From the construction site

Making a form

Cutting rebar

Cutting wood

The site

Digging the trenches for the underground seismic beams

After finishing with another small project- a floor for some cow stalls.

My room, a bit messier than normal.

SPU professors visit the volcano

Halfway up the trail.

Standing on week-old lava.

Right on top of the vent.

Dr. John Lindberg.

Dr. Elaine Scott



Most of the way up Mt. Doom.

More summer pictures

Some of the staff and I out in Antigua at night.

At the banquet on Friday

Pouring the foundation for the community center.

Mixing the concrete for the foundation.

Filling the cistern from the water truck.

Piling the sand to mix for the concrete.

The rebar.

The community center work site.

Digging the latrine hole.

Magdalena at night during the fair.

Pictures!

Here are some pictures from the last team we had:

Having lunch in the clinic building in El Gorrion

Mixing concrete for a floor

Another lunch

Oscar working hard

Nick and I on a hike up the hill. Guatemala City in the background.

With the summer staff going out to eat for Ramon's birthday.

The storage shed we built at the community center construction site.

Oscar with the finished cistern for the community center.

Digging the foundation for the community center (a giant building).

Unloading 5000 pounds of cement.

5000 pounds of cement and lots of rebar out of the rain.

The last three months

The last few months have been very busy around here. In April, my parents came to Guatemala for ten days. Our schedule was rather packed with jam. Well, my mom brought some of her (much appreciated) jam for me and the family I’m staying with. She also got to spend a day making strawberry jam the Guatemalan way (cooked all day without added pectin) with Rafaela.

Together, we toured the sites where Students International works in El Gorrión and Magdalena and met the staff.

With Mario and my trumpet.

Then, we did a family project (building wooden concrete forms for cylindrical water cisterns).

Dad was very interested in the local wood industry.
For the second phase of their stay, we went to Tikal to see the Mayan ruins.

We toured the park with its accompanying museums for two days, and for the third day stayed close to the hotel in Flores (an island in Lake Petén). We did go out on a boat to see a museum on another island, and my dad and I swam across the lake.

When we returned to Antigua my mom was beginning to get sick, so she stayed in their hotel room for most of the rest of their time here. However, my dad and I went out to climb the volcano one day,

and go fishing the next.

We caught a few dorado (mahi-mahi) and some small tuna, but then my dad had the opportunity to wrestle with a 300 pound marlin for over an hour. We also saw lots of turtles and dolphins.
It was great to see my parents even for a short time.
After they left, we received a team of Canadians for a very fast-paced week. They wanted to work longer hours than we normally do with teams. They helped Oscar and I put in our first cylindrical cistern, which came out looking great. We dirt-formed the outside of it, so we spent a little more than anticipated on concrete, as the hole ended up being about an inch too big. My new design for a lossy hand pump to get water out of the cistern was a complete success, though, with the whole thing costing less than $13. It is much easier to operate than the other suction pumps SI had been installing earlier.
The Canadian team also brought 10 square concrete sand filters from an orphanage where they work. We installed five of them after sifting and washing some black volcanic sand to go inside. The sand came off a rock crusher, so it is very clean (nothing organic), but includes lots of dust that we have to wash out. I drank from one of the filters, and didn’t get sick, so they really do work. Some of them weren’t very well sealed, though, so they leaked all the water out the bottom. We are in the process of replacing those ones.
Two weeks ago, a group of businessmen came for a week with 45 plastic sand filters in tow. One of them arrived a few days early to help set up. Together, we built more screens, mounted on stilts, to sift more sand faster. When the rest of the team showed up, it was a whirlwind week of sifting and washing sand, and installing filters. I lost track of the number we installed, but it was somewhere around 18.
Then, last week, with two teams from California, we installed 5 more filters. There were much fewer workers, and the hours were not as long.
We did have more workers than originally planned, however, as all of the schools in Guatemala have been shut down on account of the flu pandemic. Those students planning on working in the schools were reassigned to other sites, including mine.
We divided the appropriate technology site into two groups for the first time last week. Oscar led a team to put a floor in a house, while I led the other team washing sand and installing filters.
Neither the concrete filters nor the plastic ones have all come out flawless. Some of the concrete ones leak (but I have yet to try the ones we have been pouring ourselves) and the plastic ones were rather difficult to make seal at the bottom where the pipe exits. A number of them cracked while the team was trying to tighten them down.
I am back home in Canby until Monday to renew my visa, visit with family and attend my brother's graduation. I would also like to buy a camera; maybe then I could take some pictures of my own to put up on this site, rather than just begging and taking from others' cameras. My mom has suggested I get a camera for a while now; it has taken me too long to listen to her. I am excited to see her and the rest of the family.

Spring Break

During the month of March we had two spring break teams from the States. The first was from Bethel. We don't have any students from the Bethel semester program helping with the appropriate technology site, but we had two from the spring break team.

Here is a picture of us at the house where we finished putting in a cement floor that we had started a couple of weeks earlier.

My phone has been invaluable as a calculator.
Besides the floor, we also worked on a couple of sand filters. This is a short video of me explaining a little about how we make them.

We are finally getting the noses to hold on to the rest of the concrete by covering that part of the mold with margarine (the slickest stuff we could get our hands on).
The second spring break team was a high school team from King's West in Bremerton, WA. We had three guys from this group with us.

Oscar's son Christian also joined us for a day when he didn't have school.

I am clearly posing for this shot. Notice there is no sweat dripping from my brow. We had enough help that I could sit back and work on an AutoCAD drawing for my next project: wooden forms to pour cylindrical concrete cisterns.
At the end of their week, the King's West team took a trip to Pacaya, an active volcano with accessible lava fields. We were only able to get within about 100 meters of the lava, but we did find vents hot enough to roast marshmallows.

My most interesting observation was that generally the fresher the rock was, the more hollow it sounded when I poked it with my stick.
After the team left, one of the adults accompanying them (but from California, not Bremerton) and I spent a few hours Tuesday of Holy Week walking around Antigua observing the festivities.

This is me standing below the huge concrete cross overlooking the colonial city.
In case you were wondering, we have not made any real progress in getting water to El Gorrion. Keep praying for this.

Filters Update

We have successfully poured two concrete sand filter containers. The first happened last week while a team of women was here. One of them, Lori, was brave enough to work with Oscar and I. I took off the outer part of the mold the next day. It came off cleanly, except for the nose where the water outlet sits. It will still work, but it won't be as cute.

This first photo is of Oscar putting a finish coat of cement on the outside.
For the second pour, I used a lot more vegetable oil on the nose part to try to get it to release. We took the inner part of the mold out this Tuesday. No mishaps there.

This photo shows the inside of the first filter. Notice the small tube sticking out of the side at the bottom (Click on the picture for a larger view). This tube runs up the wall and pokes out about 2/3 of the way up the side as the outlet. You may also see that we neglected to vibrate one portion of the wall near the top. Oscar filled in this evidence nicely a couple hours later.

This last photo is of the mold completely disassembled. The next day (Wednesday), we put the mold back together and poured the second filter. This time, I wore myself out with the vibrator (A stick of re-bar slightly bent at the end, stuck into the chuck of my cordless drill). We are waiting until Monday to take the whole mold off at once.

In other news, I went to the beach this last weekend with the Bethel students. We got in one and a half games of Settlers, and lots of pool volleyball. I got neither sick nor sunburned, a vast improvement over my previous trip.

On Tuesday afternoon, all of us working in El Gorrion had a meeting to discuss our projects, vision, etc. The biggest consensus was that water supply should be the first priority. The idea had been going around to take water from the spring-fed creek below the community and pump it up the hill. Oscar and I took the initiative to go check out the feasibility of the project. On Wednesday, we went down to the creek and hiked up it as far as we could without a machete. According to my rough estimate, there is about a gallon per second in the creek now (the driest part of the year). There is also a waterfall of about 15 feet a hundred or so yards inward. Also, the water is very clear. Anyway, we went back yesterday with a machete and survey equipment (a speed square, a plumb bob, and a 100ft. tape). We determined an altitude difference of about 76 meters between the community's water tank and the creek level at the bridge, with 444 meters walking distance between the two points. However, we could not survey the creek yet, because the community leader still had not talked with the landowner of the area with the creek. As of today, we are waiting until next Sunday, when we will go up the creek with more people from the community to do the survey. I am very excited about this project, especially because a ram pump seems like a very feasible solution.

Please pray that everything will go well with the landowner, that we will be able to supply this community with water.