Day 4 (Saturday, January 11th)

I've been doing a lot of talking. Sorry, I like to talk, it's a problem. So I think today, I’m going to let my pictures do most of the talking.

Here is an overview of the entire area were we were working. You can see some EWB folks in brown on the left digging the trench that eventually led into the soak pit just beyond the left edge of this photo. Around the corner and down the street, on the right, is where we needed to install a new gutter system.

These pictures demonstrate why the soak pit was so important. Besides serving as a breeding ground for mosquitoes carrying Malaria, greywater got in the way of all types of traffic.

Clay (far left) and Keith working on the Soak pit with a passerby observer carrying some harvested crops:

Jardeesh and the EWB team working on the gutter leading to the soak pit:

All I could think the entire time we were working was how I wish my family could see me. My mother's side of the family are all farmers from Virginia so they pick on me for being from Connecticut because I guess people from CT just aren't as rough and tumble. And I'm the only girl out of all my cousins on my Dad's side of the family so obviously I get harassed because I've given up trying to be one of the guys. So here's proof that I can do some manual labor (ha, take that!):

Meanwhile, Keith was testing the well tanks at the girl's primary school for pH, bacteria (coliform, E. coli and Eubacterium) and any other contaminants.

He got help identifying the color change from his many short colleagues. It looks like there was a consensus.
 

When the kids got out of school they were more than happy to help us with the soak pit.


For a very very brief summary of everything we accomplished with the soak pit on day four, here is an interview with Dr. Pines (he’s hamming it up in front of the camera – a natural):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgSS3OQf3TI

I went with the Design for Global Change gang, Natacha Poggio, Chris and Christa in the morning to have a meeting with the head master and mistress of the high school in Abheypur (above). We thought we were going to show them the posters on alcohol abuse prevention (below is a picture of us talking about the posters with our translator), but we ended up setting up a meeting for later in the day which I opted out of to work on the soak pit. So Since I didn’t get to see a lot of their work, I’ll let them talk about it. At the very end of this post is a video of Chris and Christa summarizing their day.