Hi! I’m Nikhita, and I’ll be talking about our experience for our second day working with Cántaro Azul. The day mainly consisted of us building our incubator as per Cántaro’s specifications.

After a light breakfast, we headed to Cántaro, where we immediately started checking the budget that we had for the trip, to ensure that we had enough money to pull out of it to start buying materials for the new incubator.

Antonio then brought us out to the shops to buy all the things that we needed. We had planned ahead and brought most of the materials that we knew would be difficult to find over here over from the U.S., such as the nichrome wire and the temperature control switchboards. We went from shop to shop to buy each of the materials, starting from the USB cable which would allow us to connect the incubator to a variety of different power sources, and then a battery pack, and then the wood and the polyurethane. For many of the materials, most notably the wood and the nails, even the smallest quantity available for purchase was enough to make many models of our incubator.

I hope that once the design is finalized, we will be able to look into how we can cut down the cost to produce a single unit when it starts being produced in larger quantities.

After buying the materials, we checked on the water samples that we placed in the incubator yesterday — the 24-hour test period ended at around 1 pm. We’d realized that we had run the tests on relatively clean water samples, and as such, we knew that we would probably not get a result which would indicate the presence of fecal coliform and E. coli. Instead, we checked to see that the results of the test tubes that had been placed in our indicator were the same as the results that we got from the bag (with the same water sample) that had been placed in Cántaro’s official incubator using the test that they currently use. This was the case, and then we ran the tests again using both the old coliform test and the new test using the IDEXX Colilert test, this time on water samples that we know are quite contaminated.

 

Hopefully, the results that we get tomorrow will be as expected, and the water in the test tubes will have turned yellow! That would be the final indication that we need that our design has been a success; that it is actually functioning the way it is supposed and successfully allowing users to check for the presence of bacteria.

After starting the new test, we then moved on to actually beginning to make the new incubator using the materials that we had bought.  At this point in time, we have made the components of our incubator so many times that our team fell into a familiar rhythm fairly quickly, even though we weren’t in familiar surroundings (i.e. the OEDK). Irene and I mainly worked on making the coils, while Scott and Alejandro started making the box. For some reason, Irene and I struggled to make the coils today — we think it might be the fact that we are using a different brand of nichrome wire than we are used to, and this is more springy, making it harder to hold in place while placing it into the heat shrink tubing. We weren’t able to finish making the incubator today, just because the coils took us so long to make, but we should have time to work on it tomorrow and have it done by the end of the day!

The wood for the box has already been cut, and the next step will be to wire the heating circuit within the incubator.

The folks at Cántaro saw us struggling with the coils today, and helped us find a PVC pipe that we could use to wrap the nichrome wire around instead of just using the test tube. This actually worked perfectly, and we ended up making some of the best coils that we ever have. Really grateful that everyone there is so supportive of us and our project, and so willing to do whatever they can to help.

In fact, they seem to have a fantastic, supportive community at Cántaro. This afternoon, a meeting was held which seemed to involve the entire company, and we kept hearing applause every now and then from the room where everyone was. Later on, they had all moved outside and were playing games, and dancing and singing in a circle. Seeing a workplace like this that seems so inclusive and seems like it takes care of the mental and emotional well-being of its workers was incredibly heartening. It personally makes the idea of going into the workforce someday less daunting for me. Additionally, we met a little kid called Fernando when we were taking a break today. We think that he is one of the employees’ kids, and I think its great that he’s allowed to hang out over there. In fact, the “estate” that the building is in seems to have kids around all the time – there were a few toys laying around outside that Fernando was clearly familiar with. He took an interest in the work, and was tinkering with some of the tools in the workshop. I loved watching his curiosity, and more importantly, the fact that he was allowed to quench this curiosity as he played with the tools.

After we left work today, we went out to a restaurant whose specialty is Caldero, a type of soup with many ingredients in it, like bacon and beans. Was great food.

We came back and decided that we needed to settle our accounts — throughout the trip, we have been spending our money on various things, including cabs, meals and other miscellaneous items, and we have been keeping account of all our purchases in a spreadsheet (who paid for the item, who exactly owes the payer for the item, and so on). After we had gone out and bought all the materials, we realized that it was incredibly difficult to keep track of our individual expenses, so we all had to sit down and spend a good hour trying to figure out who in the group owed who else what amount of money. It also served as a good wake-up call; actually seeing our expenses made us realize that we probably should be more prudent with our money for the rest of the trip.

One thing that I want to note in particular is that thee San Cristobal community is so lively – we went out for a walk at around 10 pm to get some late-night grub, and the town was still bustling with nightlife! Many peddlers, food carts, buskers and pedestrians kept the area alive. It’s interesting to me how it’s clearly very touristy, but life there doesn’t seem to completely revolve around tourism, unlike a few other places I’ve visited. You can still see the locals go about their day in the town; working adults, schoolchildren and so on. I’m really loving what I’ve seen of Chiapas so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing more.

Even though today was such a productive day at the Cántaro workshop and we are well under way in finishing building our incubator, we fell into such a familiar pattern of building it that upon reflection, I’m not sure I have taken away much. Tomorrow, we’ll be visiting some of the communities in which the Mesita Azul has been implemented, and I hope that it will be a good opportunity to get to understand these communities and the issues that they face better. I think that tomorrow in particular will be a good learning experience for this reason.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll make sure to keep this updated!

Nikhita