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.