Thursday 19 June 2014

Pre-departure, Mexico City and the first day on site in San Miguel

Hi! Welcome to our blog that will cover our time working in Mexico as volunteers for Engineers Without Borders UCL/UK and IRRI Mexico/Isla Urbana.

First of all, we would like to thank everyone who has made this project possible, including:

UCL and the Public Engagement Unit

The department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at UCL

Everyone who helped us to fundraise, including friends, family and people that were kind enough to donate to our project who we don't know.

Before leaving for the placements, I (Alex) attended a pre-departure training course in Shoreham, Kent, hosted by EWB-UK. We did lots of group exercises to learn the essentials for working abroad, we were about 22 volunteers and it was a great 4 day course in the countryside - many thanks to all who organised it!



Literally the next day after this we set off to Mexico City, after around 8 months of planning, the project was finally happening! I was truly ready for this. Here we are coming in to Mexico City, where the plane went in to land and got caught in a rainstorm, traveled through a massive cloud and pulled away just inches from the runway, taking off back into the air to circle the city for another hour before making a safe landing. Pretty scary to be honest! 


Just hours later and here we are (minus Gaby, the last of 3 in the project) in the safe company of my friend Adriana and her family, they took us to a traditional taqueria (taco restaurant) for our first flavours of Mexico!! Many thanks to them for their kind hospitality.



The next day we met up with Gaby and visited the IRRI office for a short meeting about our work and to meet Rachel Smith, who we had been talking with over e-mail for the past 8 months but had never met. The weather was pretty nice outside whilst we waited for Rachel so I snapped this photo of Laura and Gaby.


After wrapping things up at IRRI we left Mexico City and headed for San Miguel de Allende, an almost mystical destination for us after so long talking about this project, to finally be in Mexico and going there to get started was really something, we almost needed to do it! 


Above is the avenue paseo de la reforma in Mexico City, and below the countryside during the drive.


Here we are, finally arriving there!


We sorted some things out when we arrived and had a walk around the town before getting a good night of sleep and heading out for our first day on site.


With it being rainy season, it made sense that it would be pouring with rain when we headed out for our first day. It was fitting, as we were heading to a meeting with a school to discuss the benefits of using a rainwater harvesting system and whether they wanted us to work there or not.



Here we are at the first site, Atotonico with Nati, who installed the systems in 2007, after a nice talk with the teachers. Nati will be joining us in the coming weeks to help us and to provide technical and local knowledge where we are lacking. We are coming back on Monday to have a meeting with the teachers, parents and some pupils to see what can be agreed on.



School mural (above) and problems with the existing systems (below)






Next we drove to the second site of the day, Montecillo de Nieto, and we had a meeting with the school headmaster to discuss the state of their system, to see what we can improve, and how we can integrate local residents to reinstate a maintenance committee, which disbanded after years of well functioning.





Below is a church near the third site visit of the day, in Cruz del Palmar. The sites were getting very rural at points in the day (although the pitures don't illustrate this well) and were a massive contrast to the urban sprawl of Mexico City and it's 20,000,000+ inhabitants. 






We arrived here at our last site visit of the day in San Miguel Viejo, one of the most successful sites for the systems. We talked with the site leaders and saw what was necessary to work on and organised a meeting for Tuesday next week with the parents and teachers. We have now organised three meetings for Tuesday and will be visiting more sites in the time being.





After finishing the site visits for the day we went to meet Dylan from a local NGO called Catis that we will be collaborating with. He will be joining us for some of the community workshops and one of his interns has offered to help us on the project when he is free. Before meeting with Werner in the evening, we took some time to walk around San Miguel centre and take some photos. The town is a UNESCO world heritage site and its colonial architecture is beautiful as can be seen. It's a small town but very charming.









In the evening we had another thunderstorm and an incredible amount of rain. I've seen this type of rain before but never seen the drainage system at work, it's crazy. There are pipes protruding from the top of each building and it propels water into the sides of the street where it runs off (imagine a street where each building has a water cannon firing a heavy water stream from about 20ft into the drains)

We're having another early start tomorrow and are meeting at Origen San Miguel (where Werner and Nati are based) at 8am, so I'll finish this blog entry here. We've been enjoying it so far and hope that it continues being enjoyable! It's my first time working on a development project like this and it's been a nice and unique experience. 

1 comment:

  1. Lovely colourful houses. Did someone clean the streets especially for your visit?
    Susanna

    ReplyDelete