
Our all-star intern Maarten Graveland, hailing from The Netherlands and here as an intern for nine months, has had quite the week. Balancing his time between solar hot water modification and biodigester installation, he’s been quite busy. Today I joined him in visiting two outreach sites. The bike ride out to the first community, Llanos de Pinal, was 45 minutes, uphill (we’re hoping to raise funds for a truck soon).
In the community of Llanos is an outstanding community organization and project locally referred to as The Guarderia, funded jointly by two organizations–one US-based, jovenesjuntos.org and the other Xela-based, Pop-Wuj. The project provides day care for toddlers, and after-school homework assistance for a total of 42 children. AIDG was asked to build a water tower and solar hot water system, because there is both a lack of reliable water, and the cold climate presents a health hazard as the children refuse to shower in cold water. Water towers are not in the scope of AIDG’s outreach projects, but Jovenes Juntos was able to raise funds for the project, an AIDG intern (civil engineer, Kelli Horner) designed the tower, and I found a contractor and organized a few volunteers to build the water tower structure.
Maarten, as seen in the photo above, is talking to the contractor, Nedi, regarding the details of how the solar panels will be affixed to the cement roof of the water tower, and the associated plumbing. Immediately after meeting with Nedi, we peddled on to Tierra Colorada, to visit the Dona Lety outreach site. Dona Lety is a victim of domestic violence, and a local organization approached us to collaborate with her. We’ve installed a biodigester at her house to help her keep her fuelwood costs down and provide a good fertilizer for her small agricultural production activity. Today, Maarten and Candido (XelaTeco employee) demonstrated how the biodigester functions to a local organization, CDRO that is buying 6 biodigesters from XelaTeco. Assuming all goes well with the 6 installations, CDRO will continue to buy the kits from XelaTeco and install them in rural communities in need. If we had an award for Intern of the Week, Maarten wins.