To Lastic Friends everywhere -
We haven't been reporting recently, but we still have been busy. In the last update sent on February 20, 2012, I stated that we were planning to come/go back to Haiti for an organizational meeting. Neil and I did return for several days of meetings in early March. At this time we have both a Operational and a Capital Improvements Budget approved.
In the meeting where much of this took place, at our suggestion, everyone also agreed to pay for their water based on land area. In the past when water has been available, they paid based on the number of hours water was delivered to their garden. This seemed to make for a lot of conflict - somebody had to monitor and record the time, and there were questions about whether the water was flowing full, or if somebody upstream was sneaking a little of the side, etc. An annual fee based on area based seems to have much less potential for conflict.
A snag in the plans occurred when we discovered that nobody really knows how much land they have! Our budget is based on the total watered acres, and I believe that to be a fairly solid number, but when it comes down to an individual farmer and his bill, nobody knows! The community asked us to determine the area of each property, and after a small discussion, in which they unanimously promised to accept the results, we agreed to take this on.
Some time was spent in planning, and we finally kicked off the mapping project on May 9th. The CPS unit located on the north side of PAP provided most of the effort, and their House Papa, Waylan Litwiller, was an enthusiastic leader. The local water committee provided each of the two or three mapping teams with a local guide who knew each farmer's name, and sometimes an interpreter as needed. While standing in each field, the perimeters were discussed and agreed upon, a field number was assigned, the field was traced out onto a high precision aerial photo of the area, and a log kept of that information that includes the farmer's name. In the case of difficult boundaries, the mappers used a 200' and a 300' tape measure to verify distances. I used my precision GPS to spot check the work, and to determine some boundaries in tall corn, in the banana groves, and other places where measuring was difficult. After a few days, the Unit Papa and boys had the project well in hand, and I could feel comfortable with returning home.
The mapping continued right along. The day's work was uploaded to me every night, and I started to compile and draft the results. The mappers turned in maps for anywhere from 50 to 100 gardens per day, so I did not keep up. They also kept track of areas that needed to be checked with GPS because of difficult circumstances as noted above. To date, the smallest garden mapped and calculated is 1323 sq. ft. (0.03 acres), and the largest is 2.1 acres.
Toward the end of the project, I returned to help for a few days and covered the areas that had been reserved, as well as generally helping to advance the mapped areas. It seemed that water was flowing everywhere we walked, so we were often working in muddy ground, but as I observed to the rest of the workers, it doesn't seem too bad when you know its mud made with Lastic water!
The field work was finally finished on June 4, and the semi-official count for gardens being irrigated is 1,217!!! 1,217 families able to raise more of their own food! We observed heavy farming activities, with brush, weeds, cactus, and thorn bushes being cleared, and a wide variety of crops being planted. The early corn that was irrigated up in February is well over our heads, the bananas are thick and lush, and we saw various beans, squash, melons, garlic, papaya, sugarcane, tomatoes, citrus, and other crops growing well.
The next step is to finish calculating the area of all the farms, prepare maps for the water committees to use, and prepare a "water rights" certificate for each grower. At this time we will also check over the maps to be sure every irrigated property is accounted for. This feels like it is a big job, but we're working through it, and hope to be done in mid July. At that time we will again return and meet with the water committees and keep the process of organizing moving along. Anybody with AutoCAD experience that is interested in helping is more than welcome to contact me! Maybe we can share the load.
A very vital part of the whole project is the 9 km of pipeline that was installed in the late 90's. Per the records it has 2.5 km of ductile iron, and 6.5 km of PVC, most of which is encased in concrete. We feed water into the top end, and take it out down at the bottom about 2200' lower in elevation, but we have done almost nothing to the pipe along the way, and mostly have only a very general idea where it lies within the river bed. This year during rainy season the river bed shifted in the larger channel, and the erosion uncovered a section of the pipe. At the place it was exposed it was concrete covered PVC. The force of the water driven rocks eventually knocked off some concrete and cracked a hole in the PVC, which soon filled with rocks, and plugged the pipe. When I was in the area in early May we were able to clean out some of the debris, but we could still not get the water flowing. We also used Raymond's dozer to partially re-route the river to stop the immediate damage.
Raymond has recovered very well from his surgery, and the docs gave him the green light to go back and build roads. Raymond and Vera returned to Haiti the last part of May, and Raymond took the final unplugging and repairs to the pipe in hand, and had his dozer working about 3.5 days in the river, both burying the exposed pipe, and further re-routing the channel. This work was finished and the water is flowing steadily once more. Right now we have no other plan but to keep an eye on the situation. Hopefully the pipe will stay intact for many more years.
We're hoping to do some more mapping of the farming valley this fall. I think we have only enough land with canals to use about 60% of the water we can deliver, and there are certainly some additional districts that have good farm land, but right now there are no canals servicing them. I know that to get water to most or all of the additional areas will require at least some pipelines, so the planning/engineering needs to be done and then the most feasible areas selected and worked on as we can. It seems maybe we are not quite done with everything there is to do . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment