My first topo study,pt 4

Sunday, November 16

Today was a decent day considering I was working with a crew of kids. Since none of them know any better, I'm still having to scout ahead for a half kilometer every so often to make sure I'm not leading the pipeline into a dead end like a cliff or an acre of solid rock.

The kids are still throwing rocks at eachother and swordfighting with their machetes and yelling fake orders at eachother as if I were the one telling them to yell, just to confuse eachother. Darn kids. Kinda amusing, though, I'll admit, with the fake orders. You see, I'd send the kid with the rod on ahead for a couple hundred meters so I could take a long shot, and after about a minute I'd get tired of yelling, so I'd speak to someone close to me and have 'em yell what I said. Then, when I was jotting down numbers or something and done with the rod, the kid near me would then start yelling "No! Don't move, he's not done! Hold very, very still! This is important!"

So I'm not keen on babysitting, it IS distracting and far less efficient, but the kids could work when I told 'em to straighten up. But I don't want a slow, easy pace. I want to finish and get back to my home-sweet-internets.

It would save a ton of time if Adolfo from the first few days were back... he had a good head on his shoulders for finding nice tracts of gradually sloping downhill land free of rocks and ditches.

I'm starting to worry about getting the theodolite I'm using back to its rightful owner, a member of Engineers Without Borders living in my site for a couple months. He leaves for the US in a week.

During the walk back, as it does occasionally, I got struck with the immensity of the distance between me and my chick. Kinda like a punch in the gut, the way the pain lingers awhile. I thought of the positives of being in the mountains: the days are flying by, so this project makes 10 days basically vanish instantly and bring me closer to seeing her again, and I'm living for free while I work, so I'm saving money. Of course, the negatives counter these: I can only communicate with her from a bridge 10 minutes from the house I sleep in, and a call costs 10 (about 50 cents) lempiras per minute. It costs 1 L/minute to call the US, for comparison. And the project is taking longer than it should due to a lack of organization on the part of the community, which is frustrating.

It's raining as I write these notes by candlelight... I hope I can get to the bridge tonight for my 2 minute call to China, and I hope we can work tomorrow. Too much mud, too dangerous to walk on mountainsides.

To top off the wonderfully slow and inefficient day, my cell phone clock apparently got jumbled due to me turning it off whenever I have no signal, and the time displayed was much later than it really was. I think we left at least an hour earlier than I wanted. It was cloudy, so I couldnt tell how high the sun was. Very frustrating.

The kids at my food house like me.


Monday, November 17

Today was the best day yet! It started with me rushing off to the bridge in the morning (I usually only go at night) and calling my chick. That's always an instant morale boost. It reminded me that I can talk to at length soon if I finish the project quickly, so I ended up moving like a well-oiled machine as I leveled the theodolite, gave orders, made notes, and took shots.

A bonus was that the my community contact apparently was able to milk his cows an hour earlier (why didn't he figure this out a week ago?) so he gave us an earlier ride up in his truck.

I don't think I sat down once all day. We probably got up to our last stake at 8 am, and I had the team work til 4:30 before starting the walk back down the mountain.

We made significant progress. Like, double what I did yesterday with the kids, if not triple. I was super stoked. I don't think I've worked with that intensity and focus for so long since college right before exam week, when all the research papers happen to all be due on the same day.

One thing I noticed was that nobody really said anything or chatted until the last 2 hours, when I could tell they were getting antsy and ready to call it a day. Then the atmosphere lightened, and they started talking to me and eachother more.

One of the kids is still very eager to learn English. His enthusiasm is impressive. Kinda wish I had more time to dedicate to teaching him basic phonics.

And finally, the man who was sitting around with his machete doing nothing, just out of my line of sight the other day, he redeemed himself. I gave him specific instructions on what to look for in a good route, and told him that I welcome and suggestions or questions. We worked much better together today than that other day. I was pleased.

And now, ending the day, we've got a straight line, more or less, to the tank site. Clear sailing ahead! Should be finished soon.

Now that the finish line is finally in sight, I'm super stoked!


Tuesday, November 18

So last night, I think it was, I walked into the room I've been sleeping in for a week, and for some reason I reached for the nonexistant lightswitch in a house with no electricity. Random fluke of a muscle memory, I guess. I chuckled at myself.

Today was another great day. We'll definitely finish tomorrow. I'm stoked.

In my daydreams as I power through my work, I find myself empathizing with some made-up railroad surveyor in the American West a hundred years ago. Rugged, apparently untouched terrain, just you, your gear and your crew, and the great outdoors.

Among the best lunches of my life was today. I plopped down in the middle of a thin pine forest, ground covered in pine needles, on a 25 degree slope on the side of a mountain. I put my plate in my lap and looked out on the surrounding land. Crystal clear day, tons of visibility so I can see the entire huge valley, and we're still pretty high up. No longer so high up that my ears pop as we walk down the mountain, but still a great view. Super relaxing, very peaceful. Oh, best part: my lunch was baleadas! Beans, cheese, egg all snuggled in a folded-over flour tortilla. Delish.

I finally got to pull of some easy little parkour moves as I scouted ahead once to move our route around some rocks. Nothing too impressive, just a running jump onto a tree stump then onto a big rock, but it was still a bit of a rush. I have fun.

Heh, towards the end of the day, two of the guys were talking. One worked on both the previous two topo studies for this water project, and he named all the flaws in the others (dropping the pipes down a vertical drop and putting a 45 degree elbow so the pipes continue going forward... that totally kills your water pressure and fatigues the pipe) and then he said "This study is 'supermejor!' (superbetter!)" I felt good about myself.

One of the biggest decisions I have to make is to decide where to finally cross the unpaved road we were using to climb the mountain. If we cross too early, we have to deal with traveling laterally along a nasty 45 degree (or steeper) slope to reach the tank, but if we cross too late we have to put in a 45 degree elbow to turn the pipe towards the tank again. And right in the middle, the sweet spot, is a 15 ft thick rock layer. The other surveyors opted to go right through the rock. I realized they were completely sick of the project and didn't want to turn back, so they put the burden on the community to bury the pipes in that rock. But I have an idea. There's a tiny gulley that goes through what appears to be an earth-covered fissure between two ginormous slabs of rock. I spotted it early on during our drives up and walks down, and scouted the first few dozen meters myself. It's hidden, but it looks good. That's my target.

I like mountains. I often get asked if I like Honduras more than Texas. I always reply that I like the mountains of Honduras more than the plains of Texas.

My chick once asked me, kind of incredulously, if I'd ever even been to a farm. I now think about that and smile. I've walked down roads teeming with cattle on their morning commute. I wake up to the crowing of roosters with pigs and cows eating grass right outside my window.

As I went through my going-to-bed routine at the pila at my sleeping house, I walked past a pile of piglets sleeping between their giant mom and the wall of the house. All snoring faintly and twitching. Pretty freaking adorable. And during the day, they all run around in a herd and play and investigate and eat together. Even the little black runt of the litter, even though he's always trailing behind, he participates. I'm definitely off pork for awhile. Someday I hope I go back to being a vegetarian. Or at least a quasi-vegetarian.



Wednesday, November 19

The 19th is my favorite day of the month. Fun fact.

Gaaaaah, we were so close. We got to within 200 meters of the tank site. I could SEEE it. So close. But the sun set and I couldn't take any more measurements, so I had to call it.

It's a shame, too. For my work crew today, I got the two kids who have always worked with me, and Adolfo the Magnificent. 3 people, 1 adult. First thing I had to do was tell the kids to ignore the speech they got from my community contact beforehand, who said they only have one job, one responsibility. The rod kid carries the rod, and the stake kid makes and hammers stakes. If we don't multitask when necessary, we'll never finish.

So I told 'em that if they're not doing anything, but see something they could be doing, they should do it. Typically that consisted of swinging a machete while I wrote stuff down.

Adolfo and I spent the first 2 hours of the day scouting for a path through the labyrinth of large rocks and steep slopes. A daunting task. I used my old gradeschool maze-solving skills, and made a beeline for the goal: the narrow gap that I wanted to use to cross the road. Then we backtracked, only traveling along the route that we could lay the pipeline on. And wouldn't you know it, it worked. He and I got back to the most recent stake having trailblazed a footpath through the forest along the PERFECT path to get the pipes where they needed to go. I was pleased, and amused that I had applied a strategy that I picked up in gradeschool.

The downside was that the route went through some very, very dense plants. Tropical stuff. We'd gotten low down the mountain, finally. We had to chop our way through a dense copse of thorney vines. Probably took us an hour and a half. Today was the first day in Honduras that I really regretted not having my own machete. I borrowed the a kid's machete every so often to let him rest, and put my Maui-honed AmeriCorps skills to work. Felt good.

Not sure if I mentioned it, but i've been carrying my own theodolite this entire way, since probably the third day. On my shoulder. That thing is heavy.

I have ugly hands. Covered in puncture marks from thorns, scratches, dirt, abrasions. And they're tan where my wrists aren't thanks to my long sleeve work shirts.

I made an agreement with the two kids to meet me at 7 am so we could get out to the tank site and finish up in a half hour of work. Really no need for Adolfo to trouble himself for a half hour of work. If need be, I'd chop what was left. The kids have better accuracy and more experience with their machetes, but I can have a few extra years of upper body strength on 'em.

But we ran into my community contact, the work crew organizer, on the walk back, and I told him the plan, and he disagreed with me, saying I needed more people, that it would take 2 hours with just 2 people, and only 1 hour with 3. I resisted, saying I'd already formed my team, that he didn't know how much work was left, that it was no problem. Then he said something about "if you hadn't told (the woman who makes the work crew lists) that you can work fine with 4 people, you would have finished today."

Ladies and gentleman, Alex got visibly angry that night.

First of all, I said no such thing. I'd been telling this man for 10 days that I preferred crews of 5 people. That I had a system, and it worked. And I'd been getting groups of children, groups of 4, and today a mere 3. Then he tries to pin the blame for our pace on me. Forget the fact I'd been standing around waiting, or helping chop, for hundreds of meters of dense brush to be carved through. Surely it was my fault, for some off-the-cuff comment I have no recollection making. I was so POed. Add to the fact that the man talks faster than I can understand, AND that he started putting the palm of his hand on my forehead like I was a child or a dog while talking to me (I've NEVER seen anyone in Honduras do this to someone else, never had it done to me, if it's a cultural thing, it's rare) so I kept telling him to stop touching me, and after he did it 3 times, I told myself if he did it again I was gonna react physically. I was that angry and offended. The man whose lies/half-truths (my car is broken and cant give you a ride up the mountain, I have to milk the cows at the same hour every day, thats why we leave at 8 am rather than 6 am like you want) and ineptitude (seriously, how hard is it to get 5 men together each morning?) have costed me at least two days extra on this project... he tries to blame me for ANYTHING?

Yeah, that was my train of thought at the time. He was meddling with my plan, and accused me in a sentence. Eventually he backtracked quickly and settled on "all i was saying was that 5 people is better than 4! that's all!" and I backed off for the good of everyone involved. Ruined my night.

Oh, other fun thing was having to tell my one-day crew of 4 grown men that I was not, in fact, being paid to do this project by anyone. I'm a volunteer, donating my services to this community to help them out. A few people, including the man I got angry at, understand the implications of this. But people do warm up to you more once they find that out. I wish it were better-advertised because I hate bragging on myself.

Yeah.

I had french fries for dinner, to top it off. French fries and ketchup. For dinner. Seriously? There is no protein in that meal. The lady musta seen something in my expression, because she quickly asked if I'd like some beans and cheese as well, and I quickly said "Yes please!"

Tomorrow, I finish!



Thursday, November 20

We finished the project at 9:00 am. At last. We did about a half hour of work, like I expected. I'd been promising to give the one bright kid one last English lesson, and I told him I'd have time before my bus at 11:00 am, and he should stop by. I'd write up some notes for him to study.

So I pack up and wait at the bus stop/pulperia (corner store) on the unpaved main highway. Kid had to stop at his house beforehand, and I guess his mom saddled him with chores. So I wrote up the notes, just the alphabet with some example words in English with some basic pronunciation rules, and gave it to the shop owner woman to give to him. She gave me a free Pepsi. She'd also been giving me a free cup of coffee every morning while I waited for the truck to be readied for our ascent. Very nice lady.

So I waited for my bus, got on it, and after a very, very bumpy ride, I stepped back into my site at long last.

Now, the wonderful world of data entry awaits me.

Note: finished typing up the notes. 450 lines of data on Excel and 19 pages in my little notebook. Lots of survey data.