The Technical Aspect of Tech Week

Applogies the pictures aren't exactly in order. Sunday morning at 6am, the entire environmental health group gathered at the bus stop, waiting for a shuttle from Peace Corps to take us to the bus station in Panama City. Parts of our journey to our technical week training would be handled by Peace Corps while other parts it was up to us to manage. The trip from Panama east to Metati was on public transportation for about six or seven hours. At the Meteti bus station we met up with a chartered bus which took us the next half to the port where we then took four rented boat twenty minutes upstream to a volunteer's site.

Once we arrived, we had quick meetings and then were led off in small groups to meet the families we would be staying with for the next week. Meeting host families is by far the most awkward experience Peace Corps has to offer. You show up at the door of a family, loaded down with way too many bags, and everyone initiates in awkward conversation for a bit before you put down your bags and then continue you in more awkward conversation for a bit. The awkwardness quickly dies down though and everything returns to normality.

For this week, we would be staying in an indigenous Emera community. Emera are known for their awesome skirts for women and wide open houses. By this I mean the windows are always open and there is only one "room" for the house. Everything is rather communal and private space isn't really a thing. Since I arrived in Panama, I've been staying in a shared room and at this point it doesn't really bother me. The only thing that bothered me was one family member that had a snore that could rival that of of a bull. Luckily, I had ear plugs (the snore still managed to peirce the ear plugs a bit), and I loved every other aspect about my family.

In total there were roughly eight or so family members consisiting of several sibligings, spouses, one child, and a grandmother. The exact relationship was lost on me since conversations were pretty loaded and it was hard to understand the language and remembering what was being said at the same time. The family earned their money through the running of a tienda, or small shop, as police officers in both Panama and locally, soldiers in the military, and as a doctor... this much I was able to understand from the conversations. The tienda point was the most important part though. This meant that every night I'd get an awesome beverage off of the shelf of the tienda to drink, hot chocolate in the mornings, Cheetos for dessert sometimes, and other similar goodies.

Here we are making a simple water level to measure altitude changes.

Testing the system out.

Making a mold out of clay to lay the concrete foundation in.



Molding the chicken wire to the base.



Here we are starting another project to build a soak pit. The goal of the soak pit is to move water away from a faucet so that it doesn't sit and collect in puddles.



Laying the pipes for the soak pit.



This is the water pump that pulls water out of the river up into the water tank. Currently in need of an electrical wire.

There are some pretty cool PUR packets of chemicals that showed up during the floods in Panama of 2010. Add a packet to a bucket of water and it takes the river water you see in the previous picture, filters out the gunk you see in the fabric here and turns it into the water below. Quite expensive but useful during extreme situations.

Water is cleaned here before being put into the tank.

This is the gunk I talked about previously.

Here we are learning how to make modifications to PVC pipe. The modificaitons can be seen below.

Three types of pipe we learned to make.

Here we are returning to the tank. We filled a sack with rice husks and molded chicken wire to its form.

Adding concrete to the walls of the cloth to form the final walls of the tank.

Here we are mixing concrete.

Digging the foundation for a concrete slab outside of the latrine.

Mixing concrete with water.

More concrete mixing.