September in a BLOG

After a September free of blog posts, it should come as no surprise that it was a busy month out here in the subtropics. I spent the most part of the time in Intag, driving between our various project sites and making good progress working with the Inteñan Communites. I also found time to get some motorbiking in, struggle up a volcano of 4630m, advance with the Spanish subjunctive tense, and get invited to various parties with the locals.

Let me try and fill in the blanks and share what is going on in a few of our projects.

Water Studies, Selva Alegre, Intag

Selva Alegre is one of the hotter and tropical parts of Intag whose mountains wear out the best hiking boots and quickly get the fitness levels up on a post weekend Monday morning. Typically we drive our 4x4 as close as we can to a community, and hike to their homes which can often take a few hours. Accompanied by the president of Selva Alegre, Don Vladimir, we speak to the families about where they currently get their water, the problems associated, and how contaminated water may be affecting the health of their children.

During the past weeks we undertook social studies of the water use and technical studies of the topography, then planned how nearby streams could provide a water capture point, discussed where the necessary sedimentation and treatment tanks could be sited, and then how a network can be distributed throughout the community.

We are now preparing a report to apply for funding from the local government, for the system to be constructed in due course. Next year´s EWB volunteers may well find themselves going over our tracks and realising our studies with the construction of these systems.

HidroIntag - HydroPower as an alternative to Mining

When I arrived here and PRODECI learned that I had studied plenty about Hydroelectic Power in my Master´s year at Glasgow, they were quick to introduce me to Denis Laporta, founder and coordinator of Hidrointag. At the moment, Ecuador´s energy demand is 2750MW, and due to its production shortfall, I am told that all of the energy in the North of Ecuador is imported from Colombia. Intag is an area ideally suited to hydroelectric development, with its sparse population, mountainous valleys, and plentiful rainfall.

This is a real opportunity for Ecuador to become fully energy independent with a clean alternative energy source. It is the intention of Hidrointag to develop 9 hydro systems varying in scale from 5MW to 60MW over the next ten years. Mariam and I are assisting Hidrointag with topographical and geological site studies of the CHALGUAYACO site, advising on the optimisation of the dam and ancillary works, and undertaking preliminary technical design, costing and drawings.

Advancing their technical design in my remaining months here will allow them to apply to the EU for funding, with the aim of construction starting in 2010. The communities of Intag are optimistic that Hidrointag´s projects will give them a real alternative to the exploitative mining industry as a road to their betterment. In the coming weeks we aim to get some technical designs down on paper and then we are due to present our ideas to El Ministerio de Obras Publicas (Ministry of Public Works).

Suspense in the Bridge Construction

Currently, the school children in Pamplona, Selva Alegre, cross the Río Pamplona (River Pamplona) by a makeshift bridge structure (felled tree logs with timber boards for a deck) or those too scared, wade through the river. November to April in Ecuador sees an entire change in the climate with heavy rains akin to those in my native land of Scotland. The river becomes impassable by foot, communities are cut off and school attendance drops.

With a budget of $10,000 and some rough drawings from the local government, I visited the site, and set out to create an improved design, contract a reliable Maestro (Building Contractor), and oversee the construction. Two weeks later and with $3 of my budget spent on a copy of AutoCad 2010, I had designed, drawn and costed the bridge and was ready to get our workers onto site.

The bridge is currently in the process of being built, and progress is going well. Mariam and I have organised for a Minga (a collective community work, in exchange for a free lunch) to be undertaken next week to gather stones and for us to teach them how to construct Gabions to protect their bridge foundations. As it happens Rafael Correa´s government is also on a bit of a construction splurge and have snapped up all the gabion mesh in the country. We are really keen to finish the bridge before the big rains arrive, but it looks like this material shortage will give us a delay of at least a week.

Signing Off...

So in brief, work is going grand out here, and Intag is making the most of our skills for the projects they have prioritised. There are still challenges and frustrations, the main one being the complete lack of mobile phone coverage in the mountains here, which can result in a four hour drive to convey a message that in the UK would take four minutes. Working in a foreign language that I hardly spoke prior to arrival has not given me the problems I thought it might.

Most importantly I am learning about the social aspects of engineering. On a daily basis, I see the motivations of people to take responsibility for their own destiny, and to take their community development projects into their own hands. An example of this can be found in the lack of machinery for construction projects, which is unavailable both for reasons of cost and impractibility of transport. On the construction of the suspension bridge in Pamplona, I had programmed ten days for the foundation excavations. The community completed it in a day and a half, with the most advanced tool between them a mere shovel. Subsequently I was worried that struggling to find a scaffold platform would delay the construction of 4m tall concrete columns, and was frantically calling my contacts in the city to search for anyone willing to transport a platform to Intag. After visiting the site twice to apologise to the Maesto, he told me not to worry, and went ahead and built some platforms of his own, using local materials, and completed the concreting of the columns with the help of a chain of community members passing buckets between each other.

Hope everyone else is grand in their work, their life and their adventures. Photos to follow. Chat soon x

Progress by the Barrel Load..?

The economy of Ecuador is heavily reliant on petroleum, along with agriculture and tourism. The petroleum reserves are located in the vast Amazonian rainforest extents east of the central Sierra, known as the Orient. This is the region of the country where you will find sparsely populated indigenous groups, speaking traditional native languages, and living off the land as they have done for centuries.

These communities are having some real problems maintaining their livelihoods in the face of the bulldozers and oil drilling machines working their way through the rainforest. It is becoming clear that Ecuador is finding it difficult to strike a balance between accelerating its economic growth and maintaining progress in social and human development.

Physical Map of Ecuador. Three distinct regions run North to South: The Coast, The Sierra, The Amazon/Orient.

Spillages of crude oil are common in the Orient. In recent years there have been some twenty incidents each year, mostly attributed to technical faults and human negligence on the part of PetroEcuador. June this year saw one of the worst incidents of recent times where a leak of heavy metal liquid contaminated the underground aquifer. What was, until recently, a rich supply of geologically filtered water to the communities, could now require decades to return to a safe level of toxicity.

Newscutting from El Comercio, Quito and Ecuador national paper.

Rafael Correa , the first indigenous president of Ecuador, was recently voted in for a second four-year term. Despite the right wing propaganda in private mainstream media, he remains popular with both the city middle classes, and the remote poorer communities, who await his promises of social reforms.

It seems justified that his government is making the most of their natural resources in order to fuel economic development. This is essential to fulfill the social reforms that were promised. The problem as I see it, as is often the case in developing nations with natural resources, is the lack of supervision and control over the activities of self interested private firms such as PetroEcuador.

PetroEcuador Flag over La Mariscal, Quito

A large part of my work here involves the design and installation of small scale community water systems in Intag. Not only does potable water provision form a crucial part of the development of rural communities, it is also a basic human right, and a fundamental part of the UN Millennium Development Goals.

It is disappointing and frustrating that despite the work we are undertaking to further the quality of life of communities in Intag, in a neighbouring province just over 100 km away things are going in completely the other direction.

There seems little justification that this sustainable lifestyle, formed by the Amazonians over centuries, is the sacrifice that is being paid for the barrels of oil that may allow the government to fulfill its electoral promises.