Yesterday Basilia and her mom and I took a bus ride out to Chalatenango, a city a couple hours north of San Salvador. Basilia had succeeded in tracking down her old classmate Deysi who lives in Chalate, and we had an invitation to go out and meet her family.
Chalate has a quaint city center, all the downtown streets having these covered arcades that give the place a Wild West look. It's said to be one of the hotter places in the country, and it was living up to this reputation yesterday, so the shade provided by the arcades was appreciated.
Since Basilia had last seen her, Deysi has gotten married to Jose Antonio and has a seven-year-old boy, Kenneth. They live on a quiet, leafy side street five minutes' walk from the town center. I was surprised to learn that their tiny two-bedroom row house cost them $45,000 five years ago, making it probably more expensive on a per square foot basis than an entry-level home in Arcata at that time.
As I strolled around town with Jose Antonio, I asked him about crime in Chalatenango, wondering if it's the main thing on people's minds there, as it generally seems to be in San Salvador. He dismissed the concern, saying his town is a safe place with no gang problems. "If anybody starts making trouble around here, they just show up dead in the morning," he said casually. That took me awhile to digest. There is a deep streak of violence underlying so much of Salvadoran society. Even peace and safety, where they are found, seem to owe their existence to fear and violence lurking just out of sight.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Feedback
A busy day today. Basilia and I took her mom out for an early breakfast at a place that some U.S. Fulbright students living in the neighborhood had recommended. I had to hustle off to UDB for a long string of meetings starting at 8:30 am. First Nelson Quintanilla came to talk with me about the organization of the Schatz Lab. The university's Rector (President) Huguet had tasked Nelson with drafting an organizational plan for a new multidisciplinary research center at UDB. Nelson is looking for models of existing research centers to evaluate and perhaps emulate.
As soon as we were done talking about that, it was time for a meeting with a couple of the administrators of El Salvador's Consejo Nacional de Energía. This council was created by a new federal law in 2007 but has only really begun operating in the past several months. They contacted Rector Huguet recently with interest in creating a research agreement with UDB. This was the first meeting between UDB and CNE. They told us about their charter and some of their initial goals and activities.
One of their planned projects is a national incandescent-for-CFL light bulb exchange. They talked about using home inspections as a mechanism for ensuring that the bulbs actually get used. I told them I ran a municipal level program of this sort for Palo Alto years ago and suggested that home inspections might be difficult and unwelcome. I offered as an alternative that they could work with the utilities to monitor bills of participating households and reward homes that achieve the expected level of energy savings from the light bulb exchange with an additional short-term bill discount. This would not work perfectly, as lighting related savings could get lost in the noise of other household energy use patterns, but it could be totally automated and would make a palatable proxy for on-site inspections. The CNE people were receptive to the proposal, and after the meeting Rector Huguet told me he thought it was a good idea.
Right after lunch with Moises Guerra and Nelson, we had a meeting with Carlos Azucena, the head of UDB's mechanical engineering program. Carlos has been working as part of a team designing a small scale pumped storage hydro power demonstration project to provide at least part of the electricity for a new building on the Soyapango campus. It would be an off-grid project with the electricity supplied by PV and the pumped storage being used to distribute the energy for round-the-clock use.
It's an interesting idea that they've already invested quite a lot of thought and design work into. However, on first look I don't think they've quite got a handle yet on the energy losses that the system will incur, and it all seems much too complex. Rather than taking the approach of using the simplest design that will satisfy energy needs while demonstrating the pumped storage concept, they're throwing every engineering trick they can think of into the design. I'm hoping to convince them to simplify the design before we get deeply into economic analysis and pitching the project to the university administration.
My last meeting of the day was with Carolyn Turpin of the U.S. embassy's public affairs office. Since I met her my first day in El Salvador she's been encouraging me to pursue some USAID funding that could help UDB to equip their fledgling energy institute. I had sent her a draft proposal with an equipment list and budget yesterday. When I arrived at her office today she was wrapping up a meeting with people from another Salvadoran university who it turns out are very interested in renewable energy as an area of study and as something to put to work on their campus. Carolyn pulled me into that meeting, and I promised to go talk with their administration about energy.
Carolyn was pleased with my draft proposal language and is going to get Jorge Lemus from UDB to meet with us to go over it before she merges some language of her own into it, finalizes it, and sends it off. Hopefully it will get funded -- she showed me a successful proposal that a Costa Rican university had submitted to the same program, and we felt like ours is at least as complete and well organized.
I got home from all that just at 5, in time to change into some shorts and go for a run in a neighborhood park. The park is pretty small, so we ran laps around the perimeter. There was a little boy there watching a soccer team practice. Every time we passed him, he would take off and run a few yards with us. Very cute.
Today was a satisfying day, I think mainly because I finally got substantial feedback on the work I've been doing (and it was mostly positive, to boot). When you're working in a new and unfamiliar environment and don't get such feedback, it's hard to gauge whether you're even working on the right things, let alone doing good work.
As soon as we were done talking about that, it was time for a meeting with a couple of the administrators of El Salvador's Consejo Nacional de Energía. This council was created by a new federal law in 2007 but has only really begun operating in the past several months. They contacted Rector Huguet recently with interest in creating a research agreement with UDB. This was the first meeting between UDB and CNE. They told us about their charter and some of their initial goals and activities.
One of their planned projects is a national incandescent-for-CFL light bulb exchange. They talked about using home inspections as a mechanism for ensuring that the bulbs actually get used. I told them I ran a municipal level program of this sort for Palo Alto years ago and suggested that home inspections might be difficult and unwelcome. I offered as an alternative that they could work with the utilities to monitor bills of participating households and reward homes that achieve the expected level of energy savings from the light bulb exchange with an additional short-term bill discount. This would not work perfectly, as lighting related savings could get lost in the noise of other household energy use patterns, but it could be totally automated and would make a palatable proxy for on-site inspections. The CNE people were receptive to the proposal, and after the meeting Rector Huguet told me he thought it was a good idea.
Right after lunch with Moises Guerra and Nelson, we had a meeting with Carlos Azucena, the head of UDB's mechanical engineering program. Carlos has been working as part of a team designing a small scale pumped storage hydro power demonstration project to provide at least part of the electricity for a new building on the Soyapango campus. It would be an off-grid project with the electricity supplied by PV and the pumped storage being used to distribute the energy for round-the-clock use.
It's an interesting idea that they've already invested quite a lot of thought and design work into. However, on first look I don't think they've quite got a handle yet on the energy losses that the system will incur, and it all seems much too complex. Rather than taking the approach of using the simplest design that will satisfy energy needs while demonstrating the pumped storage concept, they're throwing every engineering trick they can think of into the design. I'm hoping to convince them to simplify the design before we get deeply into economic analysis and pitching the project to the university administration.
My last meeting of the day was with Carolyn Turpin of the U.S. embassy's public affairs office. Since I met her my first day in El Salvador she's been encouraging me to pursue some USAID funding that could help UDB to equip their fledgling energy institute. I had sent her a draft proposal with an equipment list and budget yesterday. When I arrived at her office today she was wrapping up a meeting with people from another Salvadoran university who it turns out are very interested in renewable energy as an area of study and as something to put to work on their campus. Carolyn pulled me into that meeting, and I promised to go talk with their administration about energy.
Carolyn was pleased with my draft proposal language and is going to get Jorge Lemus from UDB to meet with us to go over it before she merges some language of her own into it, finalizes it, and sends it off. Hopefully it will get funded -- she showed me a successful proposal that a Costa Rican university had submitted to the same program, and we felt like ours is at least as complete and well organized.
I got home from all that just at 5, in time to change into some shorts and go for a run in a neighborhood park. The park is pretty small, so we ran laps around the perimeter. There was a little boy there watching a soccer team practice. Every time we passed him, he would take off and run a few yards with us. Very cute.
Today was a satisfying day, I think mainly because I finally got substantial feedback on the work I've been doing (and it was mostly positive, to boot). When you're working in a new and unfamiliar environment and don't get such feedback, it's hard to gauge whether you're even working on the right things, let alone doing good work.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Biomass Energy - Sweet!
Today Victor Cornejo, head of the graduate program at UDB, accompanied me on a tour of the two ingenios (sugar cane processing plants) closest to San Salvador. We were chauffered around by Nelson, one of UDB's drivers for the campus fleet.
First stop was Ingenio La Cabaña, where Tino Zamora spent a good couple hours explaining the plant to us and showing us around. All of the seven sugar plants in El Salvador generate their own mechanical power, electricity, and process heat using bagasse (sugar cane waste), but La Cabaña is one of the only ones that produces surplus electric power to export to the grid and diverts some of the molasses to make ethanol. I was very impressed with all the automation, mostly using Siemens and Honeywell DAQ and controls. And the three labs (one for testing the incoming sugarcane, one for testing sugar and molasses products, and one for the ethanol distillery) look very professional.
Having said that, deep inside the plant is a kind of scary place, lots of fire, steam, rickety catwalks, and huge mechanical grinding equipment in motion. And we really walked through just about every nook and cranny. You don't quite get the sense that you get at the LaGeo geothermal plant, where the safety equipment and procedures seemed to be fully up to first world standards. Granted, sugar processing is inherently a messy business. I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for keeping the plant clean.
After a lunch break, we drove over to Ingenio El Angel and met with Germán Molina. He spent a good while talking with us about the plant and, like Tino at Cabaña, says he's happy to have the students come for a plant tour. My sense is that the two plants have enough differences and are close together enough that we should visit both plants with the students.
Something I really like about visiting all these power plants is that the senior engineers who really know the plants make themselves very accessible and seem to enjoy showing interested visitors their plants in some depth.
First stop was Ingenio La Cabaña, where Tino Zamora spent a good couple hours explaining the plant to us and showing us around. All of the seven sugar plants in El Salvador generate their own mechanical power, electricity, and process heat using bagasse (sugar cane waste), but La Cabaña is one of the only ones that produces surplus electric power to export to the grid and diverts some of the molasses to make ethanol. I was very impressed with all the automation, mostly using Siemens and Honeywell DAQ and controls. And the three labs (one for testing the incoming sugarcane, one for testing sugar and molasses products, and one for the ethanol distillery) look very professional.
Having said that, deep inside the plant is a kind of scary place, lots of fire, steam, rickety catwalks, and huge mechanical grinding equipment in motion. And we really walked through just about every nook and cranny. You don't quite get the sense that you get at the LaGeo geothermal plant, where the safety equipment and procedures seemed to be fully up to first world standards. Granted, sugar processing is inherently a messy business. I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for keeping the plant clean.
Piles of bagasse and woodchips at La Cabaña -- they're experimenting with the latter feedstock as a way of extending their generating season (the cane harvest is only 4-5 months each year)
After a lunch break, we drove over to Ingenio El Angel and met with Germán Molina. He spent a good while talking with us about the plant and, like Tino at Cabaña, says he's happy to have the students come for a plant tour. My sense is that the two plants have enough differences and are close together enough that we should visit both plants with the students.
Ethanol distillery at La Cabaña
Something I really like about visiting all these power plants is that the senior engineers who really know the plants make themselves very accessible and seem to enjoy showing interested visitors their plants in some depth.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
It's a Smog World After All
My impression during my first month here was, hey, for a city of two million in a developing country, San Salvador's air quality isn't that bad, provided you're not directly behind one of the thousands of particulate-spewing diesel buses. The views across the city from one end to the other were pretty crisp...until today. With rising temperatures and stagnant air, the smog suddenly showed up, looking at least as thick as a bad day in L.A. or Denver. So maybe it wasn't the best of days to go sightseeing on the urban periphery, but the opportunity came up to go see Puerta del Diablo with our friends Mirna and Mercy, so Basilia and I hopped in Mirna's old VW, bringing Basi's mom along. Doña Basilia is always up for an outing, which I guess is where Basilia gets her restlessness. (In Central America people who'd always rather be in the street than at home are called Patechucho, a contraction of pata de chucho, or dog's paw -- an apt metaphor for wanderlust.)
I was morbidly curious about Puerta del Diablo, as Joan Didion in Salvador described it as the place where the death squads and secret police would take the disappeared and hurl them off the cliff during the civil war. Despite the scary name and this grim history, Puerta del Diablo today is a pretty innocuous weekend getaway destination for San Salvadorans. It's also a testament to the enterprising nature of this country. If it were in the U.S. it would probably be a state park with a parking lot, restrooms, and an interpretive trail. Here the official infrastructure is minimal, but the place is crawling with dozens of roving and stationary entrepreneurs, selling everything from pirated CDs to pupusas to drinking water. There's even a zipline ride if you want to take the fast way back down to the road from one of the rock formations. Interestingly, the generic term for recreational ziplines in El Salvador is "canopy," I guess derived from the use of ziplines for exploring the canopy of tropical forests in Costa Rica that dates back for some years.
Oh yeah, work! I did some of that this week. Actually it was a very busy week. I spent a lot of time assembling information related to the energy system for the Citalá retreat that I wrote about earlier this week. Yesterday I met with Nelson Quintanilla and Federico Machado, both UDB electrical engineers, to develop a load analysis for the Citalá site. I enjoyed working with them on the details. They listen to my ideas, but they're not afraid to politely disagree when the situation calls for it, and they made a lot of good points. I can work with these guys.
I also made plans for Monday to visit two sugar cane processing plants with cogen systems that are net contributors to the electric grid. Tomorrow I need to spend a good chunk of the day reading some documents I have about energy production in the Salvadoran sugar industry so I can be prepared with questions on Monday.
I was morbidly curious about Puerta del Diablo, as Joan Didion in Salvador described it as the place where the death squads and secret police would take the disappeared and hurl them off the cliff during the civil war. Despite the scary name and this grim history, Puerta del Diablo today is a pretty innocuous weekend getaway destination for San Salvadorans. It's also a testament to the enterprising nature of this country. If it were in the U.S. it would probably be a state park with a parking lot, restrooms, and an interpretive trail. Here the official infrastructure is minimal, but the place is crawling with dozens of roving and stationary entrepreneurs, selling everything from pirated CDs to pupusas to drinking water. There's even a zipline ride if you want to take the fast way back down to the road from one of the rock formations. Interestingly, the generic term for recreational ziplines in El Salvador is "canopy," I guess derived from the use of ziplines for exploring the canopy of tropical forests in Costa Rica that dates back for some years.
White stone pillars mark the path to the top of Puerta del Diablo
Oh yeah, work! I did some of that this week. Actually it was a very busy week. I spent a lot of time assembling information related to the energy system for the Citalá retreat that I wrote about earlier this week. Yesterday I met with Nelson Quintanilla and Federico Machado, both UDB electrical engineers, to develop a load analysis for the Citalá site. I enjoyed working with them on the details. They listen to my ideas, but they're not afraid to politely disagree when the situation calls for it, and they made a lot of good points. I can work with these guys.
I also made plans for Monday to visit two sugar cane processing plants with cogen systems that are net contributors to the electric grid. Tomorrow I need to spend a good chunk of the day reading some documents I have about energy production in the Salvadoran sugar industry so I can be prepared with questions on Monday.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Life Catches Up
Yes, I'm starting to have longer gaps between blog entries. Life is catching up and I'm getting busier, not so much spare time to fool around with blogging and suchlike pastimes. But that's a good thing, isn't it? This entry will be long to make up for my delinquency.
The cool weather of my last entry is a distant memory. The last few days have been quite warm, working their way up toward full-on hot. Since I last checked in with you, my mother-in-law Basilia, (the younger) Basilia's sister Oneyda, and Oneyda's 7-year-old son Emilson have been visiting with us. Last Friday Basilia took a bus to San Miguel to meet them coming in on the Marcala (Honduras)-San Miguel bus.
While they were en route to San Salvador Friday evening, I went to a "conferencia magistral," an event at the Radisson Hotel celebrating the publication by the Universidad Don Bosco Press of the Central American edition of a papal encyclical on truth and charity. Quite a formal event, my first of what will no doubt be many occasions of feeling under-dressed and outclassed. I thought I was doing pretty good by putting on a button-up long sleeve shirt, tie and slacks but I turned out to be the only man without a suit jacket.
Saturday we all went on the bus back out to Playa El Tunco for what was Oneyda and Emilson's first-ever visit to a beach. We checked in at the Eco del Mar Hotel (a nice, simple but elegant place, I recommend it) and headed for the surf. We met up with Noelle, John and James, spent a little time at their house, and also saw the other family we met last time at El Tunco: Walter, Jeri Ann, and Orion, this time with Jeri Ann's other child, Maya. The kids all played together on the beach, but we adults all played just as hard. Mellow surf in the morning, that got a bit rough in the afternoon. We went out to eat twice, Mexican food at Taco Guanaco and some really good pizza at Mopelia.
Sunday (after an early swim) we came back to Antiguo Cuscatlán about noon, me sporting my first real sunburn in quite a few years. We hustled to get together a veggie lasagna, some salad, and a coconut vegetable curry in time for Basilia's 4pm birthday party. We had quite a few guests over, including the Burgos family, Beatriz and her mom, all the Fulbright Scholars I could round up (Anne, Chris, Joshua, and Mike), and Walter and Jeri Ann with their two kids. The one bummer was that Noelle and family had a car breakdown on the way in from the coast and had to miss the event. The cake from Jardín del Pan was awesome.
The cool weather of my last entry is a distant memory. The last few days have been quite warm, working their way up toward full-on hot. Since I last checked in with you, my mother-in-law Basilia, (the younger) Basilia's sister Oneyda, and Oneyda's 7-year-old son Emilson have been visiting with us. Last Friday Basilia took a bus to San Miguel to meet them coming in on the Marcala (Honduras)-San Miguel bus.
While they were en route to San Salvador Friday evening, I went to a "conferencia magistral," an event at the Radisson Hotel celebrating the publication by the Universidad Don Bosco Press of the Central American edition of a papal encyclical on truth and charity. Quite a formal event, my first of what will no doubt be many occasions of feeling under-dressed and outclassed. I thought I was doing pretty good by putting on a button-up long sleeve shirt, tie and slacks but I turned out to be the only man without a suit jacket.
Saturday we all went on the bus back out to Playa El Tunco for what was Oneyda and Emilson's first-ever visit to a beach. We checked in at the Eco del Mar Hotel (a nice, simple but elegant place, I recommend it) and headed for the surf. We met up with Noelle, John and James, spent a little time at their house, and also saw the other family we met last time at El Tunco: Walter, Jeri Ann, and Orion, this time with Jeri Ann's other child, Maya. The kids all played together on the beach, but we adults all played just as hard. Mellow surf in the morning, that got a bit rough in the afternoon. We went out to eat twice, Mexican food at Taco Guanaco and some really good pizza at Mopelia.
Doña Basilia, James, John, Noelle, me, Basilia, Emilson, and Oneyda at Playa el Tunco
Emilson's first time in the ocean
Oneyda and the two Basilias knee deep in the warm Pacific
Sunday (after an early swim) we came back to Antiguo Cuscatlán about noon, me sporting my first real sunburn in quite a few years. We hustled to get together a veggie lasagna, some salad, and a coconut vegetable curry in time for Basilia's 4pm birthday party. We had quite a few guests over, including the Burgos family, Beatriz and her mom, all the Fulbright Scholars I could round up (Anne, Chris, Joshua, and Mike), and Walter and Jeri Ann with their two kids. The one bummer was that Noelle and family had a car breakdown on the way in from the coast and had to miss the event. The cake from Jardín del Pan was awesome.
Basi safely extinguishes a household fire
Yesterday was Basilia's real birthday. El Salvador celebrated by having an earthquake (a harmless 6.0 centered in Guatemala, but it felt long and strong enough to be spooky on the heels of Humboldt's nearly harmless 6.5er nine days earlier and the horrific one in Haiti last week). I got back into the working routine for the day, then we all went to the cinema at Merliot Plaza to see the new Chipmunks movie, here known as Alvin y Las Ardillas 2. All were entertained.
Today I made a road trip to Citalá, Chalatenango with UDB's Nelson Quintanilla, his wife Norma, and Oneyda to have a look at a site where a French Canadian priest is building a mountain retreat center in a beautiful setting just a few miles from the Honduran border. The priest wants help with designing an off-grid renewable energy system for the center. The wind resource maps from SWERA (a great web resource) and the local ridgetop topography suggest the place has some real possibilities for wind energy, and solar is certainly an option. The project architect and engineers met with us and gave us an electronic set of project design documents. Nelson and I are going to rough up a load analysis and some design options for a wind system with generator backup, possibly incorporating solar as well. Will make a fun case study to share with the students in the renewables course.
The view from inside the under-construction church at Citalá, Chalatenango
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
El Norte
El Norte is a generic term people use in Central America to describe a cold wind. I thought it was a farmer's term because I learned it from Basilia's father, but this week I heard a lot of city people talking about El Norte. It's been freakishly cool in San Salvador for several days, enough to make us shiver when the wind blows at mid-day and to make us glad we bought a couple of Guatemalan blankets while in Honduras at Christmas. The nights would be cold without them. Things seemed to be warming up today though, and before long I'm sure San Salvador will be back in its normal sweaty temperature range.
It looks like I'll have plenty to do at Universidad Don Bosco. Today I met with the rector (president) of the university, Federico Huguet. It was a lunchtime meeting with him and my four principal UDB collaborators, Dr. Jorge Lemus, Nelson Quintanilla, Victor Cornejo, and Moises Guerra. Dr. Lemus is my chief collaborator, and the other three are point people for my three designated projects: Nelson on the renewable energy demonstration project, Victor on the energy class, and Moises on the establishment of a campus energy research center. Rector Huguet was very welcoming and offered to provide me with anything I need to get this work done.
Afterward I met with Nelson and showed him a slide show in Spanish that I put together on HSU's student-driven Humboldt Energy Independence Fund. He's excited about HEIF, though we discussed two significant hurdles to implementing something like it at UDB: 1) Any financial contribution in the form of a student fee would have to be very modest, certainly less than the US$10/semester that HSU students pay; and 2) Nelson feels that UDB students are less likely to take on extracurricular campus activities than their US counterparts.
Given the ambitious nature of the projects I'm already committed to and the short time frame (Basilia and I have already been in Central America almost a month!), I'll need to guard against mission creep. I saw signs of this today -- Rector Huguet mentioned that they have a piece of lab equipment from Germany that's not working properly, and he wanted to know if I could have a look at it. Nelson and the staff from the metrology department showed it to me -- it's a cabinet that creates a salt/steam environment to accelerate corrosion of metals for studying failure modes. Apparently the salt spray gets out into the room when they run it. Pretty far outside my area, but I agreed to see if I can find documentation in Spanish or English (the manual they have is in German, but they couldn't locate it today).
Victor provided me with a bunch of contacts today in government, industry, and NGOs that should be of help in setting up field trips for the energy class. Tomorrow I'll make some calls to see what I can arrange.
It looks like I'll have plenty to do at Universidad Don Bosco. Today I met with the rector (president) of the university, Federico Huguet. It was a lunchtime meeting with him and my four principal UDB collaborators, Dr. Jorge Lemus, Nelson Quintanilla, Victor Cornejo, and Moises Guerra. Dr. Lemus is my chief collaborator, and the other three are point people for my three designated projects: Nelson on the renewable energy demonstration project, Victor on the energy class, and Moises on the establishment of a campus energy research center. Rector Huguet was very welcoming and offered to provide me with anything I need to get this work done.
Afterward I met with Nelson and showed him a slide show in Spanish that I put together on HSU's student-driven Humboldt Energy Independence Fund. He's excited about HEIF, though we discussed two significant hurdles to implementing something like it at UDB: 1) Any financial contribution in the form of a student fee would have to be very modest, certainly less than the US$10/semester that HSU students pay; and 2) Nelson feels that UDB students are less likely to take on extracurricular campus activities than their US counterparts.
Given the ambitious nature of the projects I'm already committed to and the short time frame (Basilia and I have already been in Central America almost a month!), I'll need to guard against mission creep. I saw signs of this today -- Rector Huguet mentioned that they have a piece of lab equipment from Germany that's not working properly, and he wanted to know if I could have a look at it. Nelson and the staff from the metrology department showed it to me -- it's a cabinet that creates a salt/steam environment to accelerate corrosion of metals for studying failure modes. Apparently the salt spray gets out into the room when they run it. Pretty far outside my area, but I agreed to see if I can find documentation in Spanish or English (the manual they have is in German, but they couldn't locate it today).
Victor provided me with a bunch of contacts today in government, industry, and NGOs that should be of help in setting up field trips for the energy class. Tomorrow I'll make some calls to see what I can arrange.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Gates
We moved into our neighborhood just in time to be in the midst of a controversy. The neighborhood feels pretty safe to us so far, but our quiet residential street and others nearby are having gates installed at the ends, either with a lock or a full-time watchman controlling who gets in. It's all pretty low-key, but it understandably rubs many people the wrong way, seeing as these are public streets. What we're hearing from the neighbors who are not fans of the gates is that the people on the block who are most fearful about crime just ramrodded the project through.
In addition to making the neighborhood feel less relaxed and friendly, the gates pose a real threat to people who operate small businesses on the affected blocks. Little cafes and grocery stores of course depend on spontaneous foot traffic, which is greatly diminished by the gates. We're especially concerned for the owners of Yemaya, a hip and tasty vegetarian-friendly restaurant two blocks from us that just opened four months ago and is about to be cut off from the surrounding neighborhood. It's hard to imagine them surviving behind locked gates.
In addition to making the neighborhood feel less relaxed and friendly, the gates pose a real threat to people who operate small businesses on the affected blocks. Little cafes and grocery stores of course depend on spontaneous foot traffic, which is greatly diminished by the gates. We're especially concerned for the owners of Yemaya, a hip and tasty vegetarian-friendly restaurant two blocks from us that just opened four months ago and is about to be cut off from the surrounding neighborhood. It's hard to imagine them surviving behind locked gates.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
¡La Playa!
Ah, a sandy beach, water warm enough to bodysurf all day without catching a chill, and coconut palms waving in the breeze...yes, we really are in the tropics. Basilia and I took the bus out to the coast of La Libertad department yesterday to get our first look at El Salvador's seashore and to visit with Noelle, John, and James, the family whose apartment we took over in Antiguo Cuscatlán when they moved out to the beach. They live just a five minute stroll from the beach in the low-key tourist destination of El Tunco. It's a backpacker/surfer hangout, no high-rise hotels or malls. We met several other Salvadorans and norteamericanos who are friends of Noelle's family; in fact, their friends JeriAnn and Walter and their little boy Orion who live in San Salvador gave us a ride back home at the end of the day.
We had such a good time that we decided we'll go back next weekend with Basilia's family for an overnight stay when they come to visit. Walter has a friend José who owns one of the small hotels in El Tunco, and we reserved a couple rooms for next Saturday night.
We had such a good time that we decided we'll go back next weekend with Basilia's family for an overnight stay when they come to visit. Walter has a friend José who owns one of the small hotels in El Tunco, and we reserved a couple rooms for next Saturday night.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Visiting the Soyapango Campus
My host university, Universidad Don Bosco, has two campuses. We live just a few blocks from the small graduate campus in Antiguo Cuscatlán in the southwest corner of the San Salvador metro area. The main campus is located in Soyapango, way over on the eastern edge of the capital's urban area. It's about a half hour by car between the two campuses if it's not rush hour, or somewhat over an hour by bus. Soyapango is San Salvador's poorest, most crime-ridden district. The university was established there by design, as its mission is to provide higher education to the poor. About 70% of UDB's undergrads are from Soyapango.
Today was my first full day at the Soyapango campus. UDB is providing me a desk at both campuses, with the expectation that I'll mostly work in A.C. while developing and teaching the class, but will spend more time at Soyapango later on when I'm helping develop a demonstration energy project at that campus.
The visit to Soyapango was very busy and a lot of fun. I spent the morning with electro-mechanical engineering professor Anselmo Valdizon, who has since 2004 been building, operating, and maintaining a solar power system that uses a parabolic mirror system as the heat source for a steam engine-driven generator. The engine is a custom-built 3hp, two-piston unit made by a small shop in the U.S. The system was built under a grant from a branch of USAID with the original intent that it would power an off-grid village. The system works but proved too complex and maintenance-intensive for that application, so USAID approved re-purposing it as an on-campus educational tool. I didn't get to see it fully up and running, but Ing. Valdizon and I had a great time checking out all the components.
(left) Sunlight focused on the solar boiler
After lunch I spent the afternoon touring all the different engineering labs with faculty member Nelson Quintanilla. Lots to see, much of it quite impressive. We spent most of our time in the electrical lab where they have a small collection of PV equipment (module, inverter, charge controller, batteries) and the metrology lab, which plays an important role as a center for calibrating instruments and quality checking products for Salvadoran industry. Nelson has some ideas about possible on-campus energy projects, including a pumped storage hydro demonstration project that would make use of an existing underground reservoir that stores rainwater for dry season irrigation of the campus landscape. This may not be feasible for a number of reasons, but performing the site survey, design and econ analysis would be a great way to learn about micro hydro and power markets.
Today was my first full day at the Soyapango campus. UDB is providing me a desk at both campuses, with the expectation that I'll mostly work in A.C. while developing and teaching the class, but will spend more time at Soyapango later on when I'm helping develop a demonstration energy project at that campus.
The visit to Soyapango was very busy and a lot of fun. I spent the morning with electro-mechanical engineering professor Anselmo Valdizon, who has since 2004 been building, operating, and maintaining a solar power system that uses a parabolic mirror system as the heat source for a steam engine-driven generator. The engine is a custom-built 3hp, two-piston unit made by a small shop in the U.S. The system was built under a grant from a branch of USAID with the original intent that it would power an off-grid village. The system works but proved too complex and maintenance-intensive for that application, so USAID approved re-purposing it as an on-campus educational tool. I didn't get to see it fully up and running, but Ing. Valdizon and I had a great time checking out all the components.
(left) Sunlight focused on the solar boiler
After lunch I spent the afternoon touring all the different engineering labs with faculty member Nelson Quintanilla. Lots to see, much of it quite impressive. We spent most of our time in the electrical lab where they have a small collection of PV equipment (module, inverter, charge controller, batteries) and the metrology lab, which plays an important role as a center for calibrating instruments and quality checking products for Salvadoran industry. Nelson has some ideas about possible on-campus energy projects, including a pumped storage hydro demonstration project that would make use of an existing underground reservoir that stores rainwater for dry season irrigation of the campus landscape. This may not be feasible for a number of reasons, but performing the site survey, design and econ analysis would be a great way to learn about micro hydro and power markets.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
A Trip to Berlin
Today Basilia and I went to Berlin. Interestingly, everyone there speaks Spanish. Oh, that's because it's Berlin, Usulután, here in El Salvador. It's home to one of El Salvador's two large geothermal power plants, which together generate about 25% of El Salvador's electricity. We donned hard hats and got a great personal tour of almost two hours' duration from Guido Molina, one of the facility's chief engineers. He's been working at geothermal plants since 1992 and was a real wealth of knowledge on a renewable energy technology I'm just starting to learn about. We had a good look inside the building that houses the two largest turbine/generators and made an excursion out to see some production and re-injection wells. The whole plant looks very well maintained and includes all the safety equipment you would expect/hope to see in such a facility anywhere. A fascinating visit -- I´m hopeful we can make this a field trip destination for the class.
(left) Guido Molina and a spare turbine rotor
After the plant tour, Basilia and I headed on into the town of Berlin and from there caught a bus up to Alegría, said to be the highest elevation town in El Salvador (about 1600 m). We had lunch at Cartagena Restaurant, which has outdoor tables on a deck with stunning views of the Lempa River valley and surrounding mountains. We had to leave to catch a pickup truck ride down the mountain in time for the last bus back to San Salvador, so seeing the sulfur lake in the volcano crater will have to wait for next time.
On the way home, the long distance inter-city bus that picked us up had to come to a screeching halt along the Pan-American Highway because a herd of cattle was galumphing leisurely across the pavement. You gotta love the random meetings of the ancient and modern that are everywhere in Central America.
Speaking of volcanoes, I chose the name for this blog because in El Salvador it really does seem like you have a volcano looming over you just about everywhere you go. This is especially striking to me because I have spent lots of time in neighboring Honduras over the past 15 years, and that country, despite many geographic and cultural similarities with El Salvador, is almost devoid of volcanoes (islands in the Gulf of Fonseca being the only exceptions).
(left) View of the Lempa River valley from Alegría
(left) Guido Molina and a spare turbine rotor
After the plant tour, Basilia and I headed on into the town of Berlin and from there caught a bus up to Alegría, said to be the highest elevation town in El Salvador (about 1600 m). We had lunch at Cartagena Restaurant, which has outdoor tables on a deck with stunning views of the Lempa River valley and surrounding mountains. We had to leave to catch a pickup truck ride down the mountain in time for the last bus back to San Salvador, so seeing the sulfur lake in the volcano crater will have to wait for next time.
On the way home, the long distance inter-city bus that picked us up had to come to a screeching halt along the Pan-American Highway because a herd of cattle was galumphing leisurely across the pavement. You gotta love the random meetings of the ancient and modern that are everywhere in Central America.
Speaking of volcanoes, I chose the name for this blog because in El Salvador it really does seem like you have a volcano looming over you just about everywhere you go. This is especially striking to me because I have spent lots of time in neighboring Honduras over the past 15 years, and that country, despite many geographic and cultural similarities with El Salvador, is almost devoid of volcanoes (islands in the Gulf of Fonseca being the only exceptions).
(left) View of the Lempa River valley from Alegría
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Day Zero
Today is officially the first day of my project with Universidad Don Bosco. I'm working at home most of the day, making revisions to my draft course outline based on feedback I got from my UDB counterparts when we met just before Christmas. At 3pm I'm going to the Antiguo Cuscatlán campus to meet with a couple of my collaborators.
So what is my project? Well, it's been kind of a moving target all along, ever since I first communicated with UDB people while writing my grant proposal. What we've arrived at is a three-part project:
Universidad Don Bosco is a private Catholic university of the Salesian order. Their main campus is way over in the east end of the capital in the community of Soyapango. They have somewhere around 5,000 enrolled students. The much smaller grad campus is here in Antiguo Cuscatlán, in the southwest corner of the San Salvador metro area. Our apartment is just a five minute walk from the grad campus, which is where I expect to work most of the time.
So what is my project? Well, it's been kind of a moving target all along, ever since I first communicated with UDB people while writing my grant proposal. What we've arrived at is a three-part project:
- I'm going to teach a class that will meet for three hours at a time on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for seven weeks starting in mid-February. The course will be an overview of renewable energy and energy efficiency. UDB is launching a new master's program in renewable energy, and the intent is to aim this course at people newly enrolled in that program, as well as interested faculty (some of whom will be teaching courses in this program in the long term) and any interested people who work in the energy industry.
- UDB is interested in creating a campus-based clean energy lab or institute, perhaps something like the Schatz Energy Research Center where I work back home. I will work with them on developing this concept, figuring out how to fund and staff it, etc.
- The university also wants to create a working renewable energy installation of some kind. No one is sure yet what that will consist of; one idea they brought up in our last meeting was a cogen system. I'm also going to work with them on developing this concept and hopefully taking it into the design and financing stages.
Universidad Don Bosco is a private Catholic university of the Salesian order. Their main campus is way over in the east end of the capital in the community of Soyapango. They have somewhere around 5,000 enrolled students. The much smaller grad campus is here in Antiguo Cuscatlán, in the southwest corner of the San Salvador metro area. Our apartment is just a five minute walk from the grad campus, which is where I expect to work most of the time.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Antiguo Cuscatlán
Antiguo Cuscatlán: our new home town, really a suburb of San Salvador.
Most interesting sociogeographic feature: Just a few blocks up the hill from us in this residential area is the rim of a volcanic crater. The inner slope of the crater is covered in lush tropical vegetation, while the flat bottom of the crater is...an industrial park! Yes, several square blocks of warehouses, manufacturing plants, pharmaceutical labs, and a Bimbo bakery. Oh, and there's also a nice botanical garden/commercial nursery. Quite an interesting area to stroll through. See it yourself on Google Earth at 13 deg 40 min 20 sec N, 89 deg 14 min 51 sec W.
Most interesting ecological feature: Every evening at twilight, hundreds or perhaps thousands of green parrots come swooping in from who knows where to roost for the night in eucalyptus trees near our apartment. They make a huge racket for an hour or so, then settle down for the night. Around 5 am they make another big squawk before heading off for the day's work. We're already used to it and enjoy their company. Sadly, the story is that the birds were dislocated by the destruction of a nearby forested area and apparently found this pretty lushly vegetated older residential area to be a suitable refuge.
Most interesting sociogeographic feature: Just a few blocks up the hill from us in this residential area is the rim of a volcanic crater. The inner slope of the crater is covered in lush tropical vegetation, while the flat bottom of the crater is...an industrial park! Yes, several square blocks of warehouses, manufacturing plants, pharmaceutical labs, and a Bimbo bakery. Oh, and there's also a nice botanical garden/commercial nursery. Quite an interesting area to stroll through. See it yourself on Google Earth at 13 deg 40 min 20 sec N, 89 deg 14 min 51 sec W.
Most interesting ecological feature: Every evening at twilight, hundreds or perhaps thousands of green parrots come swooping in from who knows where to roost for the night in eucalyptus trees near our apartment. They make a huge racket for an hour or so, then settle down for the night. Around 5 am they make another big squawk before heading off for the day's work. We're already used to it and enjoy their company. Sadly, the story is that the birds were dislocated by the destruction of a nearby forested area and apparently found this pretty lushly vegetated older residential area to be a suitable refuge.
Happy new year
The trip so far: Basilia and I left Arcata on December 13, spent a couple days visiting with my family in the East Bay, then flew to El Salvador on Dec. 16. Our friends Mirna and Mercy, two sisters from the Burgos family who once lived in Guajiquiro (Basilia's home town in Honduras), came to pick us up at the airport. We spent a couple days getting settled in with help from the Burgos family and our friend Beatriz (a Fulbright scholar at Humboldt State last year), and I met a couple of times with my counterparts from the Universidad Don Bosco, then we headed for Honduras by bus to spend Christmas and New Year with Basilia's family. We had a great time, eating, hiking, dancing, seeing old friends. Probably the last really cool weather we'll feel for awhile. Yesterday we got back to our apartment in Antiguo Cuscatlán. Tomorrow is officially the first day of my grant work period.
Guajiquiro cloud forest
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