We started off the day at 7:30 with some nice breakfast prepared by our amazing hostel hosts. We caught a bus right outside the hostel to reach Cantaro Azul’s office around 8:30. We were welcomed by the friendly staff and Talia got to be reunited with her friends from this past summer. The first half of the morning was spent meeting the employees, touring the office, and presenting upon our projects. It’s quite the learning curve to speak Spanish in a Spanish-speaking country after only having spoken Spanish in a classroom, but we are all slowly getting the hang of it (and by we, I mean Morgan and I. Talia and Aanu are already pros). We followed our presentations with an early lunch and then headed out into the field with our project helpers from Cantaro, Pablo, Simon, and Lisa.

Eating lunch and hanging with some Cantaro Employees

Our project site is a new park called El Encuentro. The park is going to serve as an education hub for multiple non-profits. Groups will be able to come to the park to learn about sustainable agriculture practices, bioconstruction techniques, water treatment processes, and herbal medicine as well as have a space for recreational activities. Before we got to work, we explored the various parts of the park to get an idea of the full vision for the park.

 

Our work is focused around the building called La Casa de Aqua. The building is to serve as the education center of the park and will house both a classroom / office and a laboratory. The building is made from bioconstruction techniques using mainly clay and straw with wooden beams to support the structure (and Talia helped build part of it over the summer!). The roof of the building will have a rain water collection system that will use both green roofs, coconut fibers, and cement to  collect the water. The water will then go into a treatment system, so the water can be used for hand washing and glassware washing within the laboratory. Our focus is on treating the water after it’s used for hand washing and dish washing.

 

 

 

After seeing the site of the wetland, there is a lot of information we need to figure out. This information includes what type of soap will be used while washing, how often will the sinks be used, the flow rate of the grey water, what is the final quality of water, what compounds need to be removed from the grey water, the types of plants we need, where the water will go after it’s been treated, the dimensions of the wetland, the slope of the wetland and other information related to these questions. After talking with the Cantaro employees, we learned that Las Abejas (another non-profit) has done some previous work with building wetlands at local schools, so we are planning on examining those later this week to gather answers to some of our questions. With all the basic information gathered from the site, we headed to a cafe, Restaurante Taniperla, to do more research on wetlands and the local environment. We spent our time in this cafe looking at our past school projects involving wetlands, looking at the EPA’s wetland manual, contacting other Cantaro employees, figuring out exactly what information we need to gather by the end of the week for use by a future group, and making a decision on where we wanted the treated water to go. We created a pro / cons list for the three placement options of the treated water: put into the nearby river, used to irrigate a garden, or released as infiltration into the nearby soil. We decided upon releasing the water as infiltration because adding piping for the water to flow down to the river would create added costs and maintenance and pumping the water to a nearby garden creates the problem of finding another way to the water the garden when the output flow from the wetland is not enough; However, we want to design the output process in such a way that a garden could eventually be installed if a future group wanted a garden. The rest of the decisions relating to the wetland specifications will be decided throughout the week as more information is gathered.

After we hung out in the cafe for a few hours, the UV Hermanos group and Dr. Loyo joined us for a debriefing session. For what it sounds like, the other group had a pretty successful day too! After gathering more supplies tomorrow morning, it sounds like they will have a fully working prototype done and ready to install! They will also be joining us at El Encuentro tomorrow to get a tour of the park and our wetland site.

The remainder of the evening was spent walking around San Cristobal and eating at a Oxacan restaurant, Los Chapulines. Most of us turned in early to get some sleep and energy for our exciting day tomorrow! We are excited to see what tomorrow brings and to flush out our wetland plan as we gather more information!