MistyCastle

Return to La Paz
We packed up and got ready to go. Ruben is supposed to have found a different route to get to us, but it is a long way round and involves more back-country roads. It is a different route than what we came in on.
We took the opportunity to finish up some loose ends, getting some interview questions answered and visiting a house or two.

The guides from the other nearby town, Komucala, showed up this morning wanting us to go now. We said we couldn’t because we were leaving. We will have to catch them next time or possibly find another EWB chapter to support their community.

We had an assortment of lumber left over, which we donated to the community to help finish the new church. We also left the egg incubator we had brought with us to test the water samples for bacteria. I was surprised that there were no chickens around. It seems like a logical solution to have hens laying eggs. The livestock in the community consists of lots of sheep, a few cows, and pigs. Mules, too.

Ruben arrives in the later morning and we packed up the LC and said our goodbyes. I let Amanda sit up front, as the trip out promised to be challenging and she is prone to motion sickness.

What a journey this was! After leaving Suncallo Valley, we headed east, down into the rugged sides of the Andes to the river, across the river and then back up the other side. It took two hours over some of the narrowest, twisty jeep trails I’ve ever seen. Once on the other side of the river, we passed through a small community that has one of the few medical clinics in the area.

We continued going up, although mostly on the ridge with some spectacular views of the Andes range and Mount Illampu in the foreground. We stopped for lunch at an overlook. The GPS put us at 15,500 feet, with Illampu towering at 20,000 feet in the background. We were on wide, easy roads now, although still gravel through our descent back to the main highway. The remainder of the trip back to La Paz was uneventful.

Amanda did not fare well. We eventually had to get her to a doctor for dehydration and nausea. Fortunately, she recovered fully by the next afternoon. Tess was a faithful friend, and stayed with her through her ordeal.
The rest of us went out and found some pizza and then a coffee shop, which put a nice cap on my day. I had not had any coffee since I had gotten there. Lastly, we found an Internet café and were able to send home a quick email.

The next day was spent in La Paz relaxing, shopping, and attending a soccer game.

The following day began a little too early as we needed to be downstairs to meet Mike and load up for the trip back to the airport. Thus began a very long and frustrating travel day that finally ended back in the Denver airport at 11PM. It sure was good to get home.

Assessment Days
Morning arrived along with Catalina’s breakfast. The plan was to hike up the hill to visit the water sources. The community has an existing drinking water system that was installed many years ago, but there is not enough pressure to deliver water to all the houses. Senor Gregorio explains to us, as we walk back up the mountain, that there are two existing water sources that are piped down to the community. He wants to add two more, and that is where we were going… to see the water sources and look at the pipeline route they have identified. (Six or so locals went with us)

We passed by fields growing barley and some small ponds that have potatoes soaking. Sr. G. explained how the different potatoes are grown and processed so they have unique flavors. He tells us there are over 100 varieties of potatoes grown here. Some of them we see are soaking in pits, others are drying in the sun. Aside from some grains and a few beans they grow primarily potatoes and that is their main source of food.

Sr. G. pointed out an irrigation pipeline in the other side of the valley. It provides water to another community down the valley further.

After a steady uphill hike of a mile or so, we got to the furthest water source. It is a typical mountain spring about 1,000 ft higher than the community. We took a break and Sr. G. offers a prayer of thanks for the project to succeed. I fired up the GPS and marked the spot. They have already roughed out a proposed pipe route and we started following that back towards the community, marking points with the GPS. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it finally happened. All the effort I have put into getting a professional chapter of Engineers Without Borders started here in the Springs has come to fruition. We adopted a drinking water and sanitation project for a remote Aymara Indian community in the Andes Mountains last fall and have been raising funds and making preparations for a site assessment trip in the Spring of 2009. In mid-May I led a team consisting of three members of the professional chapter and three members of the Air Force Academy student chapter to Suncallo, Bolivia. What follows are the notes I wrote up on the plane coming back. It consists of many observations and side notes on the trip. There was a great deal of adventure getting there and back but overall we accomplished our mission and brought back lots of data and pictures which will help us in our engineering design work. Note: if you click on the pictures you can see a larger version.

Our trip was delayed by a day due to an American Airlines requirement that all travelers must provide proof of yellow fever vaccination. The American Airlines policy contradicts the guidance given on the US Governments Center for Disease Control (CDC) website which indicates that travelers proceeding to No-Risk areas in Bolivia may sign a waiver at the point of entry.

Our pre-trip research into the vaccination requirements on the CDC website clearly identified the project site to be in a No-Risk area and to keep the costs down and eliminate the risk of introducing a live vaccine into our bodies four of the team decided not to get the yellow fever vaccinations. It is worth noting that the US Air Force declined to provide the yellow fever vaccination to the members of EWB-AFA for the same reasons.

The last thing we expected was for the airline to deny us boarding our aircraft. Regardless of our justifications and documentation supporting our position American Airlines refused to allow us to board the aircraft. Other EWB chapters should be made aware that the airlines have this authority and that the airlines policy may differ from the US Governments. It should be incumbent upon the travel agency to make the travelers aware of any requirements levied by the airlines. Apparently, the $360 in “fees” we paid the travel agency didn’t include this small courtesy.

Fortunately, we were able to locate the required vaccine and proceed the following morning on a direct flight from Denver to Miami and thence on a direct flight (overnight) to La Paz from the Miami airport. Visa fees were paid, Immigration was cleared (no they didn’t ask to see our yellow fever vaccination certifications) and Customs was cleared effortlessly. Read the rest of this entry »

The months have flown by and I’ll try to encapsulate a Spring Update.

Kristina enrolled at the University of Colorado – Denver in their Art program during January and has now completed her first semester. She enjoyed most of her classes and is looking forward to more art classes in the fall. She is living and working a part-time job in downtown Denver which is where the campus is located.

Josh and Selenda are busy in Pueblo with horses, work, and school. Selenda finished up her MBA this semester and we went down for the graduation in May. Josh continues to work an internship at BF Goodrich and has been responsible for the design of some new machinery.

Rhonda continues to work her nutritional products business, keep the home in order, and support our home fellowship group from church.

I’ve been pretty busy between work and my activities with Engineers Without Borders. ITT has been affected along with so many other companies and we had some downsizing take place this spring. We have not been able to replace several programs that have wound down and now we will be moving to a new building as the one we have is oversize with the limited work we still have. The program I am working on should still be viable out to 2012 so no immediate concerns on my job. We’ve just finished up some final testing of the system before we deliver the first one to the Govt.

A lot of my free time this spring has been consumed with getting prepared for the Bolivia trip with Engineers Without Borders. The project lead got transferred to Sacramento and I ended up taking responsibility for the trip. We coordinated a time that three of the Cadets from the Air Force Academy student chapter could go with us and finally got all of ducks in a row for a May 16th departure. I’ll write a separate article about the trip.

Today got off to a bad start. It was windy. Really windy. Really, really windy. Hurricane force kind of windy. For starters, it was garbage day for a lot of people. Being garbage day and having horrendous winds is a bad combination for the environment. Stuff was blowing everywhere, including from my neighbors garbage can. I went out to pick some of it up and moved her garbage can back out of the wind.

I came back in the house turned around and looked back out the window and realized the big ol 25 foot tall blue spruce tree I had just walked by was now laying in the yard **sigh**…**sing along**…Happy Anniversary to me…Happy Anniversary to me…Phooey! Well, at least I didn’t get flattened by the thing.

In case you were not aware, there are lots of people who are amateur weather people. They install weather stations at their homes and then connect them to the Internet where you can go look at them. We have several within a few miles of us and I pulled one up to see just how strong the winds were. As you can see from the below chart we had sustained winds of around 50 mph with gusts up to 84 mph at the time of our trees demise.

Now the odd thing here is that it’s not stormy outside. Perfectly clear sky, sunny and quite nice temperature-wise. Nevertheless, the winds can really come roaring off the mountains onto the plains and we seem to be in a micro-climate that gets to experience that neat little phenomena. Read the rest of this entry »

Once again the big hand sweeps past the top of the age clock. I celebrated by snapping off yet another tooth. I figured with the stock market in the toilet I would try the old tooth fairy strategy. But it didn’t work out cause I swallowed the darn thing. Just kidding…well mostly…my teeth have always been a weak spot for me. They’ve been chomping on stuff for a long time now. Unfortunately, they are not in the best shape and lately they seem to be breaking off. So…another sojourn to the dentist with a big bag of money and I won’t look like a hillbilly anymore.

Over the past year I have kept a closer eye on the space industry since it was always an area of interest to me. It’s good to see more countries getting into the game. The Indians (think turbans not tomahawks) have sent a spacecraft to orbit the moon and so has China and Japan. I’m still intrigued by the Google Lunar X PRIZE which is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth. There are currently 14 teams registered for the competition. I wish I had the smarts and money to join in. That would be an interesting legacy to leave. By the way, if anyone wants to buy me a cool Google T-shirt for my birthday go right ahead (size Large please).

I had thought earlier this year that I might get more involved in some of my old space-related interests but that never panned out. Instead I’ve been getting a local chapter of Engineers Without Borders up and running. We have identified several rural farm villages in Bolivia to partner with over the next three to five years. They are close together, well…relatively speaking, and both have requested the same help. Initially we will be working on irrigation projects but it’s hard to say where it will end up. Each community is just under a hundred families or so and are located high up in the Andes mountains. We will make the first site assessment visit next summer. Read the rest of this entry »

This fall has been filled with an awful lot of travel. I just got back from my second trip to Atlanta and Rhonda has been to San Antonio, TX and Suffolk, VA. Fortunately, it has been rather uneventful with planes more or less departing and arriving on time. My trips were business related and to the same place. One of our vendors completed two sets of antennas and part of the process is going down to their facility and witnessing some performance tests. This is what we call a Production Acceptance Test.

The only downside to the whole thing is the testing is quite boring. Satellite antennas have to be pretty sensitive since the transmitter is way out in space. The way they test them is by measuring the amount of noise from a dead space (cold sky) and a major source of noise like the sun or the moon. Our vendor prefers the moon. So, they move the antenna back and forth taking measurements for hours on end and after a thorough application of math come up with these performance figure based on a ration of noise to temperature. The sky has to be clear and sometimes you end up working at night.

The good thing is they are a nice bunch of people and take good care of us while we are there. The next bunch won’t be done until sometime in February so I’ll get a bit of a break on the travel for awhile.