The water man

So Jessie and I have been placed in the same hogar, called Arca de Noé (Noah´s Ark) with 13-16 year old boys. This is the same hogar that I was in that Saturday when we hauled wood down from the mountains. It is taking a little time for them to warm up to us but it seems that they are. One was passing out cantaloupe the other night, and he switched the piece he had in his hand to give out when he got to Jessie so that he could give her a bigger piece. He had already given me a big piece. When there is not enough food for everyone, they always insist that we get a full serving and then they split the rest between them, no matter what we say. I have been taking these sticks that Jessie found for me at school to hogar every night. They are about a meter long, and I know two martial arts routines that you can do with them. I have already taught them to several of the boys, and we practice them every night. I try to visit the other three hogars, which are in the same building as Arca every night. All of these house the boys age groups younger than Arca, but older than Casa Suyapa.

One night in San Pablo I saw one of our boys from Arca, and he had his arm around the shoulder of one of the younger San Pablo boys, who seemed upset. The volunteer in San Pablo told me that they are brothers. I´m always surprised to find out how so many of these kids are related. We come to know them by hogares which are separated by age groups and gender, so we might know two kids well and not know that they are related. Or six kids for that matter. The volunteers have a program that we call ¨Proyecto,¨ whose purpose is giving siblings more time to interact and maintain their family bonds. Every night, different volunteers bring a different group of siblings to our volunteer house instead of going to their hogar. Then they cook and hang out with the family all together. Those brothers I just mentioned have four other siblings, and they all have Proyecto scheduled for February 25th, which Jessie and I will do with them.

My first day of work, my boss Tonin dedicated the whole day to showing me around the Ranch and teaching me because he is on vacation for the whole month of February. My primary responsibility is to keep the potable water area clean, including the filter and storage tanks and the area around them. There are two water systems: One is filtered for showering, toilets and watering the plants and animals; the other is filtered and treated to be potable. The potable water filtration plant is about the size of a football field and consists of one above ground concrete pool-type structure. It´s like a fifteen foot high concrete maze, about the size of a four car garage where water flows from one section to another through the maze and through sand in some parts and comes out relatively clean in the end. The filtration plant also has several smaller plastic overflow tanks and a large underground concrete potable water reservoir. I spend a few hours every morning cleaning this area and listening to books on tape. I just finished Dan Brown´s “The Lost Symbol,” which one of my best friends gave me for Christmas. Last weekend we went to Tegus for a goodbye party for the old volunteers, and there we downloaded the new “Superfreakonomics” book on iTunes.

I was a little conflicted about my job the fourth week here. This is because of the way things unfolded. I knew coming here that groundskeeping would be part of my job, but only part. My boss left on vacation the second day I was here, so the guy I´m working with now is his assistant. This guy is in his mid-40´s, and one of the other volunteers aptly described him as a Honduran version of Lenny from “Of Mice and Men.” He has worn the same clothes every day since I met him: Navy overalls with a Polo Sport t-shirt. I wanted to clean up the water plant quickly so I could do other stuff, so I knocked it out in 8 hours. When I was done, he told me that I need to work slower. He told me that that is my whole job on the ranch and that I have a whole year to do it. I have come to several conclusions: One is that he doesn´t really know how to manage me. He doesn´t see me as an asset, because he doesn´t know what I can do and doesn´t want to worry about what I´m doing or if I´m doing it right. Another conclusion is that the last guy in my position did manage to stay up at the plant all year, so that´s what they expect, although I´ve been told that the last guy didn´t speak Spanish, even when he left, and he didn´t have tools or the knowledge to use them. My solution has been to talk to the volunteer coordinator and be my own manager. I find my own projects and set my own schedule. I talk to Honduran Lenny for a few minutes every morning and tell him my plans and ask him any questions I may have about what I need to do. Sometimes he tells me some things that he is doing, but more or less he doesn´t care what I do. He is just happy that the plant is cleaner than it was before I got here.

With all that said, he is a really nice guy, and he can fix anything. I did help him some on the first few days with different projects. We had to pull out seven toilets in one of the girls bathrooms at the school and clean roots out of the drain pipes. There were a tangle of tiny little roots all together about the size of my arm that filled the whole pipe. We mixed and reset the toilets in a concrete base which we had chipped up to take them out. I have fixed doors that wouldn´t shut, faucets, drain pipes, toilets, walkie talkies, picnic tables, light switches, light fixtures, backpacks, mounted a chalk board, put in a partition wall, saudered a brake cable, replaced board on playground equipment, built a swing, put the zip back in a zip line, fixed soccer balls, and fixed a fridge that wouldn´t cool.

Most stuff I need I can get from the maintenance workshop or the bodega, where they stock most of the Ranch´s needs from nails or plumbing parts to backpacks, q-tips or broom handles. I only have to sign for whatever I need. So far I´ve only needed two things: a kitchen sink faucet and a handful of those plastic things you use when you screw things into concrete (called tacofichers in Spanish, but in English I don´t know). Today, I asked the lady at the bodega for some boards so I could build bookshelves for the library in the volunteer house. We have stacks of books on the floor and plenty of wall space, so it seems like a good project. She gave me a piece of paper and told me to outline the project, including everything I would need, and get Stefan (director) or Pati (assistant director) to sign off on it. On my way home, I ran into Stefan, and as soon as I started to explain what I wanted to do, he pulled out his pen. I told him that I needed to write it out first, but that all that I really needed was the boards because I already have screws and tacofichers, and I can build the supports out of scrap lumber. Then he asked, “ So you can do carpentry stuff?” I told him yes, and that I can do a lot of plumbing, electrical, concrete work and that I can weld also. He said, “Wow that’s great. We need to give you some projects then. Right off the top of my head, I want someone to go around the whole ranch and find any water leaks anywhere and stop them, because in May we always have a water shortage, and this year it is already dry. Also, we have a house in Tegus with a whole slew of problems, and I might want to just send you there for a week to take care of those.” It seems like so far the hardest part for Jessie and I is over. It has taken a lot to become adjusted, settled, orientated and to the point where we don´t have to depend on someone else for every little thing. Now people depend on me for every little thing. The 13 girl volunteers we live with all call me their husband, because I am the house handy man.