not exactly fiji water

20/7/2009

Lately I´ve been hearing from a lot of people who seem to have no idea what I´m really doing, work-wise, here in the mountains of northern Peru. I think that probably has something to do with my near-total lack of explaining to people back home what it is exactly that I´m doing day-in and day-out, work-wise, here in the mountains of northern Peru. So I figured it was time for an explanation.

I´m assuming most people reading this know by now that I´m part of the Water/Sanitation program, one of the five operating in Peace Corps Peru at the moment (the others being Community Health, Environment, Youth Development, and Small Business). It fascinates me to learn about what other sector volunteers are doing. The other day I was down in Piura, sitting around in the hostel with a Small Business volunteer who lives in the desert region, an hour or so outside the city. I asked her what she was working on on her laptop, and she told me she was on her way to give a charla (educational session) on color combinations for a co-op of artisanal basket weavers a couple towns over. I had to laugh; it´s amazing how much gets lumped together under the “development” umbrella. Here I am working on drinking water, while others are nutritionists, artists, educators, maternal care specialists, speech therapists, and the list goes on. Neat, eh?

So when I say I work with drinking water, what exactly does that mean? Well, upon arrival here in Chalaco, I set out into the little outlying communities (caseríos) to conduct a diagnostic study, comprised chiefly of a series of door-to-door surveys with questions on all things Wat/San: water quality and usage, sanitation installations, incidence of diarrhea, parasites, and other water-borne diseases, and more. It was a great way to get to know the lay of the land, and I learned two things real quick: one, the drinking water situation was pretty abysmal, and two, most communities still lacked modern sanitation services – that is, they did their “business” out in the same campo where they planted their corn, wheat, beans, and potatoes. Pretty unappetizing, but that´s the way it is around here, and has been for as long as people can remember.

So I got together with my work partners, the head of environmental health in my district and the president of the health commission (both awesome guys, exceptionally dedicated by any standards, much less rural Peruvian ones), and we decided we´d first try to tackle the former issue, and see what else we could find out about the second one along the way. And rather than focus on just a few communities, at my urging we decided to grab the proverbial bull by the horns and take on the whole district at once, which means roughly 50 towns anywhere from a 5-minute to 4-hour hike away, and a total population of around 10,000. In other words, a tall order. But true to my American capitalist mentality (and completely shameless endorsement of carrot-and-stick strategy), I suggested we create a competition among all the communities, and try to stimulate them that way. Basically the idea was that we would provide some incentive for the individual communities to improve their drinking water services, letting the “invisible hand” do its time-tested work. We drew up a plan, and the “Campaña JASS 2009” was born.

I´ve written about the JASS a couple times already, but just in case, it stands for Junta Administradora de Servicios de Saneamiento. The JASS is the committee that each little town is supposed to re-elect every two years to manage the town´s drinking water, sanitation services, and solid waste. So the good thing is that we usually have somewhere to start (the bad being that “JASS” is sometimes no more than some meaningless acronym that people vaguely remember having heard sometime, a long time ago). The campaign, therefore is focusing only on the drinking water aspect, where there is more than enough work (I´m learning a lot about the extreme importance of taking small steps, rather than dumping 5,000 different issues on a community at once, even if all 5,000 are great ideas). With respect to water, there are essentially three areas of responsibility from the JASS´s standpoint: administration, maintenance, and operation.

Administration refers to the overall organization of the committee and the usuarios, or individual water-drinkers. It´s everything from having a complete committee (president, secretary, treasurer, etc.), to the rate of delinquency in payment of monthly dues (usually one sol, or about 33 cents a month), to the overall service coverage in the community (that is, how many people are completely without a home water connection). All of this is dealt with at a community-wide JASS meeting, often the trickiest part for me, because it´s much more about small-town politics than anything else, and that´s not something I´m gonna change in two years (see previous entry on JASS meetings for more).

Maintenance is what it sounds like: repairing broken pipes and leaky faucets, patching up broken or crumbling cement parts of the system, and the like. This is generally the easiest part of the process, because if a JASS is doing anything, chances are it´s the basic plumbing stuff. Which is a good thing, because coming into this I was pretty clueless about such topics (I´ve learned a lot, though, like how to melt a 1” PCV pipe with a candle in order to stretch it and create a union with another 1” PVC pipe, and also the fact that a 1” PVC pipe in Perú is what we in the States would call a 1 ½“ PVC pipe. Yeah, go figure. I´ve also gained a passion for well-made float valves, which really are a beautiful thing…but that´s neither here nor there).

But the third area of responsibility is where I´m focusing most of my attention. Operation of a rural water system around here basically means two things: daily water treatment and semi-annual system disinfection. The latter is often already being practiced (albeit very rarely properly, according to international health standards), and as for the former, let´s just say I´ve got my work cut out for me. The active ingredient in both is chlorine, the chemical of choice for swimming pools and drinking water alike (I often end a day of work reeking of chlorine, which makes me think of the pool in the summertime, which in turn makes me think of any number of things, including but not limited to: America (goes without saying), bikinis, that new-tennis-ball smell, freshly-cut grass, chicken fingers with honey mustard, zinc oxide, cheap beer that comes in 30-packs, those glow stick things that sink and then stand up straight at the bottom of the pool…and much more. It´s unfortunate, I´d almost say cruel, that I wound up working with chlorine).

Anyway, there are certain proportions and processes that need to be used to comply with potable water standards, and that´s really what I´m spending most of my time and effort on. The disinfections are what they sound like; you get together with the JASS and head up to the captación or water-capture point at the underground spring, and clean out the whole system from top to bottom with a chlorine solution and scrub brushes (during which you might encounter any of the following, both living and floating belly-up: frogs, fish, crabs, snakes, lizards, spiders, or babies). Just kidding about the babies, that was just to make sure you´re paying attention (but see the photo album at right for the full visual). In any case, at the reservorio (water tank with a capacity of anywhere from 4,000 to 30,000 liters) you also mix up another solution of even higher concentration – we call it the leche, for obvious reasons – and dump that into the tank as it´s filling up. You let that sit for 2 hours and then open the pipes to the community to fully disinfect the system. Disinfections usually take a full morning, and are really a lot of fun – you get your hands dirty and there´s generally a lot of standing-around time with the local guys, who always have a lot to say, even if it´s not about anything of earth-shattering importance. Plus you usually get invited to lunch (or at least a few beers) at someone´s house afterwards. Daily chlorination is the essential piece, though, because you can clean the system all you want, but if you aren´t actually treating the water, you can´t expect the parasites to roll over and die on their own. The design we´re pushing here in Chalaco is a simple 20 liter bucket that you poke a hole in the bottom of, to which you then connect a thin little hose with a drip regulator (these my work partner Miguel hooks up for free at his office at the health center, using old IV tubes – ingenious). You mix up a chlorine solution in the bucket, adjust the regulator according to reservoir volume and how many times it empties in a day, and you´ve got yourself some damn good water.

A lot of times we´ll go into a community and the people will say something like “Yeah, we just did a disinfection and chlorination two weeks ago!” To which we respond, ”That´s fantastic!” because really, it is, “But let´s talk a little bit about what those two words actually mean…” And then when you explain that the water actually needs to have a little bit of chlorine in it to kill the parasites (which contribute in a major way to the reported 48% childhood malnutrition rate in the district), you can get any number of responses, ranging from “Well around here the water comes from the earth and it´s totally clean,” to “Why would I put bleach in my water? I use that for clothes,” to my personal favorite, “My grandfather drank water straight from the river his whole life, and he´s 95. F***ing miner.” But fortunately the JASS members are generally some of the more forward-thinking members of the community, and we´re starting to make a lot of progress with the chlorination.

We started the campaign with a series of training workshops in each of the three “zones” that we´d divided the district into. They were very thorough, but also very long, and the retention rate of information (which, the way the health inspector from Piura explained it, was often way above most of the invitees´ heads) was probably slim to none. Which is why we made it a three-stage process that, rather than just ending with a single workshop and a free lunch, would then continue with a six-month period of monitoring and support out in the communities. We´re now a few months into that stage (described above), and in December we´re going to hold another series of meetings in each of the three zones (stage three) at which we´ll recognize the “Most Improved JASS” and award its members with a Little League-style gold trophy of a guy holding a bucket of water…they don´t know that yet, but hey, as long as they get the job done, right? Just kidding, we still aren´t sure what the prizes are going to be, but it could be a nice tool kit, a year´s worth of chlorine, or maybe even an outdated computer that I´ve heard aren´t too tough to get through a Peace Corps program. Whatever it is, the idea is that it´ll not only reward the winning JASS in each zone, but also motivate the other communities to get their collective acts together (ie, the proverbial “carrot”).

And if that fails, I guess we´ll have to resort to good old-fashioned communism.