Day 26

By elissam

The morning started with the loud screaming of a pig being killed in the building next door- where the workshop is- and while I tried to fall back to sleep, there was too much other noise. I got up to go see them smoking the pig; the others weren’t far behind in waking up. We started surveying the road towards Milpuc after breakfast. When we got back, we had lunch with all of the people who had been helping carve and prepare the pig- the first time we had eaten with the entire family in the same room. We have asked them several times to eat with us more often, but much of the time the family eats outside in the kitchen. 

After lunch Charlie, Paolo and I tried to take the equipment up to the reservoir for the  Foncodes system to survey the tanks. We were unable to find a guide for this afternoon, but decided to try to follow the trail we had been on the other day. The tanks had not been far up the mountain, and the trails closer to the town are relatively clear, but we still managed to get ourselves lost a couple of times before finding a trail we recognized. We did not make it up to the tanks, however. We turned around and went back to the hummingbird house for the water board meeting after realizing that someone had taken the battery cord for the total station out of the backpack and we couldn’t survey anything anyways. 

The meeting with the water board started around 5:00. We spent the most part of the meeting discussing in detail all of the responsibilities of the board in our absence. They will clean out the tanks at Mari Pata along with other maintenance of the work we have started, oversee construction of the new tanks once the government starts, set up community participation and taxes to fund the system’s maintenance, and (hopefully) contact us via email every month or so.