School Is Cool! (& Construction Update)

School is cool because I get to go on field trips with my Dad.  I went with my Dad to Semesche. Semesche is a village where my Dad works on water.  They don’t have clean water. We hike up to the top of a hill to get to a spring .The spring is clean water they are trying  to get the water  in a pipe and take it to the spigots. They are pouring concrete in the water  tank  and I stood on it . It is fun to go with my Dad.   

School is also cool because I get to explore and find cool stuff.  One time I got to find a tarantula and write about it. Another time, we saw a poisonous caterpillar - It was cool. School is fun!    

This Tarantula was outside our house!

-Little Man

It has been really fun to take Little Man and Dancing Beauty with me while I have been observing our construction progress for the spring box and tank in Semesche.  It seems as though it is a great learning experience for both of them to see what their Dad does.  The following pictures show what we have accomplished so far with the spring box and tank in Semesche.  The tank is almost complete, but I do not have a picture since the form work on the walls was stripped.  I will update again with new photos once I have them.

      

The original Spring.

Katy, Little Man, Dancing Beauty and I got to visit on the 2nd day of construction where they excavated the spring. 

Here is the beginning of form work for the front wall of the spring box.

Here is the completed spring box.  The box is filled with clean stone to support the earth behind the front wall and has an access hatch on top so that the plumbing can be worked on as needed in the future.  The man in this picture is collecting water from the spring to make concrete for the tank.

Here the men are mixing concrete (by hand) and carrying it down to the tank (in 5-gallon buckets). 

Tank construction!

More Concrete & more pictures in another post.

In other exciting Ulpan news.  We took delivery of the pipe, fittings, glue, valves, spigots, etc. for the project last night.  Only in Guatemala does the delivery truck show up to a place with no electricity at 7:45 at night.  Several men in the village showed up to help us unload the truck and count everything by candle light and head lamps.  315 sticks of 2" pipe, 18 2" Ball Valves...  Late night, but lots of fun.  Across the language barrier it was evident that the men were excited about the project and it is really fun to recognize faces and hear my name from many of the men who have been most active in the construction of their new water system.

Next Friday (Dec. 7th) we host a team from Knox ProCorps to begin construction of approximately 2 km of pipe, fittings, valves, etc. & 8 access points for the people of Semesche.  We can't wait for the team to get here or to see water flowing from the choros (spigots).  Please pray for the team's travels and work.

-Mark                                

Twitter

If you are on Twitter...my name is mwmckinney.  Feel free to follow.

I post pictures of progress on our projects and the inevitable really cute picture of one of my children.  The ability to "Tweet" from the valley is one of the ironies of the modern information age.

If you don't know what Twitter is...you may disregard this blog entirely or sign up at www.twitter.com.  It is basically a very easy way to send text messages or photos to your followers (and a great way to follow people, companies or news that you are particularly interested in - Tweets from SpaceX and the Curiosity Rover are my favorites).

Mark

Dia de Gracias

If you had asked me a year ago where we would celebrate Thanksgiving in 2012, you would not have received this answer.  But our Dia de Gracias was indeed a day on which to be thankful and to celebrate the many ways we are blessed. 

To say we had a “cultural exchange” would be an understatement.  It was more like the actual first Thanksgiving than any other I have experienced, since, as I have been reading to the kids in school, the first Thanksgiving was comprised of very few Pilgrims and over ninety Native American Indians.  Our Thanksgiving was comprised of eight Americans (half of those my children) and 22 Guatemalans!!!  That’s right….we had quite a full house, but it was delightful.  Before lunch, we explained why we celebrate Thanksgiving and it was translated into three languages!  After lunch, we watched the movie “Tangled” in Spanish with English subtitles.

 

We decided, if we were going to share our feast, it only made sense to share it with our team…most of whom are Guatemalan.  So the preparations and plans began and we invited our team.  The fact that we had to celebrate on the weekend (due to the work schedule of most), we assumed that most would not be able to come since they do not stay here on the weekends.  We were wrong!!   Every person we invited came, brought their families, plus a few extras.   It was fabulous and certainly a day where we celebrated how thankful we are to be surrounded by wonderful “family”.  Also an example of the “loaves and fishes”---we prayed during all the cooking that we would have enough food for the masses…and we put left overs in the fridge, had it for dinner last night, and probably have enough for 2 more meals (feeding 10 people)!!!

So, you may be thinking, how on earth did you prepare a Thanksgiving dinner with no oven??  Well…. When it comes to cooking in the valley, creativitiy and flexibility are the name of the game.  DeeDee is fabulous at finding no-bake or stove-top recipes on the internet.  She found one for candied sweet potatoes and for a no-bake pecan pie.  The pecan pie didn’t work out because the grocery store was completely out of pecans and pie crust….enter flexibility—plan B:  Jello Oreo no bake dessert!  Not very “Thanksgiving-ish”, but fit the bill for something sweet.  The rest of our menu was creamed corn, green beans, stove-top stuffing (brought from the states by Papa back in October), and a big-ol Butterball turkey.  How on earth did we cook a turkey, you may say???  Ah, my friends, you have not met Kris and DeeDee (with help from the Colvett family last year J).   It is like they have accepted cooking in the valley as their new-found challenge in life.  The pinnacle being cooking the Thanksgiving  turkey. 

Last year, they dug a pit, built a fire, and buried the bird.  And it was the “best Thanksgiving turkey they had ever eaten”.  So this year, we planned to do the same thing.  Dug a pit, built a fire, and buried the rosemary-honey-butter-garlic covered bird wrapped in foil, banana leaves and chicken wire.  But as things go in life, nothing ever stays the same….so when we pulled the “wooster” as Shirley Temple called it, out of the pit, it was not done.  Not sure why--- colder this year, bigger bird, fire not hot enough???  So many factors.  With an hour and a half left until lunch, Nina, Kris & DeeDee swoop into action and created an oven on the griddle of the stove.  By the time everyone arrived, the bird was cooked and lunch was delicious.

Kris & DeeDee digging the pit

Dancing Beauty and Shirley Temple helping to get the fire started.

Fire going....now for the bird!

All wrapped up & ready to cook.

Hot and steamy...just out of the pit....

But not quite done....so the make-shift oven is created.

 

I have been learning much about thankfulness during my time here in the Ulpan Valley.  Here are some of the highlights of thankfulness for our family:

Katy:  I am thankful for a roof that keeps us dry, warm blankets to sleep under, plenty of food, money to buy propane and kerosene, friends to laugh and cry with, family that prays faithfully for us, the joy in the faces of my children.

Little Man:  I am thankful for family.

Dancing Beauty: A good nights sleep & everyone we live with.

Shirley Temple:  I am thankful for Little Monkey, Daddy, Mommy, Nina, Sarah Beth Lown, Kris & DeeDee and our clothes.

Little Monkey:  Food, milk, my family.

Mark:  I am thankful for sunshine.  It gives us power, it brings us happiness, it dries our clothes.  It makes me thankful when I walk out of our room in the morning and it’s sunny.

We are also profoundly thankful for each of you.  Your prayers and support are so very evident in our lives right now.  We are grateful for the finances you gave to send us here, for the emails of support, the comments on the blog, the phone calls, the care-packages sent with teams.  You all are amazing and we are so very thankful for you.   Here are a few more pictures from our day:

The whole crowd

Glenda, Rosa & I breaking beans in preparation

Silly kiddos

Little Monkey enjoyed her meal

Dancing Beauty with her new friend

Nina & DeeDee cooking

DeeDee & I stuffing our bird with butter, honey, garlic & rosemary.

Kipi Smartwools

Just too cute!

To avoid questions - that is a 1940's vintage kerosene heater in the background.   We had a beautiful sunny Sunday morning here - it was warm in the sun - but now the clouds have returned and it is cool again.  We are looking forward to going into Coban this week for food & to buy some kerosene for the heater.

-Mark

Work Update 2.2

Continuation of Part 2.1 - Semesche:

I wanted to give you a visual of the work here in the valley.  The picture below is a picture of a map that I found in the Puesto de Salud (Health Center) in Semesche.  It has lots of helpful information on it that we are using, but for a spacial reasoning geek (me), I like to know "actual" distances and how high things are.  So...

The next picture shows the same village in Google Earth with points that we have taken with the GPS.  In the top left you will see (SEM SPRING LARGE) a point that is the spring we will be using for this project.  Towards the right, you can see the access points that we will be providing, mostly at churches, for this phase of the project.  We use Google Earth a lot (mainly because it's free) to determine distances and plot rough profiles of the terrain.  We have found that its elevations are often off and not all that consistent, so we use the GPS (with an altimeter) to verify high and low points along the routes of our designs.  

The next step is to determine how large the lines need to be in the system to provide the water a village will use.  We have been consulting reference materials to determine average usage rates for families in rural communities.  We plug the pipes, tanks, and usage (flow rates) required into a model to verify that our design will work both now and if the community were to decide to expand their coverage to each house at some point in the future.  The picture below shows the modeling work I have been working on the past two days in Semesche to determine line sizes that will work if they decide to provide water to each home.  I am thankful for free water modeling software from EPA (your tax dollars at work).  I have traditionally used much more sophisticated programs in the consulting world, but this one is getting the job done.  From the modeling, we were able to determine that by increasing one section of pipe from 2" to 3" we could eliminate the need for an additional tank when expanding the system to 60 of the families to the northeast.  The cost to increase the line size now is one-fourth to a third the cost of having to build the tank. 

2.2 Sequixpur:

The second project I have been working on is to improve an existing water system in the village of Sequixpur (pictured below).  This system was built in the mid to late 1990's for several villages, including Semesche ironically, but because of poor maintenance or funds to fix breaks, the majority of the system stopped working shortly after it was built.  Sequixpur is the highest and closest village to the supply springs and has remained working because the main break that caused the failure is downstream from them.  Since the project was constructed the village has expanded but there has been no expansion of the system to serve these new homes.  We are planning to expand their system to serve those who have no water. The picture below shows Sequixpur in Google Earth.  The blue lines show the existing system and the red and purple lines show our planned expansion.  

I believe I mentioned this in an earlier post, but the significance of the Sequixpur system to the whole valley is that the springs that feed this system have more water than can ever be used by just Sequixpur.  The springs are of good quality and are very high - which allows us to push this water to several other villages that have no good water sources near their communities.  This thought is massive when compared to the scale of what we are doing in Semesche, but is the kind of infrastructure planning that has provided all of us in the states with reliable, clean drinking water every day. I will be spending a lot of time in Sequixpur between now and when we head home for Christmas, working out the details of this design.  We hope that a team from Knox ProCorps will be coming in February to construct this project.

In 2.3, maybe next week, I will try to describe the "BIG" vision of providing water to each home in the Ulpan Valley.  "Good water, for everyone, everday!"

Hasta Luego,

Mark

Identity

Where do I find my identity...my self-worth???  This is a question I have really had to wrestle with while we have been here.  Back in February, when Mark broached tge subject with me about moving here, he was quick to mention that we would have full-time help.  At the time, that sounded completely like a dream.  You tell a mother of four small children that she can have full-time help with laundry, cooking, meal planning, grocery shopping, etc....who wouldn't jump at that opportunity?  I'm sure my friends out there reading this with small children are currently rolling their eyes and wishing they could change places with me.

And please, hear me say this very loud and clear...WE LOVE NINA!!!   She has been so good to our family and she works so hard to make life work for us here.  My struggle and wrestling has had absolutely nothing to do with anything she has or has not done.   That's my big disclaimer.

No, my struggle has been within my own heart.  What makes me a good mother??  Is my identity and self-worth wrapped up in what I can DO for my family?  Is that what makes me a good mother?   Do my husband and children love me because I keep the house livable (I won't go so far as to say clean :-)...I mean, I am being pretty honest here), keep clean clothes in their drawers, food in the pantry and dinner on the table?  Is that what makes me a good mom and is that where my value lies?  Is that what God values about me?

I think in coming here and having most of those roles removed from my life, I have realized how much of my identity and self-worth has become wrapped up in what I do.  I like a check-list and I like to check things off.  I feel like I'm valuable if I can accomplish things.  Here....I have very little to physically do.  My job--to love and support my husband and to love and care for my children...that's it!!  It has completely caught me off guard how difficult it would be for me to simply love my husband and children.

And to realize that my worth...my value...my identity---all of those things rest in one simple fact....I am a child of the KING!!!  I am his daughter and he loves me and values me.  He created me and knit me together and loved me long before I had any productive value to His Kingdom.  I can rest in that fact if I will choose to believe it.  That's the hard part for me...the believing.

But I am entering the struggle, and...a bit like Jacob in Genesis...wrestling with God to give me the eyes to see myself as He sees me and to believe it is true.

Stomach Bug

We have experienced the first stomach bug of our time here.  I am thankful that it hit the family while we were already at the hotel in Coban.  We have extended our stay because we decided when kids are involved and a stomach bug hits, it's best to be where we have easy access to laundry, Sprite, a flushable toilet and a hot shower.  So far is has hit me (Katy) and Dancing Beauty.  Please pray we are it....we're still holding our breath.

Work Update 2.1

Well the clouds and the cold have settled into the valley for the next few months, but our work continues.  

Side Note

Thinking about living in a cloud forest and actually living in a cloud forest are two very different things.  When I was thinking about it - I was thinking about monkeys and quetzals - strange bugs and trees.  In actuality, clouds can actually blow through your house - at least when houses don't have glass - I have only seen one in the valley that does.  When you live off solar - and its cloudy all the time - you have to have the annoying sound of a generator a lot in order to work on Google Earth and write blog posts - or have a light at night in your bedroom for that matter.  Today is cloudy, windy and cold - pretty normal from what we understand Nov. - Jan. to be here.  Those from the States that we know who have lived here before say that November is the hardest month of the year for them.  We are certainly experiencing that the clouds sometimes seep in into our consciousness and make us gloomy - so please pray that that the light of our Savior's love would be palpable in the midst of clouds  - warming from the inside out.  

The Work - 1. Semesche

We have two main objectives right now before we head back to the States for Christmas.  I will tell you about the first one now and write another post about the second.

The first, is to prepare for and construct a water system in the village of Semesche.  Semesche is one of the largest communities in the valley with approximately 200 families.  A team from Knoxville, Nashville, and Chattanooga (a Knox ProCorps Team) will be coming from December 7 - 14 to help us complete this task.  The work consists of constructing a spring box, a tank and then piping the water from the tank to access points at each of four churches, the Puesto de Salud (Health Center), the school and the market.  The people of Semesche have agreed to our Regalamento - which describes the water users rights, the role & responsibility of the water committee, the role and responsibility of the Fontanero (basically the town plumber - hired by the water committee to operate and maintain the system) and the tariff or fee that each member of the community will be required to pay each month so that the water committee will be able to pay the fontanero and buy supplies to fix and expand the system.  The water committee and the Cocode - elected leaders of the village - have verbally agreed to the regalmento.  We expect them to sign it next week prior to us beginning construction on the spring box.  Please pray that they will continue to agree and sign the document next week.  

CAFNIMA requires that the community pay 10% of the cost for a water system, but recognizes that it is not always easy for the community to come up with cash.  In the case of Semesche, the community is coming up with the sand, rock and wood necessary for the construction of the spring box and tank.  By "coming up with" they have purchased the wood, will carry (on their backs) 4.5 cubic meters of sand from the river & 8 cubic meters of rock (from wherever) up to the top of a small mountain where the spring is.  They will then provide 5 to 10 guys for labor for the twenty days it should take to build the spring box and tanks.  We have hired an abinil (contractor) from one of the larger towns who will coordinate the work and understands the importance of teaching while he constructs.  One of the men who works with us, Julio, will get to be present for the entire construction process so that he can expand his knowledge - our hope (and he is well on his way on this point) is that Julio will be the teacher of all the fontaneros in the valley.

This community, as well as others in the valley, have been burned by folks who have given them water projects in the past.  We mentioned using some of the pipe from an old water system and they wanted no part of it.  We have since found out that the project that we see the remains of was likely very corrupt - filling government officials pockets - and did not last long.  So we are designing a system to the primary  points in the community that is sized so that it can provide water to every house in the future.  We hope that our efforts now will provide the framework for the leaders to lead well, and begin to organize infrastructure that will provide the framework for good health and the productivity of each person in the village.  

We are continually reminded how hard development work really is.  Changing the mindset of people who are poor and have been oppressed for a long time is very hard.  Their education is poor, but more so their mindset is that they don't really deserve it.  If it breaks...it breaks.  Guess I will go back to the spring I used to get water from.  My motto for the people that we work with here is..."Good water, for everyone, everyday!"  We are trying hard to change the mindset.  If you don't have water when you turn the on the faucet, I would guess it takes you less then five minutes to call your utility.  Here they just assume that there isn't any water and go back to their old ways - even if they are paying for it.  

We will be hosting the team from Knox ProCorps to complete construction of the Semesche water system from December 7th to 14th.  Please pray for their safe travel, their work and their hearts while they experience life in the valley.  Their names are Nate, Bryan, Bill , Kevin, Michael, and Jon.  We look forward to reporting to you on their trip.

I will try to write 2.2 and maybe even a Bonus 2.3 soon!  Stay tuned.

Mark