Different directions

Dave says it’s my turn today, since I haven’t been keeping up. We had breakfast with the Rotary club this morning. They are involved in a huge number of projects. One of the hot ones coming up is a canoe race. I’m not sure how long, but first prize is $1000 BZ and there’s a big party at the finish. We met a young woman from Telluride CO who is studying sustainable development here at Galen University for credit at U of Vermont. That sounds like a good thing to do during a Vermont winter if you can arrange it.

Dan and Sheree took off on a site visit trip look for other potential sites. The Director of Rural Development, whom we had met last February, had suggested a few places to look at, and they went to check on them. It was a pretty long day; they didn’t get back until around 7:30. I’ll leave the findings to Dan.

Anne Hansen got a ride with the Rotary president to a village where Swarthmore Rotary is sponsoring a preschool. He owns a huge amount of land with timber and cattle and builds super-expensive houses and owns a couple of hotels. I think she got an eyeful of how the other small fraction lives. She caught up with us at Yalbac in time for lunch.

Dave and Aki and I went to Yalbac to work on the treatment system. On the way, we stopped in Spanish Lookout for some PVC for the well. I ran into Mike from In His Will Ministries, where Dale and I stayed on our survey trip in 2007. It’s interesting to run into people at different places from where they fit in your picture of the country.


Dave says progress on the treatment system was incremental. I thought it was very exciting. We got the new well pump into the well, with wire for power into the treatment building but no plumbing beyond the wellhead. Dave and Aki are much more patient than I am: I would have hot-wired the pump to the generator to see a geyser from the well.


Anne and I had a teaching session with the kids. We kind of commandeered them for the afternoon. The teacher went home and let us do our thing. We talked about germs and illness and handwashing and when to use the clean water they would get from their treatment system. They were pretty excited about the songs and games, and they didn’t want to go when we declared the session finished. We had to shoo them out with the promise that they could come back tomorrow afternoon.

My wildlife report isn’t very exciting because we haven’t been in the right places. Yesterday I saw clay-colored robins at the resort and great kiskadees and green parrots at Yalbac. A gecko almost fell on Anne at the resort. This morning at the hotel where Rotary meets we saw blue-gray tanagers, a female shrike-tanager, a hummingbird that the local record suggests was rufous-tailed, and a basilisk lizard, which has the interesting behaviors of running on its hind legs and running on water. The flowers are beautiful, especially several varieties of bouganvillea.

Tomorrow we will have teaching sessions with some of the women in the morning and the kids again in the afternoon. I’m really looking forward to that and to seeing water from the well.

Peace to all,
Chuck