I have known Fermín for close to 10 years now, and I have always been interested in working with him and Cántaro.  The more I learnt about the organization, the more I wanted to work with them in some capacity.  The first time that I was able to have a project with them was in 2009-2010, when my thesis student at the Tec de Monterrey, Daniel García, worked on the effects of the UV lamp in the Mesita Azul on the plastic components of the disinfection chamber.  (Coincidentally, Daniel went on to get a PhD at Rice after graduating from the Tec.)  There was a long pause during my time in Canada, but I jumped at the opportunity to restart the collaboration as soon as I started working for NEWT at Rice in early 2016.

The reason I enjoy working with Cántaro is that their approach to water development (is this the right term for what they do?) always seemed much better to me: they get the communities involved throughout the process and have their interests in mind, they invest time and effort to evaluate the effectiveness of their work, and they know that they do not hold all the answers, as Su Chen pointed out in this post.

This trip marked the start of a closer collaboration between Cántaro and Rice.  We have outlined our plans for the near future and we will start work on these plans very soon.

I want to thank Horatia, Sophia, and Su Chen for taking time out of the semester to plan this trip, which included raising funds, and for their work in San Cristobal.  They are the first team that I bring to San Cris and I hope the experience has been as rewarding for them as it has for me.

I also want to thank everyone at Cántaro Azul for their openness to collaboration and letting us spend time with them in their offices, sharing their work with us, and driving us around Los Altos.  Sophia wrote a nice introduction to Cántaro here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a special thank you to Sinead Keogh (aka Alina), who spent a week in Houston working with the teams at Rice, and is now hosting our team in San Cris.  I didn’t have a photo of her, so I went ahead and stole one of the team’s photos to post here…

 

-Jorge