Chuck's Birthday

This has been a fractionated day. Some of the group went to help build a fence around what will be a basketball court at the learning center, associated with In His Will Ministries. It certainly was reminiscent of Armenia, scorching temperatures and hard physical labor. Chuck, Lynn and I went to visit Octavia Waight Center for the Aged.

We were very impressed with the facility, you could send your grandmother there. It is clean and the patients are well cared for. They freely allowed us to see all parts of the facility. The facility is clean and Spartan. There are 6 rooms with 4 beds each. Some are devoid of decoration and some clearly have a lot personal mementos. Each room has its own bathroom and bath/shower. The staff seemed comfortable and good with the patients. We had to wait a while to see the director, so we chatted with the patients, who expressed satisfaction with their care.

We also talked to the director. He has been director for 18 years! It is a non-profit organization that receives some federal funds. They have been buying bottled water for drinking for their patients. The home is in San Ignacio, which has a municipal chlorinated water system, but they had requested an evaluation of their water because they had had an outbreak of diarrhea 3 months ago which they thought was related to the water. They have 26 patients and they feared that 3-4 would die. They also have had times when the water runs brown, or tastes like chlorine, or there is not enough water pressure to have water. They have installed a cistern that they collect water in and use it for when the water pressure is too low to have water. He is very concerned about the cost of water, they pay $300 a month for city water, which they use for cooking as well as other water uses, and they spend $125/ month for bottled water to protect the health of his patients. We have tested the water, both the tap water and the water from the cistern. There was a minimal amount of chlorine present in the tap water. We promised him we would report results. As a team we have mixed feelings about this site. The major problem is that they probably have clean water at least part of the time, and it therefore may not qualify as a Living Water site. But they have a vulnerable population, at least anecdotally they have intermittent water problems and, they would be an easy install and education component. They have a pump to move rainwater from the catchment cistern to a storage tank, they have a full-time maintenance staff, they are accustomed to handling clean water and keeping it clean, and they are very aware of the appropriate uses of clean water. Also, distribution of water jugs would be strictly in house rather than dispersed around a village.

Among our accomplishments of the day was to use Belize figures and calculate the cost of water from a Living Waters system. We think that the straight cost is 1-1.1cents/gallon. If you pay an operator $30 BZ/hr and give away 20 percent of your water the cost is close to 8 cents/gallon. A five gallon jug would then cost 40 cents and you could give away 20% of your water

Our contact with the Rotary club did not materialize today. Belize time seems to be the problem. We have hopes that we will be able to meet with them tomorrow and possibly visit the Yalbac site, another village which we have not reported on because we do not yet have enough information. We want to at least test the water there so we have a baseline. We have been unable to contact the Orange Walk site. The telephone system from here to there is not working either by cell or land line. We plan to try again tomorrow and if it does not work we will probably drive up unannounced on Wednesday. We have done all our appropriate email contacts with our previous sites and now just await return information.

The evening was spent at the learning center helping local kids with homework. It was reminiscent to us of tutoring inner city children in Chicago, with great variation in ability and the general level below what one would expect in mediocre schools in the US. However, we were startled when helping a high school girl with her math homework that it included review of simply subtraction of complex fractions and beginning algebra with multiplication of complex numerators and denominators. Since the girl seemed to get the concepts but did not manage the manipulations it became clear that she had learned a good deal of the algebra along with the simple fraction manipulations.

Another day is done, we are tired and both discouraged and hopeful.