El Salvador, Honduras, El Salvador...home?

Thursday morning I took a bus to San Miguel and from there caught the international bus to Marcala, Honduras. Basilia and her sister Georgina and Georgina's husband Braulio were waiting for me there and took me up to Guajiquiro. Basilia had fixed up a cozy room for the two of us in her parents' house.

I spent a mostly pretty lazy three days with Basilia's family in Guajiquiro. The first day the main event was me taking five of our nieces and nephews, ages 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9, on a three-hour hike to a place called Tres Piedras. The destination was Basilia's idea. I was a little daunted at the thought of being the only adult overseeing all these little kids on a fairly long walk in the mountains. But in typical don't-worry Guajiquiro fashion, Basilia said go for it, you'll all be fine. And we were. Honduran rural kids are amazing in their casual bravado. I think all kids are naturally this way, but in our culture we surround kids with a bubble of protection that purportedly keeps all sorts of dangers at bay. In the process, I think we kill something vital in our children. It was so refreshing to just wander the countryside with this gang of little kids and watch them push themselves to their own limits. Nothing bad happened, and no one even cried. Tres Piedras is a fantastic set of rock formations that would easily earn state or national park status in the States. So cool that it's just a day hike from Basilia's parents' front door.

Saturday was my birthday, and the family threw me a big party. There was a piñata made by our nieces Lourdes and Edy, lots of good food, a live acoustic band and DJ music for dancing courtesy of our brother-in-law Melvin. Many people I've known since my Peace Corps days in the 1990s showed up to dance and wish me well. As usual at Guajiquiro parties a few young men got obnoxiously drunk, but unlike at many other parties I've attended, there were no fights this time. We had a terrific time dancing and people-watching.

Basilia dancing with her father at my birthday party

Sunday was taking care of business day. Basi and I met with the family of one of our nephews whom we've offered to help financially to go to medical school, I worked with a friend of ours to draw up a contract for a piece of land she's selling us just outside town, and we even provided some impromptu relationship counseling for a couple we're hoping to see stick together as they go through some difficult times. Even though I didn't go more than a few blocks from the house all day, I felt exhausted by nightfall.

Yesterday was a classic test of our patience in traveling around Central America. We tried to travel back to Honduras using the same Marcala-San Miguel bus line I'd used a few days earlier, but after a couple hours in Marcala it became apparent the bus was not on its normal schedule. Probably a victim of the tropical storm that had been soaking both countries the last couple days. We eventually decided to go to plan B, which was catching a bus to Tegucigalpa and spending the night there, then taking the Tegucigalpa-San Salvador direct bus this morning. Our niece Celenia has accompanied us back to El Salvador to help us pack up for our return to California day after tomorrow.

It's been fun keeping this blog as an alternative to the hand-written diaries I used to keep when traveling. I don't have specific plans about whether to continue it once back in the U.S. -- I'll get back to you on that. It may depend on how actively my working relationship with people at Universidad Don Bosco continues once I get home.

Bye Bye Bosco

Yesterday I went to a send-off at the U.S. embassy for Salvadoran researchers and master's candidates who have been awarded Fulbright scholarships to go study or perform research in the U.S. The event was a chance to say goodbye to Carolyn and other members of the embassy staff, and my fellow U.S. Fulbrighters Anne and Rich. Afterward Rich and I went to a cafe near the embassy to talk over our experiences and Rich's idea about us collaborating on a paper that might compare/contrast/synthesize our experiences teaching about and studying renewable energy in El Salvador.

Today was my last day at Universidad Don Bosco. I spent the morning cleaning up and organizing my bookshelf, desk, and computer. Just before noon the grad campus staff threw me a farewell party with a cake from my favorite bakery, Jardin del Pan. Nice job! It was pretty sad saying goodbye to all these folks who have been so nice to me all along, some of whom I now know as good friends.

In the afternoon I went to Universidad de El Salvador for my third and final guest lecture there. This was part of a two-day forum on renewable energy organized by the student chapter of IEEE (an international electrical engineers' professional society). They gave me a three-hour slot to talk about renewable energy. I pasted together a bunch of material from my seven-week course I'd taught at Don Bosco, trying to winnow it down into a concise overview. I didn't have enough time to do a really proper job of this, and I ended up with way more material than I could fit into three hours. But it was OK; I had an enthusiastic audience of about 15 engineering students (sadly, only one woman in the group) who paid close attention and had lots of intelligent questions. I was less organized than I like to be, but I got the feeling the students came away satisfied. I had fun anyway.

This evening Kyle and Francisco took me out to dinner. We went to Yemaya, which was nice since they'd had to miss out on going there Friday when Kyle got sick. The food was good as always, especially when accompanied by some Garífuna guífiti (still haven't finished the damn bottle!). The owners of Yemaya, Kristina and Fernando, are such fine people. I learned tonight that Kristina lived in San Francisco, Oakland, and Guerneville (the tiny Sonoma County town where my sister Genny lived for many years!) during four years that she lived in California not long ago. I feel so at home in their restaurant -- my family and friends from back home would all love this place. It's Central American to be sure, but has so many touches that feel like my native turf -- the lo-fi artwork, the mostly vegetarian menu, and the stereo playing Billy Bragg, the Pogues, Madness, and jazz from the likes of Coltrane and Miles Davis. ¡Viva Yemaya!

Micro Buses from Hell

I've had a love-hate relationship with San Salvador's urban micro-buses ever since arriving here. These feelings echo my feelings about the city as a whole. On the one hand, the cheapskate in me loves a system that lets you cross the whole city for 25 cents. And of course those low fares are essential to the workers of the city, many of whom have to take two or more buses (no transfers offered on this system) to get to work and only earn $300 or less a month. Also, the drivers and their privately operated buses have a certain bad-boy coolness about them that you'll never see in a municipally operated transit agency in the U.S. Many of the buses have names painted across the windshield -- in most cases the name of a loved one or family member (see Emmy below), but some of the tough-guy names you gotta love: "Apocalipsis," "Taliban," and Basilia's and my favorite, "Corrupción Total."

On the other hand, these buses are among the worst polluters in the city, their drivers are frighteningly reckless, and they have a reputation for being crime magnets. The crime of course includes pickpocketing and holdups of passengers, but also gangs demand regular "protection" payments from the drivers. The horrific massacre and burning of 14 passengers on board one of these buses in the Mejicanos district of the capital the night before last may have been a gang's revenge against a driver who refused to pay up...though I hear other explanations floating around.

Yesterday morning other UDB staff and I got to meet with staff from FOMILENIO and the country director of Millennium Challenge Corporation. I had asked for this meeting in order to explore possibilities for UDB to get involved in a research role in FOMILENIO's program in which they are in the process of installing nearly 2,000 off-grid solar electric systems in rural households. There seems to be genuine interest in working together on both sides, so hopefully this could turn into one of the first major projects for UDB's new energy institute. Reina from UDB says she will work on a formal proposal to do this. I'm glad to see other UDB people picking up the energy institute ball and running with it as I leave the playing field (for now).

Father's Day

Today could have been a really melancholy day, considering it's my first Father's Day since my father died. But I got to have a great day, thanks to my friend Victor Paula, who happens to be a great dad himself. Victor was one of the students in the renewable energy class I taught. He's stayed in touch since the class ended, and we'd been talking about going out to do something together.

Today we made good on it, and he brought his family along, his wife Telma and their two little boys Victor Alejandro (three and a half) and Ernesto (six months). You can tell by how cheerful and trusting the two boys are that these must be great parents. I spent much of the day carrying Ernesto around and playing with Victor Alejandro, and they both acted very comfortable with me from first sight. This made me feel like a little bit of a dad myself (with no diaper changing required!).

Happy Father's Day Victor, Victor Alejandro, Ernesto and Telma!

The family picked me up at 10:00 am in their car, and we headed out to the coast. We took the coast road west from La Libertad, which I had not traveled before further than El Tunco beach. It's a winding road with many ocean overlooks, somewhat like Highway 1 on the Mendocino and Sonoma County coasts, but with lusher vegetation. There are five tunnels along the way, one a half kilometer long, which was exciting for Victor Alejandro.

We had lunch at a restaurant in Acajutla with an ocean view, followed by a quick car tour of the industrial facilities at the port. Victor used to work at the oil refinery, so he knows this area well. Then we headed inland to the Ruta de las Flores, a mountain road Basilia and I had previously explored by bus. Of course in the car we had the luxury of stopping where we liked to see the views. We made stops in Nahuizalco, Salcoatitán (where we went to the Pan Nuestro bakery where the owner's husband has a beautiful bonsai garden out back), Apaneca, and Ataco, plus a few fancy/rustic restaurant-lodges along the road that Victor and Telma were familiar with -- all very cute with relaxing atmospheres and beautiful landscaping.

Victor and I had a great time talking along the way about life in his country and mine. He was an exchange student in Kansas on the same CASS program in 1991-93 that allowed Basilia to go to the U.S. for the first time a few years later, so we had a lot of notes to compare. Telma was pretty quiet, but I did get her to tell me that she also has an engineering degree, and she's from Izalco, a town that Basi and I enjoyed visiting a few weeks ago. We saw a good chunk of western El Salvador today and didn't get back to San Salvador until 8:00 pm.

Thanks Victor and family for making this a happy father's day!

Indigo

This morning Nelson and Norma came to pick me up for one last weekend outing. We headed west in their car to Chalchuapa, a town in the department of Santa Ana that is surrounded by Pre-Columbian ruins, mostly unexcavated. There are two developed sites right in the vicinity of the town, Casa Blanca and Tazumal. We went first to Casa Blanca. The ruins consist of several small to medium sized pyramids, some of which have been partially restored. More interesting was the museum, where a very well-informed guide showed us around, explaining nearly every piece in the collection.

He also showed us an indigo workshop in a space adjoining the museum. Indigo is an intense blue dye derived from several related plants native to El Salvador. Indigo dye production for export to Europe became a mainstay of the Central American economy during the colonial period, but the development of cheaper artificial dyes in the 1860s wiped the industry out almost overnight. Only recently is natural indigo being revived as a cottage industry, and the workshop at Casa Blanca has a beautiful display of natural fabrics dyed using indigo and tie-dye, batik, and other techniques.

Indigo-dyed fabrics

The grounds of Casa Blanca were also beautiful, including a botanical garden with some large and interesting specimens of matapalo, or strangler fig, a parasitic vining plant that grows up the trunks of large trees and eventually kills the host, becoming free-standing in the process. The strangler fig's growth habit results in a bizarre, twisted and braided trunk.

Next we got some lunch in town: mashed yuca (cassava or manioc), a local specialty. From there we went to see Tazumal. Here the pyramids are larger and more fully restored. You're even allowed to climb up on one of them. Our guide was an small, wiry older guy with a ponytail who I initially mistook for a fellow gringo sightseer. He was very animated, a classic civil war-era radical who lost no opportunity to denounce yankee imperialism (in a friendly way that made me feel like a comrade, not the enemy!) and to declare his enthusiasm for "his" president. On this latter point I got the same feeling from him that I got from many people, particularly African-Americans, about President Obama, at least when he first took office. Keep that feeling alive, Barack! It must be hard to fight the power and be the power all at the same time.

Norma and Nelson at the Tazumal pyramids

On the way back to San Salvador we made a short detour to see downtown Santa Ana, which I had not yet visited. Santa Ana in the west and San Miguel in the east are the other two large cities in the country besides  San Salvador, though neither of them comes close to the size or intensity of the capital. The main square in Santa Ana is surrounded by a large gothic cathedral (looking more northern European than the usual Spanish look of Central American churches), a beautifully restored theater, a grand municipal palace, and a cultural center that was bustling on this Saturday afternoon with an art exhibition, ballet class, and several classrooms with music lessons in piano, violin, and guitar all going on at once. In the hour or so we spent exploring these buildings and the park, I got a much nicer first impression of Santa Ana than I got seeing San Salvador and San Miguel for the first time.

Funny, Nelson and I were just talking this morning about wind energy in El Salvador, and I noted that aside from the day when tropical storm Agatha hit San Salvador, I've hardly experienced any wind in six months in the country, reinforcing my impression that wind technology has little to offer this country. So right now it's ripping down rain outside, and there's actually quite a bit of wind blowing. Based on the rains we've had the last couple weeks, this will probably only last a couple hours.

Yesterday was the official end of my six-week Fulbright extension, so I guess I'm now a Fulbright alum. I still have a few days of work to finish up. Monday I and a couple other UDB people are meeting with staff of FOMILENIO, an organization supported by the U.S. government-run Millennium Challenge Corporation. Among other projects, FOMILENIO is installing small off-grid solar electric systems in rural homes in the impoverished northern part of the country. We want to talk with them about possibilities for FOMILENIO and UDB to collaborate. Then on Tuesday there's a send-off event for Salvadoran students with Fulbright awards headed off to study in the U.S. And on Wednesday I'm teaching a three-hour overview workshop on renewable energy for IEEE. So it ain't over yet. Thursday I head for Honduras to spend my birthday with Basilia and her family. Basi, I miss you!

Guífiti Time

The signing ceremony went fine this morning. Tim DeVoogd from the State Department showed up as planned, and Reina and I got to have a short but fruitful talk with him about opportunities to fund the exchange between UDB and HSU.

In the evening I went out with René, Kiriam, Eduardo, and Claudia. Francisco and Kyle were going to join us as well, but Kyle got sick. We went to Yemaya, the restaurant that used to be in our neighborhood. They had to move because the security gates that went up on their street made it impossible to do business. The move to Santa Tecla seems to have played out really well -- the new location is much bigger but was packed with people, mostly a hip young crowd. Kristina the owner seems very happy with the outcome. René says this neighborhood is getting really trendy lately.

A shame Francisco didn't make it, because the origin of this outing was a conversation we had about guífiti, the Garífuna liquor/medicine. I told him about this and promised to bring back a bottle from Triunfo de la Cruz. So this was meant to be our night to party it. It wasn't a total loss -- we enjoyed sharing it at our table, and Fulbrighters Chris, Anne and Beth were at a nearby table along with Teresa and Lorenzo, a pair of visiting medical researchers from Marquette University and Beth's novio Jonathan. So the guífiti found many willing tasters.

There was a jazz fusion group called Brujo that rocked the house starting around eight. It wasn't til I'd been watching them play for a few minutes that I realized I know the guitarist -- José Luis Flores from Unidad Nacional Ecológica Salvadoreña. He´s quite a good guitarist. The bassist also really impressed me. The hip atmosphere of the restaurant and the music made me feel far away from the San Salvador I know. I'm sure this sort of thing is happening every night somewhere in this big city; I just haven't been getting out enough to find it.

Brujo at Yemaya, with Eduardo and Claudia at far left

Back in the news

More press today. Coincides with the signing of the agreement between UDB and the embassy.

Home Stretch at the University

Back in February and March when I was teaching my renewable energy course, I was working 55 or 60 hours a week to keep up with lecture prep, field trip logistics, grading and so on. When the class ended I managed to get down to working about 40 hours a week, having time to make weekend trips with Basilia, watch movies in the evening, and get decent exercise and sleep.

Now as I'm in my final days at Universidad Don Bosco, I've found myself ramping up the hours again to tie up loose ends on all these different projects. Basilia is visiting her family in Honduras, so I don't have much else to do but work anyway. As has been the case all along, every week at UDB brings surprises. This week it's a construction project. A couple months ago the head of the university, Federico Huguet, asked me if I could provide some input on energy-related design issues for a new four-story building planned for the graduate campus. I attended a couple meetings, talked with the architects and directed them to some reading material and thought that was the end of it.

This week the rector pulled me back into the project. I had another meeting with the architects today, just me and this brother-sister team. It's fun working with them because they know very little about energy but are sincerely interested in learning and like to get into the details about materials and performance. I put together a four-page document with recommendations for siting and orientation, building envelope, daylighting, building envelope, and renewable energy. We talked about light shelves and similar devices for controlling entry of light and heat from the sun. This led to me nerding out for a couple hours with Google SketchUp drawing software, exploring how you can use it to visualize sun and shadow effects in buildings with windows and skylights. See the Build It Solar website for some short and simple instructions on how to do this with SketchUp models.

Tomorrow is a big day -- the U.S. embassy and UDB will sign a memorandum of understanding that sets the terms for the Science Corner grant that UDB is being awarded. Dr. Tim DeVoogd, who came to UDB a couple months ago to assess the university's capacity to manage the Science Corner, is coming back down from Washington for the ceremony. We also invited lots of people who work in the energy sector in El Salvador. There's been a lot of scrambling around as people's availability changes. At one point the vice minister of education was going to sign the MOU as a witness of honor alongside Dr. DeVoogd. I was scheduled to give a brief talk about the Science Corner project. But a couple days ago we were informed that the vice minister will not be available. So now Reina Durán de Alvarado, UDB's vice rector of science and technology, is going to give the talk instead, and I'm now a witness of honor. Rule one in Central America: be flexible and roll with the changes. In any case, I'm very honored!

Triunfo de la Cruz

This last weekend Basilia and I finally did something we'd talked about for years and organized over the last couple months. We took Basilia's whole family on an excursion. 37 of us went, with our nephew Joel driving everyone in his father Braulio's bus. We had reserved a bunch of rooms at a beachfront hotel in Triunfo de la Cruz, a village on Honduras's Caribbean coast.

But first Basilia, Celenia and I had to get to the meeting point in La Paz. From our house in San Salvador, that took a cab, five buses and a jitney. Once we were all in one place, we fired up the bus and headed for the coast. We had along Basi's mom and dad, five of her six siblings (one had to work), and many nieces, nephews, and even a couple grand-nieces. The drive went fine, though at one point we had to inch across a provisional bridge next to a bridge that was destroyed by an earthquake last year.

Triunfo is one of many Garífuna villages on the coast. The Garífuna are people of mainly African origin (with some degree of intermarriage with coastal indigenous people) who are the descendants of people who survived shipwrecks of incoming slave ships in the Caribbean. So technically they were never slaves, at least not in the New World. They maintain many traditions, having their own language they speak daily, though they all seem to know Spanish and in many cases English as well.

The place we stayed is called Panchi's, named after the owner, a kind woman who made us great meals and treated us very well. Basilia has an old classmate who is from Triunfo, and we hired her father Dionisio to take me and Basi and all the kids (11 of them) on a trip in his outboard launch across Tela Bay to Punta Sal. I´d been there years before as a Peace Corps volunteer, and it's still a wild, pristine place with monkeys in the trees and beautiful turquoise water lapping white sand beaches. Of course we all loved it. The funniest moment of the weekend was when we came ashore and the park ranger assumed Basilia and I ran an orphanage!

Part of our boatload of orphans

Saturday night Basi and I and a few members of the family, mostly twenty-something nieces and nephews, walked a few blocks from the hotel to a community center where there was a dance. It was fascinating to all of us, since virtually all the 80 or 100 people there besides us were Garífiunas. We had a great time dancing. The Garífunas are friendly enough but seem overall pretty indifferent to outsiders, whether gringos or Hondurans. This is probably a good thing for the survival of their culture.

Yesterday we headed back toward Guajiquiro, making a detour to visit Pulhapanzak, Honduras's iconic waterfall. Our last hurrah with the group was stopping for lunch at Granja d'Elia in Siguatepeque. This has long been a favorite restaurant for Basilia and me, but it was especially nice for our big group. The staff are so friendly, the buffet style food so good, and the prices affordable even when feeding so many. Awesome!

The family at Pulhapanzak

Basilia and I said our goodbyes to the family and hopped off the bus at a crossroads so we could head for Tegucigalpa on another bus. It had just gotten dark as we arrived in Tegus, and a blackout that turned out to affect much of Honduras and El Salvador had just hit. We had to find a hotel in the middle of the city in complete darkness. Always carry a flashlight in Central America! Power came back on within a couple hours. This morning another parting -- Basilia went back to Guajiquiro to spend some time there, while I caught a bus back to San Salvador for my last couple weeks of work.

This week at UDB culminates with a signing ceremony for the Science Corner grant on Friday. This grant will help the university to start equipping their renewable energy research center. I just learned today that I have ten minutes in the program to make remarks, so I need to get something together. Also, I need to prepare for a three-hour workshop I'm teaching for the local IEEE chapter a week from tomorrow. So I guess party time is over for awhile...fun while it lasted anyway!

Did we really fit all this into one weekend?

We still have several weeks remaining before we fly home to California, but it only hit us a couple of days ago that this would be Basilia's last weekend in El Salvador. On Thursday we're headed to Honduras to spend a long weekend on the Caribbean coast with my in-laws ("in-laws" is a funny-sounding term, but so is the Spanish equivalent -- "familia política"). I'll come back to San Salvador the following Monday to work a couple more weeks at UDB, but Basi is going to stay visiting with her parents until a couple days before we fly out of San Salvador.

So we decided to make the most of the weekend. Having Celenia visiting automatically livened things up. Yesterday we went to see the military history museum, which matter-of-factly and somewhat proudly recounts the more violent aspects of El Salvador's history. The one thing I really did like, though, was a huge outdoor 3D relief map of El Salvador.  The whole thing is about the size of a basketball court, with vertical scale exaggerated by a factor of five to make the topography really jump out at you. It's loaded with details, showing towns, roads, lakes, rivers, lava flows, etc. Cool! Every county and state in the U.S. should have something like this in a public space.

The 3-D map

Our friend Mirna came and met us as we were winding up our visit to the museum. She drove us out to the town of Olocuilta, reputedly the best place in El Salvador to eat pupusas. Then we went to the zoo, which has a nice animal collection and pretty grounds, but like most zoos I've seen in Latin America, does  a pretty atrocious job of caring for the animals and keeps them in too-small enclosures. The animals looked even more depressed and neurotic than they do in U.S. zoos. Still, the place obviously makes many people, especially children, very happy and may help raise consciousness about biodiversity.

In the evening Basilia, Celenia and I went to have dinner at Kyle and Francisco's. Eduardo and Claudia gave us a ride there, and Kirian and René were there too, as well as Francisco's brother Nelson (easily the most common name among men I've met in this country!) and his wife. We had a great time sitting around telling stories, mostly about travel and dealing with big corporations. Later we went dancing at Café Don Pedro in Santa Tecla with René and Kirian. They are such a fun couple. Finally our first night club experience in San Salvador. It was OK, kind of a seedy place with hookers and a couple of drunken fights, but it didn't seem too dangerous. We had fun.

Today Basi and Celenia and I took a bus downtown (now that we've broken the ice, we're suddenly going down there at the drop of a hat) from where we caught another bus out to Panchimalco. This is a quiet town with lots of indigenous people that's only 17 km from downtown San Salvador, but feels much farther away. We just wandered around, watched a wedding procession leave the church and meander through town. Our most interesting find was a cultural center that looks small and nondescript from outside, but turns out to have beautifully landscaped grounds wandering over a hillside with sculptures all over and quiet little nooks where local young folks were working on paintings and drawings. A gallery at the front of the building offered local works for sale, some of them quite nice.

When we got back to downtown San Salvador, we went to see Monseñor Romero's tomb beneath the metropolitan cathedral. The catacomb is a quiet, calm space just a few steps below the hustle of the city center. There were only a few people there. The tomb itself is a beautiful sculpture by an Italian artist. A good place for Salvadorans (and foreigners) to contemplate what this country has endured and gather strength to make a better future.

We're pooped but happy after an active weekend.

Playing Hooky

On Thursday my co-worker Nelson, who aside from being an endless fount of jokes is also an endless fount of information about cultural events, told me there would be a free performance of the Salvadoran national symphony orchestra that night, as well as a performance by the national folk ballet on Friday morning. Basilia felt like staying home Thursday night, but I joined Nelson and his wife Norma for the symphony. Among other pieces, they performed Mussorkgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which I remembered performing (albeit in an abridged form) in my high school orchestra, so it was nostalgic to hear it again. The last movement, "The Great Gate of Kiev," is so dramatic!

Nelson encouraged me to skip work for the folk ballet Friday, which was a good call. (I taught him the English expression "playing hooky.") Basilia and I took the bus to downtown. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that this was my FIRST time walking around in the city center after almost six months in the country. It's chaotic and considered dangerous by nearly every Salvadoran I've talked to and by the Lonely Planet guidebook, but I had to do this at least once. We went early so we'd have time to look at the artisan crafts for sale at the Mercado del Ex-Cuartel. Walking from the market to the Teatro Nacional, we came across a big parade on the theme of the environment, reminding us that this was World Environment Day. For some reason this seems to be ignored in the U.S., but evidently the Salvadorans take it seriously.

The Teatro Nacional is incredible, a beautiful old theater that has been taken care of, quite a contrast with the decaying downtown buildings that surround it. The ballet performance was excellent, with live musical accompaniment. The first part told the history of El Salvador from precolumbian times through dance. After an intermission they performed a variety of folk dances specific to different towns and regions of the country. Every Salvadoran event features something that would just be inconceivable in the U.S. -- in this case it was a dancer prancing around for the finale with an effigy of a bull on his back, loaded with fireworks! As they burst and filled the theater with smoke, I kept looking at the stage curtains nervously and planning our escape route, but happily the curtains didn't ignite.

After the ballet, Basilia and I went to the Tica Bus station and met Celenia, who came from Honduras and will spend a week here with us. It's great to have her here, feels more like a complete family.

I did actually go to work for a couple hours in the afternoon, where I received by email scanned copies in English and Spanish of the collaborative agreement between Humboldt State and Don Bosco with HSU President Rollin Richmond's signature. I passed the docs on to UDB Rector Huguet for him to sign. Another step forward!

Celenia and Basilia dancing to Sierra Madre

Last night Basilia, Celenia and I went to Rich Cairncross's house for dinner. The place where he lives is a center for volunteers who come from the U.S. to work with the Catholic church (a progressive branch of the church that follows the teachings of Monseñor Romero). The house was filled with seven (!) members of Rich's family who were finishing a week's visit, and a group of volunteers who were also finishing their short stay in El Salvador. They served pupusas for dinner, and afterward there was a performance by Sierra Madre, a lively folk group who are Romeristas (followers of Romero). We had fun dancing to their music. We left to go look for a taxi home just at the moment that the band were leaving in their mini-van, so they gave us a lift to a busy intersection where we quickly found a cab. Very kind, guys!

As we were leaving Rich's place, he mentioned that he'd like to talk with me about collaborating on a paper about our experiences here in El Salvador. An interesting idea...we'll get together again soon to talk this over.

El Salvador's Hydrogen Technology

Last night Roberto Saravia, one of the students from my renewable energy course, took me to visit a friend of his who is a hydrogen enthusiast. We drove through San Salvador rush hour traffic to Ayutuxtepeque, a neighborhood near the Universidad de El Salvador, where Plácido Lemus has a garage workshop cluttered with tools and half-assembled projects. Another friend of Roberto's who collaborates with Plácido, Manuel Molina, was also on hand.

Plácido operates a small business making and selling drinking water filtration systems that use activated charcoal and colloidal silver. He was experimenting on the side with developing an inexpenisve electrolytic device that could be used to generate chlorine from table salt on-site as an alternative water purification technology. He realized that hydrogen gas was a by-product of this electrolysis and started thinking about what he could do with that. He read about the devices that are sold online that supposedly enrich gasoline in vehicles by injecting hydrogen via an onboard electrolyzer and decided to build his own. He got it to work but has had trouble controlling the combustion, which tends to wander back upstream in the fuel flowpath.

Plácido is obviously brilliant and a very nice guy. He does not have a college education but appears to be pretty familiar with fluid dynamics and combustion engineering. He does unfortunately seem to have the attitude of many self-taught tinkerers, that the first and second laws of thermodynamics are just broad guidelines and don't necessarily apply to their work. This mindset tends to blind otherwise creative people to thinking clearly and critically about the all-important efficiency of their devices. In any case, I admire his accomplishments, especially given the difficulties of doing this work in El Salvador. I offered some ideas about measuring the efficiency of his electrolyzers and shared some thoughts about safety -- I'd hate to see him blow himself and his lab up.

Manuel Molina and Plácido Lemus in their workshop (the devices in the large white enclosures are DC power supplies for their electrolyzers)