things are looking up

A quick quick word to you all saying that things are looking bright and wonderful...

Two days ago froy went with a few members of the water board to the president of the community´s house (an hour walk from main Santa Ana) to try to convince him that the community really needs to select and pay an operator, not have a rotational community system as he wants because based on our experience when only half of the beneficiarias come to the meetings, we don´t really think t´hey´ll walk 2 kilometers to go clean the captation in the river, etc... The president isn´t married, doesn´t have kids, and for that has his mind much more in the past than the future, and didn´t budge in his view. Then he said he didn´t have time to come the next day to the meeting of all beneficiaries...

So yesterday we had a wonderful meeting with the community. I didn´t actually attend much of the meeting because I was running around to people´s houses and up to a trail building project about a kilometer away trying to get the majority of beneficiaries to come to the meeting. I did : ) and they agreed to a salary of $60 a month for the operator and $20 a month for the treasurer (effectively almost tripling their tariff to about $5 a month per family (depending on use... $.63 per meter cubed) but assuring a successful system). Wahoo...

Other great news is that we have 4 new volunteers from spain (we had been told they were americas and were thrilled they are 4 college students from spain because they can SPEAK SPANISH, and they are here for 2 weeks working on sub projects of ours. I went with the secretary and president of the water board and one of these able, intelligent, hard working new volunteers Ana to the municipality where we cleared up our questions about the administrative end of things, so Ana and Ines are set to set up a simple system of accounting, book keeping, etc for the water board. The other two will be helping us continue our health and higiene habit campaign.

In other news... the other day the family hen was searching for a new place to lay some eggs and found ... our bed.... it was quite the funny incident, and later, a woman in the village said that it indicates that we´re going to have kids... hehe... we are ¨married¨here after all to avoid confusion or unwanted offers...

much love to all,
Kendra