Just your Average Day

I'm extremely tired and my stomach is not happy but I'm satisfied. I read somewhere a long time ago that there really isn't any other feeling than that of a hard days work and that it actually makes the body and mind feel happier. I believe it. I'm saying that I did hard labor all day, but I did get some stuff done. It's been crazy busy as of late.

I woke up to Salomon calling me asking when we were heading up the mountain to look at the where the water source was for the potential hydro-electric plant. I made a quick breakfast and hiked over to his house with a bottle of water, my camera that has gps and an altimeter, and my phone. All of which I would need for later. We hiked up the hill passing a bunch of guys hired by the electrical company to cut down trees that might threaten the large power lines, and after about 30 minutes hiking almost straight up Salomon realized that he forgot the gallon bucket we needed to check the water flow.

As it turns out his brother lives up that hill and we were able to get a gallon jug easily. After slashing through some jungle we came to the water source and we both quickly realized that the flow wasn't going to be enough. We checked the stream at two different points noting the gallon per minute calculations using the stopwatch function on my iphone and timing how long it took to fill the gallon jug. To do this we had to cut my water bottle and cake mud around it to get the entire flow to come through and out to the same place. I also noted the elevation and gps coordinates to see how much drop we were going to have to figure out the pressure we would have at the bottom to move the turbine. We ended up with a 3 gallon per minute number and about a 300ft drop which at this point means nothing to me.

Soon after coming down the hill to check the elevation at the bottom, take pictures of everything and sending it to the Engineers Without Borders contact I helped Solomon hook up our new USB internet stick at my house. We still don't have a working laptop and the one that we have needs to be plugged in at all times so he plugged it into my solar system. I was then off to Changuinola to get a lab test done to see why I'm having to run to the latrine all day, talk to a local business to find out why its been a month and we still don't have the chlorine tablets that we need to make our aqueduct water safe to drink, and drop off the iPhone donation that we got with the battery that I bought from some weird third party so the tech guy could put the new battery in. After getting all that done I rushed back to the community taking a bus and then walking from the road to get here just in time to give English classes for an hour and then talk on the phone with the head engineer for the Pacific side of the Panama Canal about my community and the possibility of working with them here. Then I sat down and started writing this post: I'm extremely tired....