April242010

MEETING WITH LAS DELICIAS LEADERSHIP, April 24, 2010
Attendance: Fredi (president), Dora Alicia (Treasurer), and several others stopped by briefly (Chilo, Morena, Rachel, and others)

I can't believe it has been over a month since I last visited Las Delicias - I need to make these visits more frequent. I set up a meeting (via talking first with Fredi and later with Dora Alicia) to meet with Morena and talk about mapping the houses who receive less water - but something got lost in the translation and confusion over scheduling (because I wanted to meet on Sunday but the Adesco arranged a bus to the beach for Sunday - and I'll be joining their trip - so we switched to Saturday) and it turned out that Morena was busy and only stopped by briefly for the meeting.

They started by showing me a summary of the finances from 2009 (see images below). They used these posters at the community meeting to be very open about the status of finances. There is a fair amount of variation in ingresos (revenues) due to difficulty that some homes have paying their bills (also in March 2010 the ingresos were much lower ~$1600 because the community was committing a lot of manual labor to road repair - I'm still not clear if the reductions were stipulated by the community or not).

In May 2009, the gastos (expenses) were significantly higher because the community (under the previous president) ran the pump 5 days a week that month in response to demands from the community. The current leadership is a little more strict.

Also they recently installed 120 m of new pipe connecting two formerly disconnected sections of the community (Tramo 11 and Tramo 9). Both of these pipe sections are 1" PVC and they made the bridge with 1" PVC (this new section crosses a 2" pipe along calle principal but does not connect). The idea was that Tramo 9 received better water flow from Tank 3 than Tramo 11 received from tank 2 - so by connecting them, Tramo 11 would have a better water supply. The details are still a little sketchy to me and i am upset I wasn't invited to view some of the work. According to them now the water supply is more regular with most houses receiving water every 5 to 6 days.

Another issue came up talking with Chilo is that there are some inconsitencies on the map have with the actual tubing diameters. We started marking some on the map, but I became a little suspicious of the quality of his memory and we decided to walk the community at another time and look in all the valve boxes to confirm pipe diameters. This might be a job for the assessment team.

I ran through the list of questions from EWB-MAP but did not get complete answers to any of them. On the next visit (likely saturday May 8), I will meet with the pump operator while they are running the pump and try to get key elevation points, pipe diameters and locations of transitions. I will also meet with Morena and Chilo to discuss which houses receive less water.