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.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
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...
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