How to build a water captation

Here you can see one of the many steep hills and the people carrying sand and cement up the hill. Sometimes 3 horses and many little kids all helped out. It truly is a community project. In this pictures you can also see a guy carrying up a chainsaw, that we used to cut a tree to make the concrete forms. The area at the bottom hill is the location where we were originally going to but the water tank, but after doing the elevation survey we decided to move it up to more where the picture was taken.
Taking a break after climbing the hill. The men would carry 100 lbs bags of cement up in teams of two. While one was carrying the bag on his shoulders the other would be walking and resting. When they changed they would just go back to back and change the bag to the other guys shoulders. I don´t understand how they could walk with that weight when there was so much mud.
From left to right is Ramón and Emilio. Ramón is the vice president and Emilio the President of the aqueduct. We had just finished the last part of the survey. You can see my notebook for recording angles and distances, the abney level in my hand. Ramón has the 30 m tape. Emilio has a stick that is cut to my eye level so that they survey is that much more accurate.

This is the clay dam that I made to channel all the water from the spring into the 4 in pipe. The pipe came from a community member that has a fish tank, it worked excellent in keeping the construction area dry.

This is the first level of the foundation. You can see the pipe to on the right. On both sides of this small valley is rock. In order to strengthen the foundation even more we hammered the rebar into the rock on each side.
A group of muchachos that were great workers. This is the area that we stored the sand, and cement before it was mixed.
Here is a great shot of the construction area. You can see the toma ( spring box) area where all the people are in the shadows. The flat part below was expanded and used for mixing concrete. In this picture they are bending rebar there. You can also see a second smaller tube on the right used to divert a small creek. This water was used for cooking and washing sand.
This is the master mason Jose Molina. He has built 5 other toma de aguas and has plenty of experience. I pretty much let him lead the entire construction effort and just tried to make technical pointers, and give him reminders of things that we need to do. You can also see in the background the actual ´ojo de agua´ where the water comes out of the rock face.

Here you can see the trail as it approaches the toma. In the distance the really bright object is the rancho or hut that was constructed to save the bags of cement, tools, and it is where the fire was made for cooking. There was a table there, for drying the pots and pans and preparing food. Usually we would eat bananas cut from a nearby tree, and sardines that someone brought up.

We would head up to the toma around 8 in the morning. The community was notified that we are leaving by blowing into a conch sea shell. I was pretty good at doing this so they always gave it to me. After you left town it was about an one and a half hours walking up steep muddy hills. We would stop working around 430. We would then discuss what materials need to be brought up the next day, and what goals we planned to accomplish. I would write this down and give copies to the mason and the president.

There was mostly 5 or 6 people that had some construction experience and helped with the actual construction or the form work and rebar placing. This is them.


This picture is after we poured the foundation. There was two levels, the first had reinforcing, and the second was just concrete with large rocks. The bottom most pipe in the picture is the clean out pipe or scour, used to remove dirt that may settle and soap when your cleaning the toma. The next pipe is the actual exit of water where we will connect the aqueduct. The top two parallel pipes are the overflow pipes. In case the aqueduct needs to be turned off for maintenance.

Many Ngobes do not smile for pictures, so even if they look stone faced or scary, they are really nice guys.
Jose y Jose before the forms were put on the spring box. The vertical plastic tubes are used to cover up the rebar so it won´t rust with the constant water that will be flowing through it.



Emilio and Jose with the initial excavation of the toma.

One of the views you get walking up in the morning sometimes.

Joe´s Birthday Bash

The other day I went to visit one of my friends Abel in a neighboring town. I am teaching him English maybe once a week. He is a teacher but now this time of year the teachers have off so he lives at his house. I went out there to meet some of the people in his town and check out his composting latrine which still needs to be completed. He also wants to improve his family´s aqueduct. His brother had captured this owl, I´m not quite sure how, or why he still had it. He did say that they don´t like them because they eat the baby chickens.


I celebrated my Birthday in my site which was a great time. I invited a few of my neighboring volunteers to stay over the night. Kevin, Ryu, Brandon and Sara all came over. Sara brought back gifts from my family from her recent trip to the states. We made fried rice for ourselves and my host family. My host sister also made Johnny Cakes which is like a form of bread you can make without a real oven. They come out looking like buns, or bagels without the hole. I opened my presents, and then someone through flour on me. I still can´t figure out who it was because it was really dark. Apparently, this is a Panamanian tradition. I think it comes from the fact that the load up their piñatas up with flour, so when they break everyone gets white. They couldn´t afford a piñata so i guess they just throw the flour instead.

Later that night my friend Kevin brought a special present. When he showed up he was carrying a cubo. Cubo are 5 gallon buckets that are used for everything here from storing food to doing laundry. Kevins cubo was fool of ice and beer. We had a great time just catching up on our sites, and talking about all sorts of things from politics to why living in the campo can be suck sometimes.

Rather than walking down the stairs from my house ,putting boots on and crossing the muddy path to use the latrine I always pee off my porch at night. Now it was quite dark this night, no moon, and we were using a few candles out on the porch. Someone looked over at the side of the porch we had been peeing off and noticed that it had been peed all over!!! Cochino! ( see pics below) No one ever confessed to who it was.

Kevin, Brandon and Ryu