1st Mtg of the SMA Midday Rotary Vivienda de Arriba potential water Project

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1st Mtg of the SMA Midday Rotary Vivienda de Arriba potential water Project

Where: Vivienda de Arriba (40 mins from SMA)
When: Wed 10th Feb 3pm
Who: Elena Padilla & Laura Stewart (Rotary), Holly Yasui & Chela Martinez (for Cedesa) 37 adults, including 3 men, + 6 kids & no dogs!

Purpose: Preliminary Assembly re potential future water project in this community

History: Vivienda de Arriba (like Cruz del Palmar) backs onto Los Torres, the community we carried out the first water cistern project with. Los Tor res & Vivienda de Arriba (& Cruz del Palmar) are neighbours.

Some of the people in Los Torres have friends & relatives in Vivienda de Arriba.

VdA can see the white water cisterns in Los Torres, & were curious about them.

Some of the women from CdP visited their friends in Los Torres & were shown the cisterns in operation, & invited to drink the water & then spoke to their joint neighbours in VdA.

As a result some of the women of VdA were interested to know more, & were invited to attend the next assembly in Los Torres. This was in Oct 2009. Since then several representatives of VdA have attended each monthly assembly in Los Torres.

At the end of the first assembly Cruz del Palmar women attended they asked how they could get cisterns in their community. The attendees of the meeting explained the process to their neighbours & next month they came back with a list of families who would like to be involved in the project, & they also bought with them representatives from neighbouring Vivienda de Arriba, who had already compiled a list of people in their communities interested in participating! Anamaria is one of the young women representatives from VdA & has been very active in this process.

At the end of 2009 we were not in a position to promise funding, & so explained the process & that we could not promise anything but that they were welcome to continue attending the assemblies & we would work on a solution with them.

At the meeting in January we set a date for the first assembly in both CdP & Vivienda de Arriba, for 10th Feb. To meet with the community for the first time, & explain the concept & take it from there.

This is that meeting...

Journey to Vivienda de Arriba
We were accompanied from CdP to VdA by one of the women from CdP who has a son living in VdA. It was about 20 minutes by car since the roads are notoriously bad, on the way we passed 3 trucks filled with Sand & Gravel they had illegally removed from the riverbed in VdA (a separate, but related issue!).


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When we arrived, all of the community was there waiting in the courtyard in front of the church as planned.

We entered the courtyard & Anamaria had the keys to the church so bought pews out & formed a circle for the meeting.

Another young man – Saul Juarez, had arrived there by bicycle from his community in Capadrillo (about 20 minutes drive away), he has been attending the assemblies since approx Sept. Last year, as he too is interested in bringing us to his community to introduce the process there.

He is an excellent orator, & has a great memory for things that occurred or were agreed in previous assemblies. More on Saul & Capadrillo later.

Item 1.Introductions & brief history
Chela asked us all to introduced ourselves, & then described her work at Cedesa (near Dolores Hidalgo), & plans for the formation of a university to train camposinos in many things pertaining to rural living, including organisation & mobilisation & community development, as well as practical courses on food production etc.

She gave a brief history of the Los Torres project & when we began working together.

She gave a brief overview of the lack of water in the region & touched on the topic of contamination. She explained we are working in LT, MdN, Lomas & now here in CdP & VdA.

She asked what the interest was in being here? & what motivated them to be here.
During this chat it was discovered that approx 9 of the people were from yet another neighbouring community interested in the projects, Tierra Blanca, they all stood & said their names.

3 communities are very close, Tierra Blanca, Vivienda de Arriba & Espejo, & they all neighbour Los Torres & Cruz del Palmar.

Many said they were hear because of organisation by Anamaria, Agripina & Erika.
They need water as they only have water in the rainy season & none after that.
This group had sent Anamaria & Agripina to Los Torres assemblies to represent them.

Chela asked them to describe their water issues,
• 1 well in Tierra Blanca for the 3 communities. (Tierra Blanca, Espejo & VdA)
• Each person repeated the same, the water in the pipes is brackish at best,
• sometimes the water is black or yellow or green, maybe when it comes from the bottom of the reservoir tank they don’t know.
• Approx 150 mtrs
• Not very good compression hard to get water in the upper community
• They don’t know the quality of the water, have not had it tested.
• The pipes have a lot of saro, so if there is lots of saro would have to assume lots of salt &/or other minerals.
• During the rainy season they can use water from the river for cleaning, but it dries immediately the rains stop. (due to over extraction of the sand & gravel).
• The upper part of the community can not have wells since the water table is too low.

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• the river is dry because they have been extracting too many materials, Chela asked why they hadn’t stopped the extraction, & they replied because they thought it was Federal & they had no control.
• More than 20 trucks per day are coming to take materials from their river bed
• The trucks cause ruts in the roads in the roads, & the community have been repairing the ruts to keep the dust down, ironically it was agreed they are inadvertently assisting the illegal extraction…
• All of the communities originally built by the river so they could benefit, but now the river is dry most of the year

It was agreed they need to learn more about the quality of their water.

One of the people said they had tasted the water from the cisterns in Los Torres & it was delicious. She had yellow teeth, was originally from Los Torres.

One woman said we come to give cisterns to communities, & Chela took issue with the word “gift” & said we are not giving anything, that it has to be worked for.

Anamaria described the Los Torres example where they worked in small groups to build the cisterns for all the people in the group.s

Saul, said it would begin with work in Cisterns but that Los Torres are now having workshops on backyard gardens & health & other topics, so the development is continuing.

Agripina said it is important to work together & not to fight if they were to achieve a solution.

Chela talked more about the history of the region, & the river created life for animals, plants & people. Now there is nothing, the water level has dropped way below the river because of the extraction, she asked who is in control of the river?
Response – the community, it’s in the hands of the people.

There was some discussion about extraction concessions & there are very few legal operators, most are operating illegally, some blatantly & some at night. It is destroying the river.

More facts:
•Only 4 or 5 were aware of the cisterns in Los Torres (we invited them to visit LT & find out more from the community)
•Approx 40 families in VdA
•Approx 36 on the list, maybe some families can share
•They need to do a census to see the number of members in the families on the list

Tierra Blanca asked when we can visit their community.
We suggested they continue to come to VdA assemblies but we can not promise anything as we are still working on funding & logistics, we can work together.

Chela
Reiterated it is important for them to show their motivation & interest.

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The only way they can get help with materials is by persevering, it’s not a right, it’s a privilege of involvement & participation in your own solution.

They responded – when do you want us to come, weekly? Monthly? If we come daily will it come any faster? We all had a good laugh!

With working on this project you will learn many skills to solve your issues, like your road, you can involve the govt. in helping with resources when you have organization.

With unity you can solve many of your issues & transform your living conditions.

They asked if there was any cost to them, Chela said just your attendance of meetings & your work, & in Los Torres in one case they paid abaniles from their own community to work if they couldn’t. It’s up to the community, part of the process is to decide where the pilot cistern will be built.

For now it’s nice to get to know the community & their work, with volunteer work mountains can be moved.

We made a date for the next assembly

Every 2nd Wednesday of the month, in this case 10th March at 3pm, at the church

Next we were invited for food at Agripina (& her mother’s) house.
We had Gorditas, tortillas, beans & chicharon all cooked over a wood stove.

While there we noticed they were doing solar purification of water www.sodis.ch & had bottles out in the sun.

We left around 6.15 just on dark & drove Saul back to the entrance to his community Capadrillo.

We made an arrangement to visit Capadrillo/Guerrero/Vivienda de Abajo on 03.03.10 at 12 midday (meeting Saul at the Churros tienda)


Whew what a day!!!

Conclusion
There is far more need (& interest) than we can feasibly accommodate with our merry band, we need to come up with a plan to be able to service this growing number of communities & still maintain the quality of training & development.