This time of year the mornings are clear bright blue, with almost cartoon-like exaggerations of puffy clouds, but by midday the clouds gather in dark masses and dissolve into an all-pervasive mist and then rain that soaks everything.
After over 2 hours driving with a reluctant taxi driver nervous of the muddy roads, we arrived at Suro Antivo. We found the bend in the road closest to the house of the Teniente Gobernador. In the campo, you have to meet first with the autoridades. “Homero!” we shouted from the hill before descending to his house. A boy echoed back that he was not there, but we could talk to the boy’s mother. As we entered into the field in front of the 2-storey rammed earth house, a straggly dog came to greet us, wagging his tail and bearing his white fangs. We stayed still, backing up, until the boy came to call his dog away. Country dogs are the one thing I fear…and with reason; I was bitten a few weeks ago, but that is another story.
A jovial woman, Gladis, in a straw hat and apron came out, told us that Homero had gone to Cajamarca to collect the money from the bank for their milk sales. He’d taken the lechero (the milk truck) into town, as it is the only form of transportation to the community. Our taxi rental was an extravagance, and perhaps in the eyes of some, excessively expensive. She told us to come in, sit down, and spread a knit fabric down on the wooden bench under the balcony of their home. We took in the scene. Miguel, the sociologist who Daniel and I were with explained that the metal bowl on the ground was used for cleaning the intestines of pigs, to eat them. We guessed that the garden plot was a program of Programa Juntos (a state welfare program). A rabbit hopped across the grass and a tiny kitten curled around the corner. A small girl darted in and out, smiling with her surprisingly light brown eyes.
After a while the woman came out of the kitchen, a small building adjacent to the house and beckoned us in. We walked into the dark space and saw three bowls on the table, heaped high with potatoes and chicken. 9am and I tried to do my best to eat as much as possible, making sure to thank her profusely to make up for my physical inability of eating 10 boiled potatoes in one sitting. We washed it down with a steaming cup of fresh chamomile tea. While we ate, I asked Gladis about her new improved stove. She seemed genuinely excited about it. They’d built it themselves after doing a Juntos workshop. She touted the benefits of the new stove: almost no smoke so her eyes don’t hurt, it uses a fraction of the firewood, it even cooks faster…About half of the women in the community are part of Programa Juntos, which is a government program that gives families with children 100soles a month, but it requires them to have their kids in school and vaccinated, and participate in a range of “self-improvement” programs like the gardens, the improved stoves, sanitation workshops, etc.
We also asked Gladis about the water. She is one of the few people who get water in a pipe from the spring by the cemetery. She said that it comes and goes. When the water doesn’t come they have to literally suck on the end of the pipe to get it flowing again, or conversely blow so hard that they remove the blockage. She said that the water was good, pure, which I found really interesting because we just got the lab results back and there are some 900 coliform per 100ml. Is she just used to bad water? Used to children getting sick, or do they have a resistance to it?
After thanking her profusely, we walked to the source at the cemetery, I showed Miguel around and I expressed my concern. There is a gully in between the hill with the cemetery, and the adjacent hill with the sping, so it appears that the infiltration to the spring would not be contaminated by the water that flows past the cemetery. We will have to hire a hydraulogist to evaluate it. And the water will be treated and tested to make sure it is not contaminated.
We made it up to the hill, where the foreman was instructing community members how to dig the pit for the new tank. Buenos dias ingeniera, they greeted (in the country, just about anyone from outside is thought to be an engineer). The workers are paid by the municipality, despite the fact that the project is to benefit themselves. On the one hand I scoff at the idea, and yet realize that if I was asked to work digging trenches to lay the water lines to my house in Portland I would want to be paid too. Prior to GE/ITDG joining up with the water project, the municipality already had made the agreement for paid labor with the community (and other communities in the area), so while our support is not going toward the labor costs, the municipal support is. We shook hands all around, met the Agente municipal, the other authority in the village. And since it was starting to rain, we scurried down the hill to start our way to the 3rd spring, so we could collect another water sample.
I was in the village last week, where I filled the sterilized bottle with the water gushing from the rocks. But the test came out that the water has “more than 1600 fecal coliform per 100ml”—simply beyond the range of acceptable for consumption. It turns out that the rock wall, from where the water flows, had been constructed that day, so I think the water that was gathered included surface water that washed over the rocks and into the bottle. This time we brought a 1meter piece of hose and pushed it into the rock wall and into the spring itself. We let it wash out, and then took the sample. I dropped it off at the lab that same day and the results show that there are zero fecal coliform. Hurrah, it’s a great source for drinking water.
As we walked back from the spring, the maestro invited us for “a cup of hot water” at the house of his mother-in-law. Wanting to build the relationships, I said sure. The hot water ended up being another heaping meal. We waited on the bench under the awning of the house, watching water stream from the tin roof, while his wife cooked up potatoes, rice and fried egg. While we sat I asked where that house got its water from currently. Turns out the small pond full of water plants and 2 small trout is their drinking water source. I asked some off-color question about the water tasting like trout. The maestro said, no, it’s good water because it’s not stagnant, the water runs in and out of the pond…Then we were served a drink made with that very water. It was hot chicha morada. It tasted fine although I didn’t want to look too closely at the bits of things floating in the purple corn drink…
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Daniel, a volunteer from Oregon Direct Action took some pictures and video from this and other projects. Check it out…
http://vimeo.com/tag:greenempowerment
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielbachhuber/tags/greenempowerment/
current drinking water source
