We got back to Arcata a week ago. The bus ride up from the Bay Area quickly took us out of the bustle we'd been in continuously from San Salvador to Houston to San Francisco to Oakland. Humboldt seemed almost unnaturally quiet.
Passing through Eureka, the marquee on Grocery Outlet, usually advertising this week's special, just read "free pallets great firewood see manager" as if this were the most noteworthy thing happening in the center of our county seat. Nearing Arcata, I looked out at Murray Field, where a half dozen light planes sat idle on the tarmac. Nothing taking off or landing, just one turkey vulture spinning lazy turns above the runway. This is where I live, praise be. May it ever be so.
The very next morning, Basilia and I both were back at work, me at the Schatz Lab and she helping out a family we've known for years with child care. Seems almost too easy to get back into the old routine. The challenge now will be to not let this past half-year fall behind me, to act on the opportunities that have presented themselves. As Peter L. likes to say in moments of uncertainty: stay tuned.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
El Salvador, Honduras, El Salvador...home?
Thursday morning I took a bus to San Miguel and from there caught the international bus to Marcala, Honduras. Basilia and her sister Georgina and Georgina's husband Braulio were waiting for me there and took me up to Guajiquiro. Basilia had fixed up a cozy room for the two of us in her parents' house.
I spent a mostly pretty lazy three days with Basilia's family in Guajiquiro. The first day the main event was me taking five of our nieces and nephews, ages 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9, on a three-hour hike to a place called Tres Piedras. The destination was Basilia's idea. I was a little daunted at the thought of being the only adult overseeing all these little kids on a fairly long walk in the mountains. But in typical don't-worry Guajiquiro fashion, Basilia said go for it, you'll all be fine. And we were. Honduran rural kids are amazing in their casual bravado. I think all kids are naturally this way, but in our culture we surround kids with a bubble of protection that purportedly keeps all sorts of dangers at bay. In the process, I think we kill something vital in our children. It was so refreshing to just wander the countryside with this gang of little kids and watch them push themselves to their own limits. Nothing bad happened, and no one even cried. Tres Piedras is a fantastic set of rock formations that would easily earn state or national park status in the States. So cool that it's just a day hike from Basilia's parents' front door.
Saturday was my birthday, and the family threw me a big party. There was a piñata made by our nieces Lourdes and Edy, lots of good food, a live acoustic band and DJ music for dancing courtesy of our brother-in-law Melvin. Many people I've known since my Peace Corps days in the 1990s showed up to dance and wish me well. As usual at Guajiquiro parties a few young men got obnoxiously drunk, but unlike at many other parties I've attended, there were no fights this time. We had a terrific time dancing and people-watching.
Sunday was taking care of business day. Basi and I met with the family of one of our nephews whom we've offered to help financially to go to medical school, I worked with a friend of ours to draw up a contract for a piece of land she's selling us just outside town, and we even provided some impromptu relationship counseling for a couple we're hoping to see stick together as they go through some difficult times. Even though I didn't go more than a few blocks from the house all day, I felt exhausted by nightfall.
Yesterday was a classic test of our patience in traveling around Central America. We tried to travel back to Honduras using the same Marcala-San Miguel bus line I'd used a few days earlier, but after a couple hours in Marcala it became apparent the bus was not on its normal schedule. Probably a victim of the tropical storm that had been soaking both countries the last couple days. We eventually decided to go to plan B, which was catching a bus to Tegucigalpa and spending the night there, then taking the Tegucigalpa-San Salvador direct bus this morning. Our niece Celenia has accompanied us back to El Salvador to help us pack up for our return to California day after tomorrow.
It's been fun keeping this blog as an alternative to the hand-written diaries I used to keep when traveling. I don't have specific plans about whether to continue it once back in the U.S. -- I'll get back to you on that. It may depend on how actively my working relationship with people at Universidad Don Bosco continues once I get home.
I spent a mostly pretty lazy three days with Basilia's family in Guajiquiro. The first day the main event was me taking five of our nieces and nephews, ages 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9, on a three-hour hike to a place called Tres Piedras. The destination was Basilia's idea. I was a little daunted at the thought of being the only adult overseeing all these little kids on a fairly long walk in the mountains. But in typical don't-worry Guajiquiro fashion, Basilia said go for it, you'll all be fine. And we were. Honduran rural kids are amazing in their casual bravado. I think all kids are naturally this way, but in our culture we surround kids with a bubble of protection that purportedly keeps all sorts of dangers at bay. In the process, I think we kill something vital in our children. It was so refreshing to just wander the countryside with this gang of little kids and watch them push themselves to their own limits. Nothing bad happened, and no one even cried. Tres Piedras is a fantastic set of rock formations that would easily earn state or national park status in the States. So cool that it's just a day hike from Basilia's parents' front door.
Saturday was my birthday, and the family threw me a big party. There was a piñata made by our nieces Lourdes and Edy, lots of good food, a live acoustic band and DJ music for dancing courtesy of our brother-in-law Melvin. Many people I've known since my Peace Corps days in the 1990s showed up to dance and wish me well. As usual at Guajiquiro parties a few young men got obnoxiously drunk, but unlike at many other parties I've attended, there were no fights this time. We had a terrific time dancing and people-watching.
Basilia dancing with her father at my birthday party
Sunday was taking care of business day. Basi and I met with the family of one of our nephews whom we've offered to help financially to go to medical school, I worked with a friend of ours to draw up a contract for a piece of land she's selling us just outside town, and we even provided some impromptu relationship counseling for a couple we're hoping to see stick together as they go through some difficult times. Even though I didn't go more than a few blocks from the house all day, I felt exhausted by nightfall.
Yesterday was a classic test of our patience in traveling around Central America. We tried to travel back to Honduras using the same Marcala-San Miguel bus line I'd used a few days earlier, but after a couple hours in Marcala it became apparent the bus was not on its normal schedule. Probably a victim of the tropical storm that had been soaking both countries the last couple days. We eventually decided to go to plan B, which was catching a bus to Tegucigalpa and spending the night there, then taking the Tegucigalpa-San Salvador direct bus this morning. Our niece Celenia has accompanied us back to El Salvador to help us pack up for our return to California day after tomorrow.
It's been fun keeping this blog as an alternative to the hand-written diaries I used to keep when traveling. I don't have specific plans about whether to continue it once back in the U.S. -- I'll get back to you on that. It may depend on how actively my working relationship with people at Universidad Don Bosco continues once I get home.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Bye Bye Bosco
Yesterday I went to a send-off at the U.S. embassy for Salvadoran researchers and master's candidates who have been awarded Fulbright scholarships to go study or perform research in the U.S. The event was a chance to say goodbye to Carolyn and other members of the embassy staff, and my fellow U.S. Fulbrighters Anne and Rich. Afterward Rich and I went to a cafe near the embassy to talk over our experiences and Rich's idea about us collaborating on a paper that might compare/contrast/synthesize our experiences teaching about and studying renewable energy in El Salvador.
Today was my last day at Universidad Don Bosco. I spent the morning cleaning up and organizing my bookshelf, desk, and computer. Just before noon the grad campus staff threw me a farewell party with a cake from my favorite bakery, Jardin del Pan. Nice job! It was pretty sad saying goodbye to all these folks who have been so nice to me all along, some of whom I now know as good friends.
In the afternoon I went to Universidad de El Salvador for my third and final guest lecture there. This was part of a two-day forum on renewable energy organized by the student chapter of IEEE (an international electrical engineers' professional society). They gave me a three-hour slot to talk about renewable energy. I pasted together a bunch of material from my seven-week course I'd taught at Don Bosco, trying to winnow it down into a concise overview. I didn't have enough time to do a really proper job of this, and I ended up with way more material than I could fit into three hours. But it was OK; I had an enthusiastic audience of about 15 engineering students (sadly, only one woman in the group) who paid close attention and had lots of intelligent questions. I was less organized than I like to be, but I got the feeling the students came away satisfied. I had fun anyway.
This evening Kyle and Francisco took me out to dinner. We went to Yemaya, which was nice since they'd had to miss out on going there Friday when Kyle got sick. The food was good as always, especially when accompanied by some Garífuna guífiti (still haven't finished the damn bottle!). The owners of Yemaya, Kristina and Fernando, are such fine people. I learned tonight that Kristina lived in San Francisco, Oakland, and Guerneville (the tiny Sonoma County town where my sister Genny lived for many years!) during four years that she lived in California not long ago. I feel so at home in their restaurant -- my family and friends from back home would all love this place. It's Central American to be sure, but has so many touches that feel like my native turf -- the lo-fi artwork, the mostly vegetarian menu, and the stereo playing Billy Bragg, the Pogues, Madness, and jazz from the likes of Coltrane and Miles Davis. ¡Viva Yemaya!
Today was my last day at Universidad Don Bosco. I spent the morning cleaning up and organizing my bookshelf, desk, and computer. Just before noon the grad campus staff threw me a farewell party with a cake from my favorite bakery, Jardin del Pan. Nice job! It was pretty sad saying goodbye to all these folks who have been so nice to me all along, some of whom I now know as good friends.
In the afternoon I went to Universidad de El Salvador for my third and final guest lecture there. This was part of a two-day forum on renewable energy organized by the student chapter of IEEE (an international electrical engineers' professional society). They gave me a three-hour slot to talk about renewable energy. I pasted together a bunch of material from my seven-week course I'd taught at Don Bosco, trying to winnow it down into a concise overview. I didn't have enough time to do a really proper job of this, and I ended up with way more material than I could fit into three hours. But it was OK; I had an enthusiastic audience of about 15 engineering students (sadly, only one woman in the group) who paid close attention and had lots of intelligent questions. I was less organized than I like to be, but I got the feeling the students came away satisfied. I had fun anyway.
This evening Kyle and Francisco took me out to dinner. We went to Yemaya, which was nice since they'd had to miss out on going there Friday when Kyle got sick. The food was good as always, especially when accompanied by some Garífuna guífiti (still haven't finished the damn bottle!). The owners of Yemaya, Kristina and Fernando, are such fine people. I learned tonight that Kristina lived in San Francisco, Oakland, and Guerneville (the tiny Sonoma County town where my sister Genny lived for many years!) during four years that she lived in California not long ago. I feel so at home in their restaurant -- my family and friends from back home would all love this place. It's Central American to be sure, but has so many touches that feel like my native turf -- the lo-fi artwork, the mostly vegetarian menu, and the stereo playing Billy Bragg, the Pogues, Madness, and jazz from the likes of Coltrane and Miles Davis. ¡Viva Yemaya!
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Micro Buses from Hell
I've had a love-hate relationship with San Salvador's urban micro-buses ever since arriving here. These feelings echo my feelings about the city as a whole. On the one hand, the cheapskate in me loves a system that lets you cross the whole city for 25 cents. And of course those low fares are essential to the workers of the city, many of whom have to take two or more buses (no transfers offered on this system) to get to work and only earn $300 or less a month. Also, the drivers and their privately operated buses have a certain bad-boy coolness about them that you'll never see in a municipally operated transit agency in the U.S. Many of the buses have names painted across the windshield -- in most cases the name of a loved one or family member (see Emmy below), but some of the tough-guy names you gotta love: "Apocalipsis," "Taliban," and Basilia's and my favorite, "Corrupción Total."
On the other hand, these buses are among the worst polluters in the city, their drivers are frighteningly reckless, and they have a reputation for being crime magnets. The crime of course includes pickpocketing and holdups of passengers, but also gangs demand regular "protection" payments from the drivers. The horrific massacre and burning of 14 passengers on board one of these buses in the Mejicanos district of the capital the night before last may have been a gang's revenge against a driver who refused to pay up...though I hear other explanations floating around.
Yesterday morning other UDB staff and I got to meet with staff from FOMILENIO and the country director of Millennium Challenge Corporation. I had asked for this meeting in order to explore possibilities for UDB to get involved in a research role in FOMILENIO's program in which they are in the process of installing nearly 2,000 off-grid solar electric systems in rural households. There seems to be genuine interest in working together on both sides, so hopefully this could turn into one of the first major projects for UDB's new energy institute. Reina from UDB says she will work on a formal proposal to do this. I'm glad to see other UDB people picking up the energy institute ball and running with it as I leave the playing field (for now).
On the other hand, these buses are among the worst polluters in the city, their drivers are frighteningly reckless, and they have a reputation for being crime magnets. The crime of course includes pickpocketing and holdups of passengers, but also gangs demand regular "protection" payments from the drivers. The horrific massacre and burning of 14 passengers on board one of these buses in the Mejicanos district of the capital the night before last may have been a gang's revenge against a driver who refused to pay up...though I hear other explanations floating around.
Yesterday morning other UDB staff and I got to meet with staff from FOMILENIO and the country director of Millennium Challenge Corporation. I had asked for this meeting in order to explore possibilities for UDB to get involved in a research role in FOMILENIO's program in which they are in the process of installing nearly 2,000 off-grid solar electric systems in rural households. There seems to be genuine interest in working together on both sides, so hopefully this could turn into one of the first major projects for UDB's new energy institute. Reina from UDB says she will work on a formal proposal to do this. I'm glad to see other UDB people picking up the energy institute ball and running with it as I leave the playing field (for now).
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Father's Day
Today could have been a really melancholy day, considering it's my first Father's Day since my father died. But I got to have a great day, thanks to my friend Victor Paula, who happens to be a great dad himself. Victor was one of the students in the renewable energy class I taught. He's stayed in touch since the class ended, and we'd been talking about going out to do something together.
Today we made good on it, and he brought his family along, his wife Telma and their two little boys Victor Alejandro (three and a half) and Ernesto (six months). You can tell by how cheerful and trusting the two boys are that these must be great parents. I spent much of the day carrying Ernesto around and playing with Victor Alejandro, and they both acted very comfortable with me from first sight. This made me feel like a little bit of a dad myself (with no diaper changing required!).
The family picked me up at 10:00 am in their car, and we headed out to the coast. We took the coast road west from La Libertad, which I had not traveled before further than El Tunco beach. It's a winding road with many ocean overlooks, somewhat like Highway 1 on the Mendocino and Sonoma County coasts, but with lusher vegetation. There are five tunnels along the way, one a half kilometer long, which was exciting for Victor Alejandro.
We had lunch at a restaurant in Acajutla with an ocean view, followed by a quick car tour of the industrial facilities at the port. Victor used to work at the oil refinery, so he knows this area well. Then we headed inland to the Ruta de las Flores, a mountain road Basilia and I had previously explored by bus. Of course in the car we had the luxury of stopping where we liked to see the views. We made stops in Nahuizalco, Salcoatitán (where we went to the Pan Nuestro bakery where the owner's husband has a beautiful bonsai garden out back), Apaneca, and Ataco, plus a few fancy/rustic restaurant-lodges along the road that Victor and Telma were familiar with -- all very cute with relaxing atmospheres and beautiful landscaping.
Victor and I had a great time talking along the way about life in his country and mine. He was an exchange student in Kansas on the same CASS program in 1991-93 that allowed Basilia to go to the U.S. for the first time a few years later, so we had a lot of notes to compare. Telma was pretty quiet, but I did get her to tell me that she also has an engineering degree, and she's from Izalco, a town that Basi and I enjoyed visiting a few weeks ago. We saw a good chunk of western El Salvador today and didn't get back to San Salvador until 8:00 pm.
Thanks Victor and family for making this a happy father's day!
Today we made good on it, and he brought his family along, his wife Telma and their two little boys Victor Alejandro (three and a half) and Ernesto (six months). You can tell by how cheerful and trusting the two boys are that these must be great parents. I spent much of the day carrying Ernesto around and playing with Victor Alejandro, and they both acted very comfortable with me from first sight. This made me feel like a little bit of a dad myself (with no diaper changing required!).
Happy Father's Day Victor, Victor Alejandro, Ernesto and Telma!
The family picked me up at 10:00 am in their car, and we headed out to the coast. We took the coast road west from La Libertad, which I had not traveled before further than El Tunco beach. It's a winding road with many ocean overlooks, somewhat like Highway 1 on the Mendocino and Sonoma County coasts, but with lusher vegetation. There are five tunnels along the way, one a half kilometer long, which was exciting for Victor Alejandro.
We had lunch at a restaurant in Acajutla with an ocean view, followed by a quick car tour of the industrial facilities at the port. Victor used to work at the oil refinery, so he knows this area well. Then we headed inland to the Ruta de las Flores, a mountain road Basilia and I had previously explored by bus. Of course in the car we had the luxury of stopping where we liked to see the views. We made stops in Nahuizalco, Salcoatitán (where we went to the Pan Nuestro bakery where the owner's husband has a beautiful bonsai garden out back), Apaneca, and Ataco, plus a few fancy/rustic restaurant-lodges along the road that Victor and Telma were familiar with -- all very cute with relaxing atmospheres and beautiful landscaping.
Victor and I had a great time talking along the way about life in his country and mine. He was an exchange student in Kansas on the same CASS program in 1991-93 that allowed Basilia to go to the U.S. for the first time a few years later, so we had a lot of notes to compare. Telma was pretty quiet, but I did get her to tell me that she also has an engineering degree, and she's from Izalco, a town that Basi and I enjoyed visiting a few weeks ago. We saw a good chunk of western El Salvador today and didn't get back to San Salvador until 8:00 pm.
Thanks Victor and family for making this a happy father's day!
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Indigo
This morning Nelson and Norma came to pick me up for one last weekend outing. We headed west in their car to Chalchuapa, a town in the department of Santa Ana that is surrounded by Pre-Columbian ruins, mostly unexcavated. There are two developed sites right in the vicinity of the town, Casa Blanca and Tazumal. We went first to Casa Blanca. The ruins consist of several small to medium sized pyramids, some of which have been partially restored. More interesting was the museum, where a very well-informed guide showed us around, explaining nearly every piece in the collection.
He also showed us an indigo workshop in a space adjoining the museum. Indigo is an intense blue dye derived from several related plants native to El Salvador. Indigo dye production for export to Europe became a mainstay of the Central American economy during the colonial period, but the development of cheaper artificial dyes in the 1860s wiped the industry out almost overnight. Only recently is natural indigo being revived as a cottage industry, and the workshop at Casa Blanca has a beautiful display of natural fabrics dyed using indigo and tie-dye, batik, and other techniques.
The grounds of Casa Blanca were also beautiful, including a botanical garden with some large and interesting specimens of matapalo, or strangler fig, a parasitic vining plant that grows up the trunks of large trees and eventually kills the host, becoming free-standing in the process. The strangler fig's growth habit results in a bizarre, twisted and braided trunk.
Next we got some lunch in town: mashed yuca (cassava or manioc), a local specialty. From there we went to see Tazumal. Here the pyramids are larger and more fully restored. You're even allowed to climb up on one of them. Our guide was an small, wiry older guy with a ponytail who I initially mistook for a fellow gringo sightseer. He was very animated, a classic civil war-era radical who lost no opportunity to denounce yankee imperialism (in a friendly way that made me feel like a comrade, not the enemy!) and to declare his enthusiasm for "his" president. On this latter point I got the same feeling from him that I got from many people, particularly African-Americans, about President Obama, at least when he first took office. Keep that feeling alive, Barack! It must be hard to fight the power and be the power all at the same time.
On the way back to San Salvador we made a short detour to see downtown Santa Ana, which I had not yet visited. Santa Ana in the west and San Miguel in the east are the other two large cities in the country besides San Salvador, though neither of them comes close to the size or intensity of the capital. The main square in Santa Ana is surrounded by a large gothic cathedral (looking more northern European than the usual Spanish look of Central American churches), a beautifully restored theater, a grand municipal palace, and a cultural center that was bustling on this Saturday afternoon with an art exhibition, ballet class, and several classrooms with music lessons in piano, violin, and guitar all going on at once. In the hour or so we spent exploring these buildings and the park, I got a much nicer first impression of Santa Ana than I got seeing San Salvador and San Miguel for the first time.
Funny, Nelson and I were just talking this morning about wind energy in El Salvador, and I noted that aside from the day when tropical storm Agatha hit San Salvador, I've hardly experienced any wind in six months in the country, reinforcing my impression that wind technology has little to offer this country. So right now it's ripping down rain outside, and there's actually quite a bit of wind blowing. Based on the rains we've had the last couple weeks, this will probably only last a couple hours.
Yesterday was the official end of my six-week Fulbright extension, so I guess I'm now a Fulbright alum. I still have a few days of work to finish up. Monday I and a couple other UDB people are meeting with staff of FOMILENIO, an organization supported by the U.S. government-run Millennium Challenge Corporation. Among other projects, FOMILENIO is installing small off-grid solar electric systems in rural homes in the impoverished northern part of the country. We want to talk with them about possibilities for FOMILENIO and UDB to collaborate. Then on Tuesday there's a send-off event for Salvadoran students with Fulbright awards headed off to study in the U.S. And on Wednesday I'm teaching a three-hour overview workshop on renewable energy for IEEE. So it ain't over yet. Thursday I head for Honduras to spend my birthday with Basilia and her family. Basi, I miss you!
He also showed us an indigo workshop in a space adjoining the museum. Indigo is an intense blue dye derived from several related plants native to El Salvador. Indigo dye production for export to Europe became a mainstay of the Central American economy during the colonial period, but the development of cheaper artificial dyes in the 1860s wiped the industry out almost overnight. Only recently is natural indigo being revived as a cottage industry, and the workshop at Casa Blanca has a beautiful display of natural fabrics dyed using indigo and tie-dye, batik, and other techniques.
Indigo-dyed fabrics
Next we got some lunch in town: mashed yuca (cassava or manioc), a local specialty. From there we went to see Tazumal. Here the pyramids are larger and more fully restored. You're even allowed to climb up on one of them. Our guide was an small, wiry older guy with a ponytail who I initially mistook for a fellow gringo sightseer. He was very animated, a classic civil war-era radical who lost no opportunity to denounce yankee imperialism (in a friendly way that made me feel like a comrade, not the enemy!) and to declare his enthusiasm for "his" president. On this latter point I got the same feeling from him that I got from many people, particularly African-Americans, about President Obama, at least when he first took office. Keep that feeling alive, Barack! It must be hard to fight the power and be the power all at the same time.
Norma and Nelson at the Tazumal pyramids
On the way back to San Salvador we made a short detour to see downtown Santa Ana, which I had not yet visited. Santa Ana in the west and San Miguel in the east are the other two large cities in the country besides San Salvador, though neither of them comes close to the size or intensity of the capital. The main square in Santa Ana is surrounded by a large gothic cathedral (looking more northern European than the usual Spanish look of Central American churches), a beautifully restored theater, a grand municipal palace, and a cultural center that was bustling on this Saturday afternoon with an art exhibition, ballet class, and several classrooms with music lessons in piano, violin, and guitar all going on at once. In the hour or so we spent exploring these buildings and the park, I got a much nicer first impression of Santa Ana than I got seeing San Salvador and San Miguel for the first time.
Funny, Nelson and I were just talking this morning about wind energy in El Salvador, and I noted that aside from the day when tropical storm Agatha hit San Salvador, I've hardly experienced any wind in six months in the country, reinforcing my impression that wind technology has little to offer this country. So right now it's ripping down rain outside, and there's actually quite a bit of wind blowing. Based on the rains we've had the last couple weeks, this will probably only last a couple hours.
Yesterday was the official end of my six-week Fulbright extension, so I guess I'm now a Fulbright alum. I still have a few days of work to finish up. Monday I and a couple other UDB people are meeting with staff of FOMILENIO, an organization supported by the U.S. government-run Millennium Challenge Corporation. Among other projects, FOMILENIO is installing small off-grid solar electric systems in rural homes in the impoverished northern part of the country. We want to talk with them about possibilities for FOMILENIO and UDB to collaborate. Then on Tuesday there's a send-off event for Salvadoran students with Fulbright awards headed off to study in the U.S. And on Wednesday I'm teaching a three-hour overview workshop on renewable energy for IEEE. So it ain't over yet. Thursday I head for Honduras to spend my birthday with Basilia and her family. Basi, I miss you!
Friday, June 18, 2010
Guífiti Time
The signing ceremony went fine this morning. Tim DeVoogd from the State Department showed up as planned, and Reina and I got to have a short but fruitful talk with him about opportunities to fund the exchange between UDB and HSU.
In the evening I went out with René, Kiriam, Eduardo, and Claudia. Francisco and Kyle were going to join us as well, but Kyle got sick. We went to Yemaya, the restaurant that used to be in our neighborhood. They had to move because the security gates that went up on their street made it impossible to do business. The move to Santa Tecla seems to have played out really well -- the new location is much bigger but was packed with people, mostly a hip young crowd. Kristina the owner seems very happy with the outcome. René says this neighborhood is getting really trendy lately.
A shame Francisco didn't make it, because the origin of this outing was a conversation we had about guífiti, the Garífuna liquor/medicine. I told him about this and promised to bring back a bottle from Triunfo de la Cruz. So this was meant to be our night to party it. It wasn't a total loss -- we enjoyed sharing it at our table, and Fulbrighters Chris, Anne and Beth were at a nearby table along with Teresa and Lorenzo, a pair of visiting medical researchers from Marquette University and Beth's novio Jonathan. So the guífiti found many willing tasters.
There was a jazz fusion group called Brujo that rocked the house starting around eight. It wasn't til I'd been watching them play for a few minutes that I realized I know the guitarist -- José Luis Flores from Unidad Nacional Ecológica Salvadoreña. He´s quite a good guitarist. The bassist also really impressed me. The hip atmosphere of the restaurant and the music made me feel far away from the San Salvador I know. I'm sure this sort of thing is happening every night somewhere in this big city; I just haven't been getting out enough to find it.
In the evening I went out with René, Kiriam, Eduardo, and Claudia. Francisco and Kyle were going to join us as well, but Kyle got sick. We went to Yemaya, the restaurant that used to be in our neighborhood. They had to move because the security gates that went up on their street made it impossible to do business. The move to Santa Tecla seems to have played out really well -- the new location is much bigger but was packed with people, mostly a hip young crowd. Kristina the owner seems very happy with the outcome. René says this neighborhood is getting really trendy lately.
A shame Francisco didn't make it, because the origin of this outing was a conversation we had about guífiti, the Garífuna liquor/medicine. I told him about this and promised to bring back a bottle from Triunfo de la Cruz. So this was meant to be our night to party it. It wasn't a total loss -- we enjoyed sharing it at our table, and Fulbrighters Chris, Anne and Beth were at a nearby table along with Teresa and Lorenzo, a pair of visiting medical researchers from Marquette University and Beth's novio Jonathan. So the guífiti found many willing tasters.
There was a jazz fusion group called Brujo that rocked the house starting around eight. It wasn't til I'd been watching them play for a few minutes that I realized I know the guitarist -- José Luis Flores from Unidad Nacional Ecológica Salvadoreña. He´s quite a good guitarist. The bassist also really impressed me. The hip atmosphere of the restaurant and the music made me feel far away from the San Salvador I know. I'm sure this sort of thing is happening every night somewhere in this big city; I just haven't been getting out enough to find it.
Brujo at Yemaya, with Eduardo and Claudia at far left
Back in the news
More press today. Coincides with the signing of the agreement between UDB and the embassy.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Home Stretch at the University
Back in February and March when I was teaching my renewable energy course, I was working 55 or 60 hours a week to keep up with lecture prep, field trip logistics, grading and so on. When the class ended I managed to get down to working about 40 hours a week, having time to make weekend trips with Basilia, watch movies in the evening, and get decent exercise and sleep.
Now as I'm in my final days at Universidad Don Bosco, I've found myself ramping up the hours again to tie up loose ends on all these different projects. Basilia is visiting her family in Honduras, so I don't have much else to do but work anyway. As has been the case all along, every week at UDB brings surprises. This week it's a construction project. A couple months ago the head of the university, Federico Huguet, asked me if I could provide some input on energy-related design issues for a new four-story building planned for the graduate campus. I attended a couple meetings, talked with the architects and directed them to some reading material and thought that was the end of it.
This week the rector pulled me back into the project. I had another meeting with the architects today, just me and this brother-sister team. It's fun working with them because they know very little about energy but are sincerely interested in learning and like to get into the details about materials and performance. I put together a four-page document with recommendations for siting and orientation, building envelope, daylighting, building envelope, and renewable energy. We talked about light shelves and similar devices for controlling entry of light and heat from the sun. This led to me nerding out for a couple hours with Google SketchUp drawing software, exploring how you can use it to visualize sun and shadow effects in buildings with windows and skylights. See the Build It Solar website for some short and simple instructions on how to do this with SketchUp models.
Tomorrow is a big day -- the U.S. embassy and UDB will sign a memorandum of understanding that sets the terms for the Science Corner grant that UDB is being awarded. Dr. Tim DeVoogd, who came to UDB a couple months ago to assess the university's capacity to manage the Science Corner, is coming back down from Washington for the ceremony. We also invited lots of people who work in the energy sector in El Salvador. There's been a lot of scrambling around as people's availability changes. At one point the vice minister of education was going to sign the MOU as a witness of honor alongside Dr. DeVoogd. I was scheduled to give a brief talk about the Science Corner project. But a couple days ago we were informed that the vice minister will not be available. So now Reina Durán de Alvarado, UDB's vice rector of science and technology, is going to give the talk instead, and I'm now a witness of honor. Rule one in Central America: be flexible and roll with the changes. In any case, I'm very honored!
Now as I'm in my final days at Universidad Don Bosco, I've found myself ramping up the hours again to tie up loose ends on all these different projects. Basilia is visiting her family in Honduras, so I don't have much else to do but work anyway. As has been the case all along, every week at UDB brings surprises. This week it's a construction project. A couple months ago the head of the university, Federico Huguet, asked me if I could provide some input on energy-related design issues for a new four-story building planned for the graduate campus. I attended a couple meetings, talked with the architects and directed them to some reading material and thought that was the end of it.
This week the rector pulled me back into the project. I had another meeting with the architects today, just me and this brother-sister team. It's fun working with them because they know very little about energy but are sincerely interested in learning and like to get into the details about materials and performance. I put together a four-page document with recommendations for siting and orientation, building envelope, daylighting, building envelope, and renewable energy. We talked about light shelves and similar devices for controlling entry of light and heat from the sun. This led to me nerding out for a couple hours with Google SketchUp drawing software, exploring how you can use it to visualize sun and shadow effects in buildings with windows and skylights. See the Build It Solar website for some short and simple instructions on how to do this with SketchUp models.
Tomorrow is a big day -- the U.S. embassy and UDB will sign a memorandum of understanding that sets the terms for the Science Corner grant that UDB is being awarded. Dr. Tim DeVoogd, who came to UDB a couple months ago to assess the university's capacity to manage the Science Corner, is coming back down from Washington for the ceremony. We also invited lots of people who work in the energy sector in El Salvador. There's been a lot of scrambling around as people's availability changes. At one point the vice minister of education was going to sign the MOU as a witness of honor alongside Dr. DeVoogd. I was scheduled to give a brief talk about the Science Corner project. But a couple days ago we were informed that the vice minister will not be available. So now Reina Durán de Alvarado, UDB's vice rector of science and technology, is going to give the talk instead, and I'm now a witness of honor. Rule one in Central America: be flexible and roll with the changes. In any case, I'm very honored!
Monday, June 14, 2010
Triunfo de la Cruz
This last weekend Basilia and I finally did something we'd talked about for years and organized over the last couple months. We took Basilia's whole family on an excursion. 37 of us went, with our nephew Joel driving everyone in his father Braulio's bus. We had reserved a bunch of rooms at a beachfront hotel in Triunfo de la Cruz, a village on Honduras's Caribbean coast.
But first Basilia, Celenia and I had to get to the meeting point in La Paz. From our house in San Salvador, that took a cab, five buses and a jitney. Once we were all in one place, we fired up the bus and headed for the coast. We had along Basi's mom and dad, five of her six siblings (one had to work), and many nieces, nephews, and even a couple grand-nieces. The drive went fine, though at one point we had to inch across a provisional bridge next to a bridge that was destroyed by an earthquake last year.
Triunfo is one of many Garífuna villages on the coast. The Garífuna are people of mainly African origin (with some degree of intermarriage with coastal indigenous people) who are the descendants of people who survived shipwrecks of incoming slave ships in the Caribbean. So technically they were never slaves, at least not in the New World. They maintain many traditions, having their own language they speak daily, though they all seem to know Spanish and in many cases English as well.
The place we stayed is called Panchi's, named after the owner, a kind woman who made us great meals and treated us very well. Basilia has an old classmate who is from Triunfo, and we hired her father Dionisio to take me and Basi and all the kids (11 of them) on a trip in his outboard launch across Tela Bay to Punta Sal. I´d been there years before as a Peace Corps volunteer, and it's still a wild, pristine place with monkeys in the trees and beautiful turquoise water lapping white sand beaches. Of course we all loved it. The funniest moment of the weekend was when we came ashore and the park ranger assumed Basilia and I ran an orphanage!
Saturday night Basi and I and a few members of the family, mostly twenty-something nieces and nephews, walked a few blocks from the hotel to a community center where there was a dance. It was fascinating to all of us, since virtually all the 80 or 100 people there besides us were Garífiunas. We had a great time dancing. The Garífunas are friendly enough but seem overall pretty indifferent to outsiders, whether gringos or Hondurans. This is probably a good thing for the survival of their culture.
Yesterday we headed back toward Guajiquiro, making a detour to visit Pulhapanzak, Honduras's iconic waterfall. Our last hurrah with the group was stopping for lunch at Granja d'Elia in Siguatepeque. This has long been a favorite restaurant for Basilia and me, but it was especially nice for our big group. The staff are so friendly, the buffet style food so good, and the prices affordable even when feeding so many. Awesome!
Basilia and I said our goodbyes to the family and hopped off the bus at a crossroads so we could head for Tegucigalpa on another bus. It had just gotten dark as we arrived in Tegus, and a blackout that turned out to affect much of Honduras and El Salvador had just hit. We had to find a hotel in the middle of the city in complete darkness. Always carry a flashlight in Central America! Power came back on within a couple hours. This morning another parting -- Basilia went back to Guajiquiro to spend some time there, while I caught a bus back to San Salvador for my last couple weeks of work.
This week at UDB culminates with a signing ceremony for the Science Corner grant on Friday. This grant will help the university to start equipping their renewable energy research center. I just learned today that I have ten minutes in the program to make remarks, so I need to get something together. Also, I need to prepare for a three-hour workshop I'm teaching for the local IEEE chapter a week from tomorrow. So I guess party time is over for awhile...fun while it lasted anyway!
But first Basilia, Celenia and I had to get to the meeting point in La Paz. From our house in San Salvador, that took a cab, five buses and a jitney. Once we were all in one place, we fired up the bus and headed for the coast. We had along Basi's mom and dad, five of her six siblings (one had to work), and many nieces, nephews, and even a couple grand-nieces. The drive went fine, though at one point we had to inch across a provisional bridge next to a bridge that was destroyed by an earthquake last year.
Triunfo is one of many Garífuna villages on the coast. The Garífuna are people of mainly African origin (with some degree of intermarriage with coastal indigenous people) who are the descendants of people who survived shipwrecks of incoming slave ships in the Caribbean. So technically they were never slaves, at least not in the New World. They maintain many traditions, having their own language they speak daily, though they all seem to know Spanish and in many cases English as well.
The place we stayed is called Panchi's, named after the owner, a kind woman who made us great meals and treated us very well. Basilia has an old classmate who is from Triunfo, and we hired her father Dionisio to take me and Basi and all the kids (11 of them) on a trip in his outboard launch across Tela Bay to Punta Sal. I´d been there years before as a Peace Corps volunteer, and it's still a wild, pristine place with monkeys in the trees and beautiful turquoise water lapping white sand beaches. Of course we all loved it. The funniest moment of the weekend was when we came ashore and the park ranger assumed Basilia and I ran an orphanage!
Part of our boatload of orphans
Saturday night Basi and I and a few members of the family, mostly twenty-something nieces and nephews, walked a few blocks from the hotel to a community center where there was a dance. It was fascinating to all of us, since virtually all the 80 or 100 people there besides us were Garífiunas. We had a great time dancing. The Garífunas are friendly enough but seem overall pretty indifferent to outsiders, whether gringos or Hondurans. This is probably a good thing for the survival of their culture.
Yesterday we headed back toward Guajiquiro, making a detour to visit Pulhapanzak, Honduras's iconic waterfall. Our last hurrah with the group was stopping for lunch at Granja d'Elia in Siguatepeque. This has long been a favorite restaurant for Basilia and me, but it was especially nice for our big group. The staff are so friendly, the buffet style food so good, and the prices affordable even when feeding so many. Awesome!
The family at Pulhapanzak
Basilia and I said our goodbyes to the family and hopped off the bus at a crossroads so we could head for Tegucigalpa on another bus. It had just gotten dark as we arrived in Tegus, and a blackout that turned out to affect much of Honduras and El Salvador had just hit. We had to find a hotel in the middle of the city in complete darkness. Always carry a flashlight in Central America! Power came back on within a couple hours. This morning another parting -- Basilia went back to Guajiquiro to spend some time there, while I caught a bus back to San Salvador for my last couple weeks of work.
This week at UDB culminates with a signing ceremony for the Science Corner grant on Friday. This grant will help the university to start equipping their renewable energy research center. I just learned today that I have ten minutes in the program to make remarks, so I need to get something together. Also, I need to prepare for a three-hour workshop I'm teaching for the local IEEE chapter a week from tomorrow. So I guess party time is over for awhile...fun while it lasted anyway!
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Did we really fit all this into one weekend?
We still have several weeks remaining before we fly home to California, but it only hit us a couple of days ago that this would be Basilia's last weekend in El Salvador. On Thursday we're headed to Honduras to spend a long weekend on the Caribbean coast with my in-laws ("in-laws" is a funny-sounding term, but so is the Spanish equivalent -- "familia política"). I'll come back to San Salvador the following Monday to work a couple more weeks at UDB, but Basi is going to stay visiting with her parents until a couple days before we fly out of San Salvador.
So we decided to make the most of the weekend. Having Celenia visiting automatically livened things up. Yesterday we went to see the military history museum, which matter-of-factly and somewhat proudly recounts the more violent aspects of El Salvador's history. The one thing I really did like, though, was a huge outdoor 3D relief map of El Salvador. The whole thing is about the size of a basketball court, with vertical scale exaggerated by a factor of five to make the topography really jump out at you. It's loaded with details, showing towns, roads, lakes, rivers, lava flows, etc. Cool! Every county and state in the U.S. should have something like this in a public space.
Our friend Mirna came and met us as we were winding up our visit to the museum. She drove us out to the town of Olocuilta, reputedly the best place in El Salvador to eat pupusas. Then we went to the zoo, which has a nice animal collection and pretty grounds, but like most zoos I've seen in Latin America, does a pretty atrocious job of caring for the animals and keeps them in too-small enclosures. The animals looked even more depressed and neurotic than they do in U.S. zoos. Still, the place obviously makes many people, especially children, very happy and may help raise consciousness about biodiversity.
In the evening Basilia, Celenia and I went to have dinner at Kyle and Francisco's. Eduardo and Claudia gave us a ride there, and Kirian and René were there too, as well as Francisco's brother Nelson (easily the most common name among men I've met in this country!) and his wife. We had a great time sitting around telling stories, mostly about travel and dealing with big corporations. Later we went dancing at Café Don Pedro in Santa Tecla with René and Kirian. They are such a fun couple. Finally our first night club experience in San Salvador. It was OK, kind of a seedy place with hookers and a couple of drunken fights, but it didn't seem too dangerous. We had fun.
Today Basi and Celenia and I took a bus downtown (now that we've broken the ice, we're suddenly going down there at the drop of a hat) from where we caught another bus out to Panchimalco. This is a quiet town with lots of indigenous people that's only 17 km from downtown San Salvador, but feels much farther away. We just wandered around, watched a wedding procession leave the church and meander through town. Our most interesting find was a cultural center that looks small and nondescript from outside, but turns out to have beautifully landscaped grounds wandering over a hillside with sculptures all over and quiet little nooks where local young folks were working on paintings and drawings. A gallery at the front of the building offered local works for sale, some of them quite nice.
When we got back to downtown San Salvador, we went to see Monseñor Romero's tomb beneath the metropolitan cathedral. The catacomb is a quiet, calm space just a few steps below the hustle of the city center. There were only a few people there. The tomb itself is a beautiful sculpture by an Italian artist. A good place for Salvadorans (and foreigners) to contemplate what this country has endured and gather strength to make a better future.
We're pooped but happy after an active weekend.
So we decided to make the most of the weekend. Having Celenia visiting automatically livened things up. Yesterday we went to see the military history museum, which matter-of-factly and somewhat proudly recounts the more violent aspects of El Salvador's history. The one thing I really did like, though, was a huge outdoor 3D relief map of El Salvador. The whole thing is about the size of a basketball court, with vertical scale exaggerated by a factor of five to make the topography really jump out at you. It's loaded with details, showing towns, roads, lakes, rivers, lava flows, etc. Cool! Every county and state in the U.S. should have something like this in a public space.
The 3-D map
Our friend Mirna came and met us as we were winding up our visit to the museum. She drove us out to the town of Olocuilta, reputedly the best place in El Salvador to eat pupusas. Then we went to the zoo, which has a nice animal collection and pretty grounds, but like most zoos I've seen in Latin America, does a pretty atrocious job of caring for the animals and keeps them in too-small enclosures. The animals looked even more depressed and neurotic than they do in U.S. zoos. Still, the place obviously makes many people, especially children, very happy and may help raise consciousness about biodiversity.
In the evening Basilia, Celenia and I went to have dinner at Kyle and Francisco's. Eduardo and Claudia gave us a ride there, and Kirian and René were there too, as well as Francisco's brother Nelson (easily the most common name among men I've met in this country!) and his wife. We had a great time sitting around telling stories, mostly about travel and dealing with big corporations. Later we went dancing at Café Don Pedro in Santa Tecla with René and Kirian. They are such a fun couple. Finally our first night club experience in San Salvador. It was OK, kind of a seedy place with hookers and a couple of drunken fights, but it didn't seem too dangerous. We had fun.
Today Basi and Celenia and I took a bus downtown (now that we've broken the ice, we're suddenly going down there at the drop of a hat) from where we caught another bus out to Panchimalco. This is a quiet town with lots of indigenous people that's only 17 km from downtown San Salvador, but feels much farther away. We just wandered around, watched a wedding procession leave the church and meander through town. Our most interesting find was a cultural center that looks small and nondescript from outside, but turns out to have beautifully landscaped grounds wandering over a hillside with sculptures all over and quiet little nooks where local young folks were working on paintings and drawings. A gallery at the front of the building offered local works for sale, some of them quite nice.
When we got back to downtown San Salvador, we went to see Monseñor Romero's tomb beneath the metropolitan cathedral. The catacomb is a quiet, calm space just a few steps below the hustle of the city center. There were only a few people there. The tomb itself is a beautiful sculpture by an Italian artist. A good place for Salvadorans (and foreigners) to contemplate what this country has endured and gather strength to make a better future.
We're pooped but happy after an active weekend.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Playing Hooky
On Thursday my co-worker Nelson, who aside from being an endless fount of jokes is also an endless fount of information about cultural events, told me there would be a free performance of the Salvadoran national symphony orchestra that night, as well as a performance by the national folk ballet on Friday morning. Basilia felt like staying home Thursday night, but I joined Nelson and his wife Norma for the symphony. Among other pieces, they performed Mussorkgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which I remembered performing (albeit in an abridged form) in my high school orchestra, so it was nostalgic to hear it again. The last movement, "The Great Gate of Kiev," is so dramatic!
Nelson encouraged me to skip work for the folk ballet Friday, which was a good call. (I taught him the English expression "playing hooky.") Basilia and I took the bus to downtown. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that this was my FIRST time walking around in the city center after almost six months in the country. It's chaotic and considered dangerous by nearly every Salvadoran I've talked to and by the Lonely Planet guidebook, but I had to do this at least once. We went early so we'd have time to look at the artisan crafts for sale at the Mercado del Ex-Cuartel. Walking from the market to the Teatro Nacional, we came across a big parade on the theme of the environment, reminding us that this was World Environment Day. For some reason this seems to be ignored in the U.S., but evidently the Salvadorans take it seriously.
The Teatro Nacional is incredible, a beautiful old theater that has been taken care of, quite a contrast with the decaying downtown buildings that surround it. The ballet performance was excellent, with live musical accompaniment. The first part told the history of El Salvador from precolumbian times through dance. After an intermission they performed a variety of folk dances specific to different towns and regions of the country. Every Salvadoran event features something that would just be inconceivable in the U.S. -- in this case it was a dancer prancing around for the finale with an effigy of a bull on his back, loaded with fireworks! As they burst and filled the theater with smoke, I kept looking at the stage curtains nervously and planning our escape route, but happily the curtains didn't ignite.
After the ballet, Basilia and I went to the Tica Bus station and met Celenia, who came from Honduras and will spend a week here with us. It's great to have her here, feels more like a complete family.
I did actually go to work for a couple hours in the afternoon, where I received by email scanned copies in English and Spanish of the collaborative agreement between Humboldt State and Don Bosco with HSU President Rollin Richmond's signature. I passed the docs on to UDB Rector Huguet for him to sign. Another step forward!
Last night Basilia, Celenia and I went to Rich Cairncross's house for dinner. The place where he lives is a center for volunteers who come from the U.S. to work with the Catholic church (a progressive branch of the church that follows the teachings of Monseñor Romero). The house was filled with seven (!) members of Rich's family who were finishing a week's visit, and a group of volunteers who were also finishing their short stay in El Salvador. They served pupusas for dinner, and afterward there was a performance by Sierra Madre, a lively folk group who are Romeristas (followers of Romero). We had fun dancing to their music. We left to go look for a taxi home just at the moment that the band were leaving in their mini-van, so they gave us a lift to a busy intersection where we quickly found a cab. Very kind, guys!
As we were leaving Rich's place, he mentioned that he'd like to talk with me about collaborating on a paper about our experiences here in El Salvador. An interesting idea...we'll get together again soon to talk this over.
Nelson encouraged me to skip work for the folk ballet Friday, which was a good call. (I taught him the English expression "playing hooky.") Basilia and I took the bus to downtown. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that this was my FIRST time walking around in the city center after almost six months in the country. It's chaotic and considered dangerous by nearly every Salvadoran I've talked to and by the Lonely Planet guidebook, but I had to do this at least once. We went early so we'd have time to look at the artisan crafts for sale at the Mercado del Ex-Cuartel. Walking from the market to the Teatro Nacional, we came across a big parade on the theme of the environment, reminding us that this was World Environment Day. For some reason this seems to be ignored in the U.S., but evidently the Salvadorans take it seriously.
The Teatro Nacional is incredible, a beautiful old theater that has been taken care of, quite a contrast with the decaying downtown buildings that surround it. The ballet performance was excellent, with live musical accompaniment. The first part told the history of El Salvador from precolumbian times through dance. After an intermission they performed a variety of folk dances specific to different towns and regions of the country. Every Salvadoran event features something that would just be inconceivable in the U.S. -- in this case it was a dancer prancing around for the finale with an effigy of a bull on his back, loaded with fireworks! As they burst and filled the theater with smoke, I kept looking at the stage curtains nervously and planning our escape route, but happily the curtains didn't ignite.
After the ballet, Basilia and I went to the Tica Bus station and met Celenia, who came from Honduras and will spend a week here with us. It's great to have her here, feels more like a complete family.
I did actually go to work for a couple hours in the afternoon, where I received by email scanned copies in English and Spanish of the collaborative agreement between Humboldt State and Don Bosco with HSU President Rollin Richmond's signature. I passed the docs on to UDB Rector Huguet for him to sign. Another step forward!
Celenia and Basilia dancing to Sierra Madre
Last night Basilia, Celenia and I went to Rich Cairncross's house for dinner. The place where he lives is a center for volunteers who come from the U.S. to work with the Catholic church (a progressive branch of the church that follows the teachings of Monseñor Romero). The house was filled with seven (!) members of Rich's family who were finishing a week's visit, and a group of volunteers who were also finishing their short stay in El Salvador. They served pupusas for dinner, and afterward there was a performance by Sierra Madre, a lively folk group who are Romeristas (followers of Romero). We had fun dancing to their music. We left to go look for a taxi home just at the moment that the band were leaving in their mini-van, so they gave us a lift to a busy intersection where we quickly found a cab. Very kind, guys!
As we were leaving Rich's place, he mentioned that he'd like to talk with me about collaborating on a paper about our experiences here in El Salvador. An interesting idea...we'll get together again soon to talk this over.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
El Salvador's Hydrogen Technology
Last night Roberto Saravia, one of the students from my renewable energy course, took me to visit a friend of his who is a hydrogen enthusiast. We drove through San Salvador rush hour traffic to Ayutuxtepeque, a neighborhood near the Universidad de El Salvador, where Plácido Lemus has a garage workshop cluttered with tools and half-assembled projects. Another friend of Roberto's who collaborates with Plácido, Manuel Molina, was also on hand.
Plácido operates a small business making and selling drinking water filtration systems that use activated charcoal and colloidal silver. He was experimenting on the side with developing an inexpenisve electrolytic device that could be used to generate chlorine from table salt on-site as an alternative water purification technology. He realized that hydrogen gas was a by-product of this electrolysis and started thinking about what he could do with that. He read about the devices that are sold online that supposedly enrich gasoline in vehicles by injecting hydrogen via an onboard electrolyzer and decided to build his own. He got it to work but has had trouble controlling the combustion, which tends to wander back upstream in the fuel flowpath.
Plácido is obviously brilliant and a very nice guy. He does not have a college education but appears to be pretty familiar with fluid dynamics and combustion engineering. He does unfortunately seem to have the attitude of many self-taught tinkerers, that the first and second laws of thermodynamics are just broad guidelines and don't necessarily apply to their work. This mindset tends to blind otherwise creative people to thinking clearly and critically about the all-important efficiency of their devices. In any case, I admire his accomplishments, especially given the difficulties of doing this work in El Salvador. I offered some ideas about measuring the efficiency of his electrolyzers and shared some thoughts about safety -- I'd hate to see him blow himself and his lab up.
Manuel Molina and Plácido Lemus in their workshop (the devices in the large white enclosures are DC power supplies for their electrolyzers)
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Agatha
Tropical storm Agatha came on strong yesterday, creating a dramatic change in the weather. After two straight months of very warm weather, temperatures dropped sharply, the skies turned dark, and rain began to fall in torrents. My experience of rainstorms in the tropics prior to this tended to follow a predictable pattern, where the mornings would be dry, clouds would build up in the afternoon, and rain would fall intensely but briefly late in the day.
This was different. The rain was almost non-stop for over 24 hours. Rivers quickly overflowed their banks in many parts of the country. Our part of San Salvador got drenched but was otherwise not heavily impacted. There was no interruption in power or phone service.
We had planned to spend yesterday exploring the western part of El Salvador with Nelson and his wife Norma. We were going to visit Tazumal and Casa Blanca, two archeological sites, then go to some hot springs near Ahuachapán. But Nelson called in the morning to say the weather looked too rough for a road trip. So instead the four of us went to the national art museum. It´s a really nice museum, and the small number of visitors made it easy to get up close and personal with all the art. I hadn't known that Salarrué, an early 20th century Salvadoran author whose short story collection Cuentos de Barro I´d been reading recently, was also a prolific painter and has a number of paintings on display at the museum.
Norma drove us around in their car, which was nice given the stormy weather. On the way home in the afternoon, with no letup in the rain, we were forced to change routes when we came to a spot in a major street that was flooded over a foot deep. Today has been overcast all day, but very little rain has fallen. Based on how things look outside and the online forecast, it seems the worst of Agatha is over. Poor Guatemala, they were already coping with the eruption of Volcán Pacaya near the capital this week, and Agatha reportedly hit them even harder than she hit El Salvador.
This was different. The rain was almost non-stop for over 24 hours. Rivers quickly overflowed their banks in many parts of the country. Our part of San Salvador got drenched but was otherwise not heavily impacted. There was no interruption in power or phone service.
We had planned to spend yesterday exploring the western part of El Salvador with Nelson and his wife Norma. We were going to visit Tazumal and Casa Blanca, two archeological sites, then go to some hot springs near Ahuachapán. But Nelson called in the morning to say the weather looked too rough for a road trip. So instead the four of us went to the national art museum. It´s a really nice museum, and the small number of visitors made it easy to get up close and personal with all the art. I hadn't known that Salarrué, an early 20th century Salvadoran author whose short story collection Cuentos de Barro I´d been reading recently, was also a prolific painter and has a number of paintings on display at the museum.
Norma drove us around in their car, which was nice given the stormy weather. On the way home in the afternoon, with no letup in the rain, we were forced to change routes when we came to a spot in a major street that was flooded over a foot deep. Today has been overcast all day, but very little rain has fallen. Based on how things look outside and the online forecast, it seems the worst of Agatha is over. Poor Guatemala, they were already coping with the eruption of Volcán Pacaya near the capital this week, and Agatha reportedly hit them even harder than she hit El Salvador.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Progress
My work at Univ. Don Bosco is similar to my work at the Schatz Lab back home, in the sense that a day's work can seem trivial, and only at intervals do I get a sense that it's all adding up to something significant. This week I caught a glimpse of that kind of summing up. Ever since I finished teaching the course in late March, I've been working in this more nebulous arena where I'm trying to get a renewable energy institute up and running and help the university design a renewable energy demonstration project on campus. These projects feel like moving targets, as different players come and go and the university's objectives shift around.
But this week it started to feel like it's jelling. We had a couple of productive meetings with the main stakeholders on campus, and I completed a draft proposal and budget to ask the Alliance for Energy and Environment, a Central America-wide program sponsored by the governments of Finland and Austria, to fund a solar electric system on the roof of campus building 4, the same place where the renewable energy institute will be housed. We also cemented June 15 as the date for the signing ceremony of a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. embassy and the university. This agreement will allow the embassy to begin spending the $50,000 for equipment for the Science Corner (which forms the material foundation for the renewable energy institute). Meanwhile, I've also been homing in on a final version of the organizational plan for the energy institute, circulating drafts of the document and incorporating feedback from the stakeholders.
When I have some time between these tasks, I've been working on a preliminary design for another demonstration project on campus, a micro scale (1kW) pumped storage hydro system, which would act as storage in lieu of a battery for a 3.5 kW solar photovoltaic system. I just yesterday found a paper online by Chris Greacen, someone I've met briefly and whose work I've been acquainted with for some time. Chris does great work, always on interesting topics. He looked at the economics of using pumped storage on a small scale like this and concludes it really isn't feasible. Still, I think a pilot project has some appeal because a) it's a totally clean technology compared with batteries, and b) since the Salvadoran hydro power agency CEL is considering a large pumped storage project, this could offer a chance for Salvadoran engineers to tinker with the technology before taking on a big project.
A word of appreciation for Basilia, who is often so much better than I am at walking her environmentalist talk. In getting ready for this big excursion we're going to do with her family in June, we were lamenting how hard it is to avoid using throwaway plates and cups. With nearly 40 people going on this trip, we were potentially going to send a lot of paper or styrofoam to the landfill. Basi had the idea of buying durable, unbreakable plastic dishes and metal forks and spoons, and she went to the central marketplace and got a great deal on service for 50 people. After the trip, we'll leave them with her family for all their future gatherings. Basi, great idea and way to follow through!
But this week it started to feel like it's jelling. We had a couple of productive meetings with the main stakeholders on campus, and I completed a draft proposal and budget to ask the Alliance for Energy and Environment, a Central America-wide program sponsored by the governments of Finland and Austria, to fund a solar electric system on the roof of campus building 4, the same place where the renewable energy institute will be housed. We also cemented June 15 as the date for the signing ceremony of a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. embassy and the university. This agreement will allow the embassy to begin spending the $50,000 for equipment for the Science Corner (which forms the material foundation for the renewable energy institute). Meanwhile, I've also been homing in on a final version of the organizational plan for the energy institute, circulating drafts of the document and incorporating feedback from the stakeholders.
When I have some time between these tasks, I've been working on a preliminary design for another demonstration project on campus, a micro scale (1kW) pumped storage hydro system, which would act as storage in lieu of a battery for a 3.5 kW solar photovoltaic system. I just yesterday found a paper online by Chris Greacen, someone I've met briefly and whose work I've been acquainted with for some time. Chris does great work, always on interesting topics. He looked at the economics of using pumped storage on a small scale like this and concludes it really isn't feasible. Still, I think a pilot project has some appeal because a) it's a totally clean technology compared with batteries, and b) since the Salvadoran hydro power agency CEL is considering a large pumped storage project, this could offer a chance for Salvadoran engineers to tinker with the technology before taking on a big project.
A word of appreciation for Basilia, who is often so much better than I am at walking her environmentalist talk. In getting ready for this big excursion we're going to do with her family in June, we were lamenting how hard it is to avoid using throwaway plates and cups. With nearly 40 people going on this trip, we were potentially going to send a lot of paper or styrofoam to the landfill. Basi had the idea of buying durable, unbreakable plastic dishes and metal forks and spoons, and she went to the central marketplace and got a great deal on service for 50 people. After the trip, we'll leave them with her family for all their future gatherings. Basi, great idea and way to follow through!
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Visit to USAID, volcano hiking
Friday I visited the offices of US Agency for International Development (USAID) at the US embassy. I was invited there by Michelle Jennings, their deputy director of economic growth. She'd seen my presentation on renewable energy at the forum at Universidad Centroamericana in April and wanted me to give her co-workers a replay. They are starting to make a priority of working with renewable energy in El Salvador, and Michelle wanted me to go over what I've learned about how renewables are being or could be applied in the country. The meeting went well. I made a pitch for Don Bosco's new renewable energy institute, looking to see if USAID is interested in helping out. They are, but they need some time to formulate their own renewable energy action plan before they commit to specific projects.
A fun aspect of the meeting was finding out that two of the USAID staffers know people I know from Humboldt. Michelle is friends with Laura Chapman, whom I know through the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer network, and one of her co-workers got to know Bob Gearheart and Barbara Smith from HSU engineering when she took a wetlands workshop at Humboldt.
This week I got recruited to help review plans for a new building on UDB's grad campus. They want me to help come up with ways to make the building greener and less energy intensive. This will be interesting and enjoyable, but it's yet another distraction from the main things I'm allegedly working on, helping develop UDB's energy institute and a renewable energy demonstration project. I continue to wrestle with whether I should let my UDB collaborators detour me into these other activities or be more insistent on staying on task. They're the client, so I'm being sort of passive and letting them make the call. But I do worry that all this is taking a toll on my principal projects.
Yesterday Basilia and I set out on a weekend trip to the west of the country. We took a couple of buses to get to Parque Nacional Los Volcanes. The end of the bus line is actually on top of one of the volcanoes, Cerro Verde. From there you can hike to the summit of either of two neighboring volcanoes, Izalco or Ilametepec (aka Santa Ana). We opted for Santa Ana. Because of the assaults and robberies that have taken place on these volcanoes in the past, the park management requires all hikers to be escorted by a guide and police from PoliTur, the tourism police. This seemed like a weird and potentially uncomfortable way to go on what looked like a pretty straightforward hike, but we went along with it. As it turned out, our guide and the two police officers were a lot of fun to hike with. The guide, Yocelyn, is a 17-year-old high school student from nearby El Congo who looks like she could be from Basilia's home town. She works giving park tours on weekends. One of the cops, Juan Carlos, is a very personable and intelligent guy. Basilia and I chatted with them almost the whole way up the volcano and back, and we treated them to lunch as a tip when we got back to the visitor center.
The top of Santa Ana volcano was beautiful, with a deep crater that contains a lake with an intense green color. The strata of rock and ash around the lake run a gamut of colors and textures. The volcano erupted as recently as 2005, causing the park to be closed for a period. You can still see steam rising from vents around the lake and bubbles coming up through the water at the center of the lake.
After the visit to the park, we went downhill to Lago de Coatepeque, a lake in a huge volcanic crater, somewhat like Crater Lake in Oregon. Coatepeque is beautiful, but sadly almost the entire lakeshore consists of houses on private lots. It's hard to even see the lake let alone get close to it, since most of the homeowners have put up high concrete block walls for privacy or security. I suspect most of the homes are weekend retreats for wealthy people from San Salvador. We did find a nice old hotel to stay in (Torremolinos) that allowed us lake access. We were apparently the only guests in this big rambling place that had two swimming pools, a dining room with dozens of tables, and a covered dock with another dining area. The place looks like it must have been very glamorous and popular a half century ago, though it's now gathering dust. The staff were attentive and made us good meals, and the lodging and food were quite reasonably priced. I'm not sure why this place and the other neighboring hotels seemed deserted on a weekend. Maybe the middle class these places cater to are hurting more than I suspected from the global crisis. The rich seem to all have their own places, so they don't need to patronize these hotels.
This morning we found a bus over to the other side of the lake and onward to Izalco. I'd been curious about this city since reading about its role as one of the epicenters of the 1932 peasant/communist uprising that led to the government slaughtering 30,000 people, mostly indigenous. It's a picturesque and historic city, and the people we met there were really friendly. As so often happens to me in Latin America, I struggle to reconcile the kind people and innocuous settings of the present with the violent and hate-filled events of the not-so-distant past in the very same places. This aside, we both liked Izalco and may go back before our time here is through.
A fun aspect of the meeting was finding out that two of the USAID staffers know people I know from Humboldt. Michelle is friends with Laura Chapman, whom I know through the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer network, and one of her co-workers got to know Bob Gearheart and Barbara Smith from HSU engineering when she took a wetlands workshop at Humboldt.
This week I got recruited to help review plans for a new building on UDB's grad campus. They want me to help come up with ways to make the building greener and less energy intensive. This will be interesting and enjoyable, but it's yet another distraction from the main things I'm allegedly working on, helping develop UDB's energy institute and a renewable energy demonstration project. I continue to wrestle with whether I should let my UDB collaborators detour me into these other activities or be more insistent on staying on task. They're the client, so I'm being sort of passive and letting them make the call. But I do worry that all this is taking a toll on my principal projects.
Yesterday Basilia and I set out on a weekend trip to the west of the country. We took a couple of buses to get to Parque Nacional Los Volcanes. The end of the bus line is actually on top of one of the volcanoes, Cerro Verde. From there you can hike to the summit of either of two neighboring volcanoes, Izalco or Ilametepec (aka Santa Ana). We opted for Santa Ana. Because of the assaults and robberies that have taken place on these volcanoes in the past, the park management requires all hikers to be escorted by a guide and police from PoliTur, the tourism police. This seemed like a weird and potentially uncomfortable way to go on what looked like a pretty straightforward hike, but we went along with it. As it turned out, our guide and the two police officers were a lot of fun to hike with. The guide, Yocelyn, is a 17-year-old high school student from nearby El Congo who looks like she could be from Basilia's home town. She works giving park tours on weekends. One of the cops, Juan Carlos, is a very personable and intelligent guy. Basilia and I chatted with them almost the whole way up the volcano and back, and we treated them to lunch as a tip when we got back to the visitor center.
The top of Santa Ana volcano was beautiful, with a deep crater that contains a lake with an intense green color. The strata of rock and ash around the lake run a gamut of colors and textures. The volcano erupted as recently as 2005, causing the park to be closed for a period. You can still see steam rising from vents around the lake and bubbles coming up through the water at the center of the lake.
On top of Volcán Santa Ana with our escorts
After the visit to the park, we went downhill to Lago de Coatepeque, a lake in a huge volcanic crater, somewhat like Crater Lake in Oregon. Coatepeque is beautiful, but sadly almost the entire lakeshore consists of houses on private lots. It's hard to even see the lake let alone get close to it, since most of the homeowners have put up high concrete block walls for privacy or security. I suspect most of the homes are weekend retreats for wealthy people from San Salvador. We did find a nice old hotel to stay in (Torremolinos) that allowed us lake access. We were apparently the only guests in this big rambling place that had two swimming pools, a dining room with dozens of tables, and a covered dock with another dining area. The place looks like it must have been very glamorous and popular a half century ago, though it's now gathering dust. The staff were attentive and made us good meals, and the lodging and food were quite reasonably priced. I'm not sure why this place and the other neighboring hotels seemed deserted on a weekend. Maybe the middle class these places cater to are hurting more than I suspected from the global crisis. The rich seem to all have their own places, so they don't need to patronize these hotels.
The vast and empty (except Basilia!) open-air dining hall at Hotel Torremolinos
This morning we found a bus over to the other side of the lake and onward to Izalco. I'd been curious about this city since reading about its role as one of the epicenters of the 1932 peasant/communist uprising that led to the government slaughtering 30,000 people, mostly indigenous. It's a picturesque and historic city, and the people we met there were really friendly. As so often happens to me in Latin America, I struggle to reconcile the kind people and innocuous settings of the present with the violent and hate-filled events of the not-so-distant past in the very same places. This aside, we both liked Izalco and may go back before our time here is through.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Yo No Me Dejo Rentear (I'm Not for Rent)
My Salvadoran friends explained that the image is of Don Ramón, a character from the sketch comedy TV series "El Chavo del Ocho." The Don Ramón character is famous for being a deadbeat, who always has some reason for not being able to pay the rent when the landlord comes around. Here in El Salvador a major social problem is extortion by gangs, euphemistically known as "rent." Gangs force bus drivers and small business people to pay protection money on a regular basis, and the news is always full of stories of people getting shot dead if they refuse to pay up. The Don Ramón publicity campaign is part of a grassroots movement to get people to stand up to the gangs en masse and stop paying the "rent." Making this work will take some real faith and courage; let's all wish them luck.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Is this a healthy place?
I spend a lot of time thinking about my health here in San Salvador and comparing it with my health back home in Arcata. On the whole I consider myself a pretty healthy person regardless of where I live, but there are some interesting differences.
- Skin. Ever since my teens, I've had eczema, mostly restricted to certain places on my right hand. In California, my affected skin is always dry and flaky, and at times it cracks and bleeds, which can get painful. I've learned strategies to manage it, but it's annoying all the same. Here in Central America, the problem just disappears completely with no special attention on my part. This alone is enough to make me consider staying here permanently.
- Allergies. Basilia and I both get hay fever in Arcata, starting around May and lasting through early July or so. Mine seems to have tapered off over the years, while Basilia's has unfortunately gotten worse. Again, here in Central America we both seem to be completely allergy-free, at least for the time being. I've heard that many people with allergies usually get only temporary relief, maybe for a couple of years, when they move to a new locale.
- Respiratory. Aside from the hay fever symptoms, I seldom have any respiratory trouble back home. Here the constant inhaling of vehicle fumes in the street seems to take its toll, giving me an intermittent upper respiratory infection. Of course, one also has to wonder about the long-term effects of frequent whiffs of thick black diesel exhaust...
- Bugs. Pretty much a non-issue living in Arcata. Here there are some nasty bug-transmitted illnesses to worry about, like dengue, chagas, and in some rural areas malaria. So far so good, but I seem to be way more sensitive than Basilia to fleas, as we can sleep in the same bed when we go to Guajiquiro and I end up covered in itchy bites, while she's totally unscathed.
- Fitness. Definitely worse here than in Arcata for me. Arcata's climate is mild enough to let me run or bike outdoors virtually year-round in reasonable comfort. Here it's challenging to find good times to walk or run. The filthy commute traffic gets heavy almost as soon as it's light in the morning, and when I return from work around 5:30 or 6:00 there's heavy traffic again, and little daylight left, even at this time of year. Lunch times are an option, but it's brutally hot this time of year. Sunday mornings are the only time in the week when there's little traffic during daylight hours. I go running alone and walking with Basilia when I can, but honestly it's not much fun here. I could join a gym that's nearby, but it's just not my thing. We bought a yoga mat so we can do stretching, abs and such at home. Running in the community forest and the marsh is one of the things I'm most looking forward to when we return to Arcata.
- Nutrition. Not a problem in either place. Our diet is definitely different here, not drastically so when we cook at home, but certainly high in fat and sodium when we eat out. I will really miss the fresh, delicious, and inexpensive tropical fruit and juices when we leave.
- Medical attention. Back home we have decent insurance, so I guess we're as well covered as the average insured person in the U.S. Here we have insurance too, from a different provider, which we fortunately have not had occasion to test. The one time I needed a doctor, for my vertigo problem, the whole bill for exam and prescription meds came to $55, not a lot more than the office visit co-pay under our insurance, so I decided not to go to the trouble of filing a claim.
So in the end I guess it's kind of a toss-up where I feel healthier. I'm thankful to be in good health most of the time in both places.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Bimbo Christ
I don´t know, for me there´s just something beautiful about an advertisement that combines white bread, Jesus, and the word Bimbo.
The image of Christ is from a statue in central San Salvador called Salvador del Mundo, and it´s iconically associated with El Salvador the way the Golden Gate Bridge is with San Francisco. Bimbo as a brand name is also iconic - the equivalent of Wonder Bread in Mexico and Central America.
Monday, May 17, 2010
To Costa Rica and back
Basilia needed to renew her El Salvador residency, which expires every 90 days. Last time this happened, we went to the immigration office and spent a grueling half day filling out forms and waiting around the labyrinth of bureaucracy. They informed us at the time that an alternative was to simply leave the four-country area covered by the regional immigration agreement (El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras) for 72 hours. This time around we decided to take them up on that suggestion -- hence our trip to Costa Rica.
We considered flying, but that would have cost around $300 each round trip. We found we could do the trip by Tica Bus for well under half that, plus the bus lets you get a look at the countryside in between. And of course the carbon footprint for bus travel is much smaller. The direct bus leaves San Salvador at 3:00 a.m, makes a mid-day stop in Managua, and gets you into San José around 10:00 p.m.
In San José we met up with Monica Lazo, one of my co-workers from Don Bosco who has been working on her PhD through a Costa Rican university. She hooked us up with Rosmery and Hampi, a sweet couple who rent rooms to students in their home out in the suburbs, about 5 km from the center of San José. We stayed a night there, then caught a bus to Turrialba a couple hours from the capital. There we looked up Lauren Fins and her husband Dave Potter. Lauren is a fellow Fulbrighter I met at the orientation session in Washington, D.C. last June. She's developing a course on the genetics of cacao at CATIE, a rural development research center that focuses on agroforestry. Dave and Lauren showed us around the beautiful campus, which is surrounded by a botanical garden and thousands of acres of experimental plantations of cacao, coffee, and all kinds of other tropical perennial plants.
We spent a night at their big house on the CATIE campus. In the morning we got to meet with Glen Galloway, director of CATIE's graduate programs. He told Basilia she's a great candidate for their master's program in watershed management. He even encouraged me to consider working on a bioenergy research project at CATIE if I were to accompany Basilia to Costa Rica while she works on a master's there.
Our next stop was Cahuita, a small town on the Caribbean coast located right next to a national park on a point jutting out into the sea and surrounded by coral reefs. I'd been to Cahuita almost 20 years earlier with my friends Mike and Laura. I was happy to find the place mostly unchanged, still a quiet backpacker destination that has not morphed into a 5-star Club Med-type resort. We rented an incredibly cute and comfy cabin just outside the park for $40 a night, tucked among trees frequented by howler monkeys and toucans. The grounds were pocked with holes, each one home to a land crab. When we sat still on the porch, all the crabs would come out to prowl for food.
We spent two nights in Cahuita. The weather was rainy most of the time, but eventually we decided to go for a soggy hike in the national park. Just inside the park we met a local resident who works for the park as a guide. He offered to show us around, which turned out to be a great thing, as he showed us all kinds of animals we would have overlooked: two-toed and three-toed sloths, capuchin monkeys, giant iguanas up in the high branches of trees, snakes, and giant hermit crabs.
From Cahuita we headed back inland to San José. We spent one day just exploring the city. It's mellower and less chaotic than other Central American capitals, and there are a few streets converted into pedestrian malls in the city center that are downright pleasant to walk on. It is amazing how much nicer of a place a big city becomes when you take away the cars.
Our last day in Costa Rica Basilia was feeling burnt out. I caught a bus by myself to the Poás Volcano national park. At first the weather was too misty to see the volcano crater, so I hiked around looking at the cloud forest flora and fauna. Just before it was time to catch the bus back to San José, the mists parted and I got a great look into the steaming crater.
On Saturday we took Tica Bus back to San Salvador. One of the highlights of the ride was seeing the 40 megawatt Amayo wind farm in southern Nicaragua. The narrow isthmus between the Pacific Ocean and Lago de Nicaragua seems to create an ideal wind micro-climate. In addition to the big 2 MW turbines, I saw many family farms in the area with wind-powered well pumps or small wind electric generators.
Our first day back in San Salvador was wedding day for my co-worker Francisco and Kyle. Another of my co-workers René and his wife Kirian drove us up to the wedding at a sort of country club up high on the slopes of Volcán San Salvador. I was pressed into service at the last minute to read the ceremony in English, echoing the Spanish original recited by the priest hired for the occasion. The reception was lots of fun, with good food and drink and DJ dancing. In the middle of the celebration, a samba drum group came in and rocked the place for twenty minutes or so. Basilia had a great time of course. We realized we need to get out and dance more often.
Today was my first day back on the job. I went with Federico Machado and Anselmo Valdizon from UDB to FUSALMO, a foundation that runs a neighborhood sports facility in Soyapango. The director and the head of maintenance showed us around the place. They're concerned because they're spending $4,000 to $5,000 a month on electricity, most of which seems to be for outdoor lighting for basketball courts and soccer fields. We´re going to try to work an energy audit of the facility into the syllabi for one or more engineering courses, the idea being to teach the students auditing skills while helping FUSALMO reduce costs.
We considered flying, but that would have cost around $300 each round trip. We found we could do the trip by Tica Bus for well under half that, plus the bus lets you get a look at the countryside in between. And of course the carbon footprint for bus travel is much smaller. The direct bus leaves San Salvador at 3:00 a.m, makes a mid-day stop in Managua, and gets you into San José around 10:00 p.m.
In San José we met up with Monica Lazo, one of my co-workers from Don Bosco who has been working on her PhD through a Costa Rican university. She hooked us up with Rosmery and Hampi, a sweet couple who rent rooms to students in their home out in the suburbs, about 5 km from the center of San José. We stayed a night there, then caught a bus to Turrialba a couple hours from the capital. There we looked up Lauren Fins and her husband Dave Potter. Lauren is a fellow Fulbrighter I met at the orientation session in Washington, D.C. last June. She's developing a course on the genetics of cacao at CATIE, a rural development research center that focuses on agroforestry. Dave and Lauren showed us around the beautiful campus, which is surrounded by a botanical garden and thousands of acres of experimental plantations of cacao, coffee, and all kinds of other tropical perennial plants.
We spent a night at their big house on the CATIE campus. In the morning we got to meet with Glen Galloway, director of CATIE's graduate programs. He told Basilia she's a great candidate for their master's program in watershed management. He even encouraged me to consider working on a bioenergy research project at CATIE if I were to accompany Basilia to Costa Rica while she works on a master's there.
Our next stop was Cahuita, a small town on the Caribbean coast located right next to a national park on a point jutting out into the sea and surrounded by coral reefs. I'd been to Cahuita almost 20 years earlier with my friends Mike and Laura. I was happy to find the place mostly unchanged, still a quiet backpacker destination that has not morphed into a 5-star Club Med-type resort. We rented an incredibly cute and comfy cabin just outside the park for $40 a night, tucked among trees frequented by howler monkeys and toucans. The grounds were pocked with holes, each one home to a land crab. When we sat still on the porch, all the crabs would come out to prowl for food.
We spent two nights in Cahuita. The weather was rainy most of the time, but eventually we decided to go for a soggy hike in the national park. Just inside the park we met a local resident who works for the park as a guide. He offered to show us around, which turned out to be a great thing, as he showed us all kinds of animals we would have overlooked: two-toed and three-toed sloths, capuchin monkeys, giant iguanas up in the high branches of trees, snakes, and giant hermit crabs.
In the coastal jungle of Cahuita National Park
From Cahuita we headed back inland to San José. We spent one day just exploring the city. It's mellower and less chaotic than other Central American capitals, and there are a few streets converted into pedestrian malls in the city center that are downright pleasant to walk on. It is amazing how much nicer of a place a big city becomes when you take away the cars.
Our last day in Costa Rica Basilia was feeling burnt out. I caught a bus by myself to the Poás Volcano national park. At first the weather was too misty to see the volcano crater, so I hiked around looking at the cloud forest flora and fauna. Just before it was time to catch the bus back to San José, the mists parted and I got a great look into the steaming crater.
On Saturday we took Tica Bus back to San Salvador. One of the highlights of the ride was seeing the 40 megawatt Amayo wind farm in southern Nicaragua. The narrow isthmus between the Pacific Ocean and Lago de Nicaragua seems to create an ideal wind micro-climate. In addition to the big 2 MW turbines, I saw many family farms in the area with wind-powered well pumps or small wind electric generators.
Amayo wind farm as seen from the window of a speeding bus
Our first day back in San Salvador was wedding day for my co-worker Francisco and Kyle. Another of my co-workers René and his wife Kirian drove us up to the wedding at a sort of country club up high on the slopes of Volcán San Salvador. I was pressed into service at the last minute to read the ceremony in English, echoing the Spanish original recited by the priest hired for the occasion. The reception was lots of fun, with good food and drink and DJ dancing. In the middle of the celebration, a samba drum group came in and rocked the place for twenty minutes or so. Basilia had a great time of course. We realized we need to get out and dance more often.
Basilia and I with UDB friends and family at the wedding, Kyle and Francisco right behind us
Today was my first day back on the job. I went with Federico Machado and Anselmo Valdizon from UDB to FUSALMO, a foundation that runs a neighborhood sports facility in Soyapango. The director and the head of maintenance showed us around the place. They're concerned because they're spending $4,000 to $5,000 a month on electricity, most of which seems to be for outdoor lighting for basketball courts and soccer fields. We´re going to try to work an energy audit of the facility into the syllabi for one or more engineering courses, the idea being to teach the students auditing skills while helping FUSALMO reduce costs.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Village power at last
From when I first applied for my Fulbright grant until I arrived here in El Salvador, a period of over a year and a half, the picture I carried in my head of my renewable energy experience I expected to have here revolved around household-scale, off-grid projects in remote rural villages. This was the Central America I had become familiar and comfortable with during my two years as a Peace Corps volunteer out in the mountains of Honduras a dozen years ago.
Once I got here, I learned that this type of work didn't really harmonize with the culture of Don Bosco University. The engineers who teach and study here are more oriented toward industrial scale projects that put serious juice into the grid, like the geothermal and hydroelectric systems that account for more than 60% of El Salvador's electricity. While less familiar to me, I was willing to shift gears to adapt to this approach to renewable energy. Things just kind of fell into place via the contacts that presented themselves. In the end, the class revolved largely around field trips to large, megawatt-scale projects and lectures geared to address what we saw on those field trips. I felt ambivalent about this, but the class went well and the students gave positive evaluations, so what the heck.
So now, well past the midpoint of my stay here, I finally had a chance to put on my jeans and go see some bona fide appropriate technology out in the countryside. Today Nelson Quintanilla and I joined Roberto Saravia, one of my students from the course, for a day of visiting his energy projects in remote villages. Roberto works for InterVida, a Spanish NGO that employs around 300 people in El Salvador. Like Peace Corps, their work revolves around rural development and falls into several categories, one of which is natural resources. Within that they have a renewable energy program, which Roberto runs. He took us to see two houses in Berlin municipio in Usulutan department in eastern El Salvador. First we went to the home of Oscar Pineda, who has a small solar electric system and a biodigester that he feeds with manure from his cows. The digester design is very simple but seems quite robust. It's been working for over a year with no serious trouble. It requires little maintenance and produces enough gas to run one burner for six to eight hours a day. Oscar is one of these sharp people you often meet in the countryside who seems to have a real technical knack despite little formal education.
Next we went to see a woman named Sonia who has a wood-conserving stove at her house. InterVida has experimented with different woodstoves over the years. They tried the Lorena stove which has been promoted by many appropriate technology groups. It worked OK but tended to fall apart after a year or so and did not really conserve that much energy. They now are using a design called a Rocket Stove. They buy them from another NGO in Guatemala for $150 each. The stove consists of three hollow, cast concrete pieces that fit together and can be mounted on top of concrete blocks or adobes. There is a small combustion chamber inside, and the surrounding cavity is filled with small chunks of locally collected pumice that acts as an insulator, as well as filtering particles out of the exhaust stream, which is vented out of the house via a metal stove pipe. There are two burner openings on top, which each come with a set of four removable concentric cast iron rings. The user selects the appropriate number of rings so the cooking pot just fits in the opening. We fired up the stove and were impressed with how easy it is to use and how cool the exterior remains, a testament to its efficiency and safety.
On the way back, we stopped at an athletic complex in Soyapango where the director is worried about electric bills of $4,000 a month. Nelson, Roberto and I went over the facility's bills with him and gave him some recommendations. Helping him out with an energy audit and a design for a photovoltaic system seems like an ideal project for our fledgling energy institute at Don Bosco.
One of the things that I like about InterVida is that most of their staff work outside San Salvador in one of their five district offices. We visited one of those offices today in Santiago de Maria, a small city about the size of Marcala in Honduras. This strikes me as the ideal long-term job situation for me when Basilia and I eventually relocate to Central America -- working for a European NGO in a small city. Less smog and traffic, closer to the back country, while getting to work for an organization that has its act together and probably won't fold in a year or two.
Last night Basilia and I got together for dinner with Marcela, a young woman from Guajiquiro who is visiting with our friends the Burgos family here in San Salvador. I first met Marcela and her twin sister Daniela when they were in elementary school back when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. They always stood out from the crowd as really smart kids. Now Marcela is going to law school in Honduras, and Daniela is in Cuba studying to be a doctor. You go girls!
Once I got here, I learned that this type of work didn't really harmonize with the culture of Don Bosco University. The engineers who teach and study here are more oriented toward industrial scale projects that put serious juice into the grid, like the geothermal and hydroelectric systems that account for more than 60% of El Salvador's electricity. While less familiar to me, I was willing to shift gears to adapt to this approach to renewable energy. Things just kind of fell into place via the contacts that presented themselves. In the end, the class revolved largely around field trips to large, megawatt-scale projects and lectures geared to address what we saw on those field trips. I felt ambivalent about this, but the class went well and the students gave positive evaluations, so what the heck.
So now, well past the midpoint of my stay here, I finally had a chance to put on my jeans and go see some bona fide appropriate technology out in the countryside. Today Nelson Quintanilla and I joined Roberto Saravia, one of my students from the course, for a day of visiting his energy projects in remote villages. Roberto works for InterVida, a Spanish NGO that employs around 300 people in El Salvador. Like Peace Corps, their work revolves around rural development and falls into several categories, one of which is natural resources. Within that they have a renewable energy program, which Roberto runs. He took us to see two houses in Berlin municipio in Usulutan department in eastern El Salvador. First we went to the home of Oscar Pineda, who has a small solar electric system and a biodigester that he feeds with manure from his cows. The digester design is very simple but seems quite robust. It's been working for over a year with no serious trouble. It requires little maintenance and produces enough gas to run one burner for six to eight hours a day. Oscar is one of these sharp people you often meet in the countryside who seems to have a real technical knack despite little formal education.
Oscar Pineda demonstrates his biogas-fired cookstove (note white PVC gas supply line coming straight from the digester in the back yard)
Next we went to see a woman named Sonia who has a wood-conserving stove at her house. InterVida has experimented with different woodstoves over the years. They tried the Lorena stove which has been promoted by many appropriate technology groups. It worked OK but tended to fall apart after a year or so and did not really conserve that much energy. They now are using a design called a Rocket Stove. They buy them from another NGO in Guatemala for $150 each. The stove consists of three hollow, cast concrete pieces that fit together and can be mounted on top of concrete blocks or adobes. There is a small combustion chamber inside, and the surrounding cavity is filled with small chunks of locally collected pumice that acts as an insulator, as well as filtering particles out of the exhaust stream, which is vented out of the house via a metal stove pipe. There are two burner openings on top, which each come with a set of four removable concentric cast iron rings. The user selects the appropriate number of rings so the cooking pot just fits in the opening. We fired up the stove and were impressed with how easy it is to use and how cool the exterior remains, a testament to its efficiency and safety.
Sonia looks on while Roberto fires up the efficient woodstove
On the way back, we stopped at an athletic complex in Soyapango where the director is worried about electric bills of $4,000 a month. Nelson, Roberto and I went over the facility's bills with him and gave him some recommendations. Helping him out with an energy audit and a design for a photovoltaic system seems like an ideal project for our fledgling energy institute at Don Bosco.
One of the things that I like about InterVida is that most of their staff work outside San Salvador in one of their five district offices. We visited one of those offices today in Santiago de Maria, a small city about the size of Marcala in Honduras. This strikes me as the ideal long-term job situation for me when Basilia and I eventually relocate to Central America -- working for a European NGO in a small city. Less smog and traffic, closer to the back country, while getting to work for an organization that has its act together and probably won't fold in a year or two.
Last night Basilia and I got together for dinner with Marcela, a young woman from Guajiquiro who is visiting with our friends the Burgos family here in San Salvador. I first met Marcela and her twin sister Daniela when they were in elementary school back when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. They always stood out from the crowd as really smart kids. Now Marcela is going to law school in Honduras, and Daniela is in Cuba studying to be a doctor. You go girls!
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Mayday!
Friday was another trip to Universidad de El Salvador, this time to participate in a panel discussion on renewable energy organized by an environmental group, Unidad Ecológica Nacional de El Salvador (UNES). Basilia and her mom took the bus with me across town to UES and attended part of the panel. The turnout was not as big as for the embassy-sponsored events the week before at other universities, but it was a chance to get to know the UES campus and people better. Some departments were having graduation the same morning, so the campus was bustling. As requested, I gave a talk on the distinctions between renewable energy and sustainable energy. The event started late and some presenters ran over their allotted time, so in the end there was unfortunately no chance for audience questions or comments. My favorite part of the event was Roberto Bonilla of solar energy company SEESA. He's a real character, very opinionated and animated but with great messages to share. There was also an interesting talk by a researcher who has been doing monitoring to quantify the wave and tidal energy resources of El Salvador and has quite a bit of data.
I spent the afternoon working at the Antiguo Cuscatlán campus, then went home in time to greet our good friend Mayra and her mother Eva who came over from Honduras by bus to have a short visit with us. Like Basilia, Mayra married a Peace Corps volunteer and now lives in California, but she's currently visiting family in Honduras. In the evening we all went over to the anthropology museum, where there was an event with live music and food. The museum stayed open until 10 pm, so I finally had a chance to go through the galleries. It has some nice exhibits. The social event was in the courtyard. The headline act was Coast to Coast Jazz Ensemble from the U.S. Their repertoire is pretty diverse, from Route 66 to Django Reinhardt, and the two guitarists in the group are phenomenal.
Early yesterday Basilia's mom left to go back home to Guajiquiro, Honduras. Mayra, Eva, Basilia, and I took a bus down to Salvador del Mundo in the western part of the city center to check out the May Day workers' march. Some Salvadorans had cautioned us to stay away from the event, that it could get ugly. But we couldn't pass this up. As it turned out, it was quite a wholesome and upbeat event, with many families present. FMLN red was everywhere, not to mention gorillas playing samba drums. There were lots of police, but they seemed relaxed and friendly, not at all confrontational from what we saw -- many of them were posing for photos with people or being interviewed by student journalists. It felt as safe as, say, the San Francisco Gay Pride parade. It was very heartening to see how mainstream the pro-labor left is in El Salvador - the turnout was enormous, energetic but peaceful, and still growing when we decided it was time to go.
Wanting to make the most of the day, we next caught a bus out to La Libertad on the coast and from there another to El Tunco where our friends Noelle, John and James live. Noelle was away interviewing people as part of her research, but we visited with John and his son James. This was shaping up to be the first really rainy day of the wet season, but we wanted a dip in the ocean. We walked out to the beach and swam for awhile in the warm water. A nice thing about the rain was you didn't have to go looking for a shower to get the salt off your skin after you got out of the water. How nice to stand in the rain in swim trunks and not feel at all cold!
In the evening back in San Salvador we went to bust our bellies at our favorite restaurant, the Salvadoran cuisine buffet at Las Cofradias. After that we went to Plaza Futura and Las Galerias, two upscale shopping centers that are pretty close to each other in the Escalón part of town. Early this morning Eva and Mayra headed back for Honduras, leaving me and Basilia alone in our apartment for the first time in many weeks. We're using today to rest, do laundry, catch up on the blog...
I spent the afternoon working at the Antiguo Cuscatlán campus, then went home in time to greet our good friend Mayra and her mother Eva who came over from Honduras by bus to have a short visit with us. Like Basilia, Mayra married a Peace Corps volunteer and now lives in California, but she's currently visiting family in Honduras. In the evening we all went over to the anthropology museum, where there was an event with live music and food. The museum stayed open until 10 pm, so I finally had a chance to go through the galleries. It has some nice exhibits. The social event was in the courtyard. The headline act was Coast to Coast Jazz Ensemble from the U.S. Their repertoire is pretty diverse, from Route 66 to Django Reinhardt, and the two guitarists in the group are phenomenal.
Early yesterday Basilia's mom left to go back home to Guajiquiro, Honduras. Mayra, Eva, Basilia, and I took a bus down to Salvador del Mundo in the western part of the city center to check out the May Day workers' march. Some Salvadorans had cautioned us to stay away from the event, that it could get ugly. But we couldn't pass this up. As it turned out, it was quite a wholesome and upbeat event, with many families present. FMLN red was everywhere, not to mention gorillas playing samba drums. There were lots of police, but they seemed relaxed and friendly, not at all confrontational from what we saw -- many of them were posing for photos with people or being interviewed by student journalists. It felt as safe as, say, the San Francisco Gay Pride parade. It was very heartening to see how mainstream the pro-labor left is in El Salvador - the turnout was enormous, energetic but peaceful, and still growing when we decided it was time to go.
Come on, how dangerous can an event be if it's got drum majorettes?
Wanting to make the most of the day, we next caught a bus out to La Libertad on the coast and from there another to El Tunco where our friends Noelle, John and James live. Noelle was away interviewing people as part of her research, but we visited with John and his son James. This was shaping up to be the first really rainy day of the wet season, but we wanted a dip in the ocean. We walked out to the beach and swam for awhile in the warm water. A nice thing about the rain was you didn't have to go looking for a shower to get the salt off your skin after you got out of the water. How nice to stand in the rain in swim trunks and not feel at all cold!
In the evening back in San Salvador we went to bust our bellies at our favorite restaurant, the Salvadoran cuisine buffet at Las Cofradias. After that we went to Plaza Futura and Las Galerias, two upscale shopping centers that are pretty close to each other in the Escalón part of town. Early this morning Eva and Mayra headed back for Honduras, leaving me and Basilia alone in our apartment for the first time in many weeks. We're using today to rest, do laundry, catch up on the blog...
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Going public
What a day! I had to be at the campus at 7:00 a.m. today to catch a ride over to the Soyapango campus with Reina, UDB's vice president of science and technology. At 8 I had a meeting with Nelson, Federico Machado, and Anslemo Valdizon to talk about the university's solar thermal electric system. The system is not getting much use, and we brainstormed ways to integrate it more into engineering curriculum and possible demonstration uses. I explained how we had done something similar with fuel cells as part of the H2E3 project, looking for ways to incorporate fuel cells into curriculum of existing engineering courses.
At 9 another meeting, this one with Rector Huguet, Jorge, Reina and Nelson to talk about the solar project for building #4 for which we are seeking funding from the Alianza para Energía y Medio Ambiente. I announced the good news that the science corner grant was approved, which got a happy reaction. The university folks really want to bring Peter Lehman down here for a visit to cement the relationship with Schatz Energy Research Center before I leave at the end of June.
Right after the meeting I called Peter and talked with him for almost half an hour. It looks like he is totally booked through May and June, so as an alternative we´re considering the two of us making a trip to El Salvador later, perhaps in July. It was exciting hearing news from home; among other things, Dan Kammen has been named by the Obama administration as a special energy envoy to Latin America.
In the afternoon I went to the Universidad de El Salvador to substitute for Rich Cairncross, who had to make a quick trip back to the U.S. this week. I gave a talk on fuel cells and demonstrated the SERC fuel cell/electrolyzer kit. I was really happy with how well the fuel cell worked this time; it seems to be improving with age. The students and faculty were great, giving me a warm reception and lots of logistical help.
Something about the UES campus feels very homey to me, maybe because it's a public university. It's more of an Oscar compared to UDB's Felix mojo, if that makes any sense.
At 9 another meeting, this one with Rector Huguet, Jorge, Reina and Nelson to talk about the solar project for building #4 for which we are seeking funding from the Alianza para Energía y Medio Ambiente. I announced the good news that the science corner grant was approved, which got a happy reaction. The university folks really want to bring Peter Lehman down here for a visit to cement the relationship with Schatz Energy Research Center before I leave at the end of June.
Right after the meeting I called Peter and talked with him for almost half an hour. It looks like he is totally booked through May and June, so as an alternative we´re considering the two of us making a trip to El Salvador later, perhaps in July. It was exciting hearing news from home; among other things, Dan Kammen has been named by the Obama administration as a special energy envoy to Latin America.
In the afternoon I went to the Universidad de El Salvador to substitute for Rich Cairncross, who had to make a quick trip back to the U.S. this week. I gave a talk on fuel cells and demonstrated the SERC fuel cell/electrolyzer kit. I was really happy with how well the fuel cell worked this time; it seems to be improving with age. The students and faculty were great, giving me a warm reception and lots of logistical help.
Something about the UES campus feels very homey to me, maybe because it's a public university. It's more of an Oscar compared to UDB's Felix mojo, if that makes any sense.
Hey Dr. C., I stole your whole class. Whatcha gonna do about it, huh?
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Clean energy from filthy trash
Yesterday I tagged along with Rich Cairncross's class from Universidad de El Salvador to see an under-construction landfill gas energy project. The Nejapa landfill is the only real sanitary landfill in the country, serving the area around San Salvador. This is not too shocking when you consider that San Salvador department alone, one of 14 departments that make up the country, generates more than half the country's solid waste. Metro San Salvador has about a quarter of the country's population, but I think the standard of living and thus the amount of trash generated per capita here is much higher than in the rest of the country.
Anyhow, the landfill was interesting. As usual with field trips to industrial sites, they gave you way more liberty to get up close and personal with the equipment than in the liability- and intellectual property-crazy USA. We got to get up on top of one of the huge landfill trash heaps (it's neatly covered with soil, so it's not messy or stinky) and see the network of wells and tubing that capture the landfill gas. Then we went to see the flares, which is how they are disposing of the gas while they develop the 6 MW power plant they plan to open next year (eventually to be ramped up to 20 MW). The most disgusting part of the landfill visit? The lixiviados (leachate) liquid that oozes out of the landfill and gets sprinkled over the surface of the landfill. The tour bus drove right through the sprinkler spray, motivating us to quickly shut all the windows!
In the evening I went to the U.S. Ambassador's residence for a social event featuring a jazz combo who are visiting El Salvador from the States. Good thing I bought a suit from the tailors down the street a couple weeks ago -- I'm already putting some miles on it. When I arrived at the party I was greeted with the good news that the Science Corner grant I wrote with the embassy's Carolyn Turpin has been awarded funding. This will give us $50,000 to start equipping Universidad Don Bosco's renewable energy research center.
I also got to meet several other people associated with the embassy, including the country director of the Millennium Challenge Corporation. They're putting in off-grid renewable energy systems for rural homes in out-of-the-way corners of the country. I'm hoping he can set me up an opportunity to visit some of these systems and see how people are living with them.
Today I went to see an ear nose and throat specialist (in Spanish an otorrinolaringólogo - one of the most amazing words I've come across in this language). He found some inflammation in both of my ears and prescribed me some anti-inflammatory medicine and a medication that suppresses the involuntary eye movements that make vertigo so disorienting. He also recommended some head and neck movement exercises that he says will help. He thinks I'll get over the vertigo in a few more days.
Anyhow, the landfill was interesting. As usual with field trips to industrial sites, they gave you way more liberty to get up close and personal with the equipment than in the liability- and intellectual property-crazy USA. We got to get up on top of one of the huge landfill trash heaps (it's neatly covered with soil, so it's not messy or stinky) and see the network of wells and tubing that capture the landfill gas. Then we went to see the flares, which is how they are disposing of the gas while they develop the 6 MW power plant they plan to open next year (eventually to be ramped up to 20 MW). The most disgusting part of the landfill visit? The lixiviados (leachate) liquid that oozes out of the landfill and gets sprinkled over the surface of the landfill. The tour bus drove right through the sprinkler spray, motivating us to quickly shut all the windows!
UES students at the Nejapa landfill gas flare
In the evening I went to the U.S. Ambassador's residence for a social event featuring a jazz combo who are visiting El Salvador from the States. Good thing I bought a suit from the tailors down the street a couple weeks ago -- I'm already putting some miles on it. When I arrived at the party I was greeted with the good news that the Science Corner grant I wrote with the embassy's Carolyn Turpin has been awarded funding. This will give us $50,000 to start equipping Universidad Don Bosco's renewable energy research center.
I also got to meet several other people associated with the embassy, including the country director of the Millennium Challenge Corporation. They're putting in off-grid renewable energy systems for rural homes in out-of-the-way corners of the country. I'm hoping he can set me up an opportunity to visit some of these systems and see how people are living with them.
Today I went to see an ear nose and throat specialist (in Spanish an otorrinolaringólogo - one of the most amazing words I've come across in this language). He found some inflammation in both of my ears and prescribed me some anti-inflammatory medicine and a medication that suppresses the involuntary eye movements that make vertigo so disorienting. He also recommended some head and neck movement exercises that he says will help. He thinks I'll get over the vertigo in a few more days.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Locals only
Today Basilia and her mom and I wanted to go to the beach, something we hadn't done for months. We considered playing it safe and going to El Tunco, a beach we've already been to twice. It's easy to get to, we know we like it, and we have friends there we could look up. However, I successfully lobbied for trying someplace new, so we took a considerably longer bus trip to go to Playa Los Cóbanos.
Like the Lonely Planet guidebook says, it's a beautiful place, but we were kind of taken aback by how crammed the beachfront was with snack shacks, restaurants, and ranchos (the Salvadoran name for little open-air huts you can rent for a day to have some shade and a place to ditch your stuff while you swim -- elsewhere in Latin America known as palapas). We eventually found some good food and had a nice afternoon at the beach, but the consensus is we like El Tunco better. Los Cóbanos does have the distinction of having the only coral reefs on the Pacific Coast of Central America, but we didn't get around to renting snorkel gear to go check it out.
To me the most interesting aspect of Los Cóbanos was that, of the hundreds of beach-goers, we didn't see anyone but yours truly (I love the Spanish equivalent for "yours truly" to refer to oneself: "su servidor") who appeared to not be Central American. Since the place is evidently not catering to the foreign tourist trade, it has this intense kind of Salvadoran-ness about it. All the grittiness of a public marketplace in the city, right up to the waterline. Kind of fascinated and repulsed us at the same time -- lively but not the relaxing experience we were looking for.
When we got back to Antiguo Cuscatlán, we found our neighbors the tailors had made a Barcelona soccer shirt for their dog. Salvadorans are nuts about Spanish soccer teams, mainly Real Madrid and Barcelona, but this was the first time we'd seen this particular expression of fandom.
Like the Lonely Planet guidebook says, it's a beautiful place, but we were kind of taken aback by how crammed the beachfront was with snack shacks, restaurants, and ranchos (the Salvadoran name for little open-air huts you can rent for a day to have some shade and a place to ditch your stuff while you swim -- elsewhere in Latin America known as palapas). We eventually found some good food and had a nice afternoon at the beach, but the consensus is we like El Tunco better. Los Cóbanos does have the distinction of having the only coral reefs on the Pacific Coast of Central America, but we didn't get around to renting snorkel gear to go check it out.
To me the most interesting aspect of Los Cóbanos was that, of the hundreds of beach-goers, we didn't see anyone but yours truly (I love the Spanish equivalent for "yours truly" to refer to oneself: "su servidor") who appeared to not be Central American. Since the place is evidently not catering to the foreign tourist trade, it has this intense kind of Salvadoran-ness about it. All the grittiness of a public marketplace in the city, right up to the waterline. Kind of fascinated and repulsed us at the same time -- lively but not the relaxing experience we were looking for.
When we got back to Antiguo Cuscatlán, we found our neighbors the tailors had made a Barcelona soccer shirt for their dog. Salvadorans are nuts about Spanish soccer teams, mainly Real Madrid and Barcelona, but this was the first time we'd seen this particular expression of fandom.
Basilia with Barcelona Fan
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Some real work for a change
Today Basilia, her mother and I all participated in a volunteer day with Habitat for Humanity. The volunteers were organized by an employee of the U.S. embassy, so we all gathered outside the embassy at 7 a.m. There were several private vehicles and a bus owned by the U.S. Navy, who have a small base at the main airport in Comalapa. The three of us rode on the Navy bus, along with several Navy personnel and a mix of other volunteers. Mostly people from the U.S., but a few Salvadorans in the group.
The job site was in Santa Ana department, a little over an hour from San Salvador. Habitat is building an entire neighborhood. Many of the homes are already finished and occupied, and the neat upkeep of the homes and the gardens that surround them suggest that the residents take a lot of pride in these little houses.
I give Habitat a lot of credit for how they organize their volunteer events. Unlike many events I've participated in with other organizations in the past, they are great at giving everyone something useful to do and keeping people happy with details like bathroom access, drinking water, first aid kits, etc. Also, they put us to work side by side with Salvadoran paid laborers, with whom we had a great time chatting.
The plan was to work a full day, but just before lunch a team who were digging one of the foundations encountered human remains. It appeared to be a clandestine burial from several years earlier. The Habitat leaders decided to notify the police and suspend construction for the rest of the day. I think many of us were relieved, since the heat was brutal. A full day would have been a tough deal.
The job site was in Santa Ana department, a little over an hour from San Salvador. Habitat is building an entire neighborhood. Many of the homes are already finished and occupied, and the neat upkeep of the homes and the gardens that surround them suggest that the residents take a lot of pride in these little houses.
I give Habitat a lot of credit for how they organize their volunteer events. Unlike many events I've participated in with other organizations in the past, they are great at giving everyone something useful to do and keeping people happy with details like bathroom access, drinking water, first aid kits, etc. Also, they put us to work side by side with Salvadoran paid laborers, with whom we had a great time chatting.
The plan was to work a full day, but just before lunch a team who were digging one of the foundations encountered human remains. It appeared to be a clandestine burial from several years earlier. The Habitat leaders decided to notify the police and suspend construction for the rest of the day. I think many of us were relieved, since the heat was brutal. A full day would have been a tough deal.
Habitat for Humanity mason Mirna, Basilia, and Doña Basilia assemble rebar for a house foundation
On Wednesday I participated in a round table discussion on renewable energy at Universidad Centroamericana. There was a good turnout, mostly university students. Like other panel discussions I've seen here, it differed from typical panels in the U.S. in that 1) there was no attempt to stimulate discussion or give and take between the panelists after our initial presentations, and 2) instead of asking questions of the panel, most audience members used the Q and A period to give short speeches stating their opinions on the topic. You can see the Powerpoint presentations online (look for "Energías Renovables en El Salvador: ¿Cuales son las alternativas?")
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Other universities and vertigo
Yesterday sounded like it was going to be pretty lightweight, just giving two 40-minute presentations at two universities (Univ. Católica de El Salvador in Santa Ana and Univ. José Matías Delgado in Santa Tecla) as part of the U.S. embassy's Earth Week events. It turned out to be a marathon day, leaving the house at 7:15 a.m. and not getting home until almost dark. No huge surprises, just the usual random delays, meeting lots of people, getting from place to place...
The presentations were fun, Rich Cairncross and I tag-teaming. He talked about his biodiesel production research at Drexel, using ethanol in place of methanol in the transesterification/esterification process and other adjustments that could make production more cost-effective and/or more environmentally benign. I talked about renewable energy in El Salvador and the need for a renewable energy research institute. The students, mostly agronomy and industrial engineering majors, were very receptive and asked good questions. One thing that impressed me was that about half of the students at both universities were women. I hope this translates into women being well-represented in the technical workforce and enjoying equal status and pay with their male counterparts.
I think I have something called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. I had this intense sensation of vertigo or dizziness as I got out of bed Sunday morning (no, I didn't get wasted Saturday night!). The first wave was so strong it made me throw up. I throw up like once every ten years, so that in itself was kind of disturbing. I canceled plans Basilia and I had made to go out with our friends Francisco and Kyle so I could stay home and rest. The vertigo has recurred a few times but seems to be subsiding. I looked online and found the link above, which I think pretty much nails what I've got. Sounds like I don't need to rush to see a doctor unless the nausea and vomiting come back. Otherwise I feel fine but am taking a day off work to rest. I have some prep work to do for another presentation tomorrow at the Universidad Centroamericana, but I think it will just basically be a truncated version of yesterday's presentations.
The presentations were fun, Rich Cairncross and I tag-teaming. He talked about his biodiesel production research at Drexel, using ethanol in place of methanol in the transesterification/esterification process and other adjustments that could make production more cost-effective and/or more environmentally benign. I talked about renewable energy in El Salvador and the need for a renewable energy research institute. The students, mostly agronomy and industrial engineering majors, were very receptive and asked good questions. One thing that impressed me was that about half of the students at both universities were women. I hope this translates into women being well-represented in the technical workforce and enjoying equal status and pay with their male counterparts.
With Rich at UNICAES
One funny incident at Univ. J.M. Delgado: I was introduced to the director of the school of industrial engineering, and she commented that we had already met before. She looked very familiar to me, but I couldn't place it. Later, after the presentations, she asked me "when are we going to sing again?" and it came back to me -- she was one of the other engineers who sang karaoke the night I went with Nelson to an engineering society get-together a couple months ago! She was a great singer, both in English and Spanish.I think I have something called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. I had this intense sensation of vertigo or dizziness as I got out of bed Sunday morning (no, I didn't get wasted Saturday night!). The first wave was so strong it made me throw up. I throw up like once every ten years, so that in itself was kind of disturbing. I canceled plans Basilia and I had made to go out with our friends Francisco and Kyle so I could stay home and rest. The vertigo has recurred a few times but seems to be subsiding. I looked online and found the link above, which I think pretty much nails what I've got. Sounds like I don't need to rush to see a doctor unless the nausea and vomiting come back. Otherwise I feel fine but am taking a day off work to rest. I have some prep work to do for another presentation tomorrow at the Universidad Centroamericana, but I think it will just basically be a truncated version of yesterday's presentations.
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