFP employees, Francisco (our trusted driver and traveling companion) and the people we met in the many communities we visited are hard-working, down to earth people who, despite the many difficulties their country faces, have a pride and a love for their homeland and culture that gives me a lot of hope for their future.

While our time in Honduras has come to and end, we still have three more weeks of work to do here in the US. I’ll keep you updated!

July 18

This week we worked hard and got a lot of different things done. On Monday we continued our work on the latrines in Las Casitas. The community members did a lot of work over the weekend and we were able to make a lot of progress. By the end of the day the bajareque group, which I have been working with, was almost done with the roof and had the sides woven with bamboo strips and ready to be filled with the adobe mixture. The community members have worked on the latrines for the rest of the week while we have been doing other things, other than a brief visit on thursday. By doing this they can achieve a sense of ownership and they will be more likely to care for it properly in the future, making the project more sustainable.

We spent Tuesday and Wednesday transitioning from the latrines into our other projects: monitoring for Water for People, performing a time study of the water collection process, and trying to establish a diurnal curve for rural communities in developing countries. This consisted of preparing procedures and data collection sheets for our studies and writing up our construction procedures for the latrines. I worked a lot with Google’s SketchUp program to develop visuals to accompany the procedure.

The jury is still out on how effective these latrines are as replacements for the zinc-aluminum corrugated metal latrines that WFP has been using. They have been significantly cheaper and they use local materials, but they have involved a lot more labor, which takes away from the community member’s ability to provide for their families. When the project is over, we will have to take all these factors into account in order to establish if the new latrine system is indeed more sustainable. Hopefully it is, but even if it isn’t, improvements can be made to the important work we have done. My mother, who is in El Salvador right now, has talked to a few people from organizations that work with sanitation who are also very interested in an improved latrine design that costs less and uses local materials and who want to hear more about our work. This shows that there is a broad demand for what we are working on, not only in Honduras but throughout the world.

On Wednesday a few of us stayed back to continue work on the procedures while most of us (myself included) went to two communities, El Golfo and Vallecito, to administer questionnaires regarding when people collected water, how much they collected, when they used it and what they used it for. The next day we used this information to visit the same houses and follow the residents as they collected water for our time study. We had to be ready to follow them by 6 in the morning, which meant leaving the hotel by 4. This was hard for me as I am not a morning person, but we got there in time and were able to collect a lot of data, which was great. Because I had been one of the people who developed the procedure and data collection sheets, it was a great learning experience for me to see what worked and what didn’t. I felt the study went well, but if I were to do it again I would have asked for more specific information on the data collection sheets. All part of the research process! It was at times hard to watch and not help these tiny women lifting five gallon buckets of brown water onto their heads, and it made me more appreciative of just how important the work is that organizations like WFP are doing.

On Friday we took a break from our projects and got a tour of WFP Honduras’ biggest project, a  system that collects water high in the mountains and once it’s done will deliver water to seventeen communities below. We had to leave the bus behind and take two pickup trucks to the base of a muddy and steep trail that we then hiked up for an hour. We followed the pipes, encountering break-pressure tanks, clean-out valves and suspended river crossings, until we reached the dam where the water is collected. It was quite a large structure, and hiking up there made me appreciate how much work it must have been to carry all the cement and steel required to build the system. On the way down we stopped by the sedimentation tank as well, completing a tour that I’m sure all my civil engineering peers will be incredibly jealous of. The president of the water committee that organizes the seventeen villages accompanied us and let us know that on top of the sheer magnitude of manual labor that was required for this project was the difficulty of keeping the community members involved, since a project like this takes so long to complete. We saw evidence of this difficulty a few days before when we were working on our questionnaires. El Golfo was one of the seventeen communities, but we talked to some people there who didn’t believe that there even WAS a project that was bringing them clean water.

We spent the weekend exploring a different part of Honduras and getting horribly sunburned in the beach city of Tela. Two of the Honduran students, Alex and Fernando, came with us. It was good to spend some free time with them and get to know them better. I was able to practice my Spanish more and learn more about their feelings about the political situation here in Honduras. We met some French-Canadian medical students who have been doing humanitarian work in villages near Tegucigalpa for more than a month and invited them to join our game of beach soccer. Almost all of the foreigners we have met are doing some sort of humanitarian mission, which is good to see but at the same time shows that Honduras is really in need of it. We also witnessed people dancing “Punta”, a type of Honduran music and dance which involved a lot of suggestive hip movement.

We only have one more week to go here in Honduras. It promises to be just as interesting and busy as the first three!

July 11

This week was all about building latrines. We would get up early, drive the hour-and a half to the village of Las Casitas, then work with the the Honduran students, the architect, and community members to build two latrines, one of adobe and one of bajareque. I was assigned to the bajareque latrine along with Joelle, Fernando, and Carmen. This is the one we designed as a group last week, so it was great to be able to actually make the structure that we just finished designing. The houses where we are building latrines are very much in need of our help. They are very poor and have a lot of children who would benefit greatly from better sanitation. The villagers are extremely friendly, hard-working and knowledgeable people. They have been working with this type of construction their whole lives so they know what they are doing and we have learned a lot from them. In a usual Water for People project they would be doing all the labor and buying the materials themselves so that they had a sense of ownership of the system, knew how it worked and could make repairs, but since this is more of a pilot project we have been helping. This has been a great practical learning experience for me as I have been practicing the arts of machete-wielding and masonry. The latrines are not done yet, but by the end of this project we hope to have two sustainable and cost-effective latrines built, as well as updated, more detailed designs and a clear set of procedures so WFP can build more of these latrines in the future.

This weekend we visited Copán, where we enjoyed some delicious food and explored the Mayan ruins. We learned a lot about Copán’s history, art and infrastructure. It was a good place for us to visit because much of Copán’s history is based around water. It became a city because it was in a fertile river valley, then later declined largely because of lack of water due to deforestation. The Mayans had a very good drainage and water supply system, which we were able to see up close. Our guide told us that during heavy rains the modern town of Copán has issues with flooding, yet the ruins remain perfectly drained via the system that the mayans built.

July 4

While people celebrate independence day in the United States, here in Honduras we are recovering from a long and very productive week. We started with two introductory days in which we established goals for the next month, finalized our schedule, were formally introduced to the Water for People program and employees, met the students we will be working closely with for the rest of the summer, introduced them to the work we have been done so far and visited some communities where WFP has installed latrines.

The WFP folks, led by Diana Betancourt, are very dedicated, enthusiastic and helpful group who seem exited to have us working with them. The San Pedro Sula office is the headquarters for Water for People Cenral America, which also runs programs in Nicaragua and Guatemala, so they are very busy working on a lot of great projects. We are getting along very well with the Honduran students, who we have already gotten to know pretty well just in this week. They are all hard-working, intelligent people and they seem just as excited about this project as we are. Working with them is a great experience because as we collaborate on the project we are also learning about each other’s cultures, improving our Spanish/English skills and getting to know each other better. Since they are all civil or environmental engineers, it has been interesting for me to be able to talk about what I have been learning in class and see that they have been learning the same things.

It was great to see the various types of latrines first-hand as opposed to reading about them, as we have been doing far the past few weeks. Before this summer I never thought I would have such interest in latrines! The locals we met were friendly, resourceful and strong people. I look forward to working with them, getting to know them better, and hopefully helping them in some way. Our trip to the rural communities also served as an investigation of the possibility of building a pour-flush latrine out of adobe or bajareque (wattle and daub) to improve on WFP’s current design, which is built with expensive and imported aluminum-zinc corrugated metal. Victoria Delgado, a local architect and professor who specializes in earth construction, accompanied us on the trip and worked with us the rest of the week to design the latrine, which we will be building starting tomorrow! I really enjoyed the collaboration and challenge of building designing the latrine, which will have a rock and cement foundation and walls made of wooden frames with woven bamboo covered by an earth-pine needle mixture in the bajareque style. Since the superstructure (the above-ground part) of the latrine should last longer than it takes to fill one pit, we are building a second pit which can be switched to once the first is filled. The design process involved a lot of revisions and brainstorming to find the best solution to issues that arose. Overall, I am happy with the design we have and excited to be able to build it! It was great working with an Victoria as well, especially since I am interested in architecture and am pursuing an Architectural Studies minor at Lafayette. Hopefully the latrines we build are successful and can improve WFP’s services.

We took time out of this busy schedule to visit a local water treatment plant. It was fairly similar to a plant that I visited with my environmental engineering class back in Easton, PA, except the process was a bit less intensive due to the better initial water quality here. Apparently there are four plants that serve the city of San Pedro Sula. What I was shocked to hear is that most of the city’s wastewater is not treated and is deposited directly into the river, which has horrible environmental conditions downstream. In the US this would not be acceptable, but here they don’t have the money to support such a large wastewater treatment system.

Joelle and I accepted an invitation to play soccer with Fernando (one of the Honduran students) and his friends Thursday night. I had a great time playing and remain convinced that playing soccer is one of the best ways to get to know people from another country, especially one so soccer-crazed as Honduras

Our weekend was just as eventful, if a bit more relaxed. Yesterday (Saturday), we witnessed the large parade that marks the final day of la Feria Juniana. Thousands of people gathered to watch large bands of students playing drums and xylophone-like instruments, men on stilts, dancers, prancing horses and floats with different themes. Many of these floats were sponsored by major companies, with employees throwing small samples and souvenirs to the crowd. I was lucky enough to catch a free roll of toilet paper, which I plan on leaving in one of the latrines we build. Today we woke up early to go to Panacam, and eco-lodge an hour-and-a-half away where we took a four-hour hike through the rainforest/cloud forest. We hiked up some very steep paths, saw some great views, saw beautiful butterflies and what we think was a fake coral snake, and showered under a pristine waterfall. now its time to get some sleep because we have another big week ahead of us.

June 28

This last week at Lafayette consisted of continuing to work on our research paper and preparing logistically for our trip to Honduras. The week went by quickly and after a lot of time in front of a computer, two relatively unsuccessful Honduras world cup games, a bunch of trips to the store, and some efficient packing, I found myself on my way to Honduras.

We have now been here for two days, and it has been a great cultural experience so far. La Feria Juniana, San Pedro Sula’s annual carnival, is in full swing. We are staying right in the middle of the city facing the central park, which is flanked by the Palacio Municipal and a large church. The area around our hotel has been a constant celebration of Honduran tradition, music, dancing, and sports. This begins early in the morning, continuing all day and late into the night. It is 11 o’clock at night right now, and I am glad I am writing this instead of trying to fall asleep over the noise of the concert taking place on the corner outside. Last night we witnessed a highly entertaining yet politically incorrect traditional dance performance by a group of teenagers as we mingled with the locals and tried some real Honduran food, which was delicious. Today the street in front of our hotel was closed off to allow people to play soccer, baseball, and volleyball while others witnessed concerts and boxing matches. There is a constant undertone of political activism to these proceedings, as the FNRP (Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular) has been holding rallies, concerts, and demonstrations in protest of the coup of former president Manuel Zelaya that happened a year ago.

So far we have only seen a small part of the country, but I feel that we could not have picked a better place to learn firsthand about the culture of this country. I am looking forward to learning more as I get to know local Hondurans and see more of the country. This will begin with our first visit to the Water for People office tomorrow morning, which I am very exited for.

June 18

Our time at Lafayette is passing quickly, and I can’t believe we will be leaving for Honduras in just one week. For the past few days we have been using the information gained from our many meetings and readings to begin working on our projects for the summer. We have created a procedure, data sheet and questionnaire for a study that we will perform in Honduras that should provide detailed information about the water collection process, and we are translating it into Spanish so our Honduran counterparts can join in the study. We have also been researching an environmental and cost life-cycle inventory for rural sanitation systems in developing countries. This has involved researching four different latrine types and finding out what materials they use, the cost of these materials, and their environmental effects from cradle to grave.

I am learning a lot by working on these projects, especially about the research process. The work I have been doing this week is different from the class projects I am used to because it is not as well-defined and can be horribly tedious and abstract at times, yet you get to be more creative and gain a real in-depth understanding of the material. What we are learning now will help us greatly in Honduras when we are working with these systems firsthand.

We spent some time at the beginning of the week learning about Honduran culture, politics, and economics. We learned about the recent coup, typical foods we will encounter, and other general information that will be important for us to know when we are there. I discovered that we will be arriving in San Pedro Sula right in the middle of the Feria Juniana, the city’s annual carnival and one of the county’s biggest celebrations, so that should be exiting. This formal learning was complimented by my getting up early to watch Honduras play Chile in the world cup with my friend who is a student here but is from Tegucigalpa. Although the result of the game was not so good for “Los Catrachos”, it was great to see the passion that Hondurans have for their team. I also added to my vocabulary some Spanish terms that I cannot repeat here.

June 11, 2010

The first week of the program is winding down. This was a time to get us all caught up to speed on how rural water and sanitation systems work in developing countries, what the main issues are concerning water scarcity and lack of proper sanitation, the benefits of installing these systems, the difficulty of installing and especially of maintaining these systems, the environmental, economic, and social aspects of providing a sustainable system, how water for people works and how it compares to other similar NGO’s, what our main projects will be, what we should expect when we get to Honduras, the list goes on. Looking back, it is hard for me to believe that we have processed so much information in just one week.

What has really struck me this week is just how difficult it is to foster sustainable development in developing regions. Installing a system is the easy part, but how do you ensure that the system being installed is the right kind to serve the community’s needs, that residents will use it properly, that it can be maintained, that the community can gain a sense of ownership of the system? These are problems that are not as easy to find solutions to, and it seems many projects that start out with good intentions end up becoming ineffective wastes of resources because these issues are not properly addressed.

I am enthusiastic about the dynamic nature of the experience so far. In this week alone we have already taken on a new project: to run a time study of the water collection process that can be used in a computer simulation being developed to predict the economic and health effects of a rural water system in a developing country. I know that this will not be the last change of plans and I am OK with that.

This week has served to inform and also to excite me. Next week we will begin work on our actual projects, and the information I gained this week has led me to  believe that the work we will be doing will be very engaging and will ultimately help to answer some difficult questions and make a positive difference in the field of rural sustainable development.

Hasta próxima semana,

-Dan