Week 2, By Nicolas Dante Dilliott

The second and third week of the trip flew by as our days were jam packed with work. We would get up everyday at 6 to make breakfast at 6:30 so that we could arrive on-site at 8 am. We would have a meeting with the contractor and labor to go over goals for the day and work on site until 5 pm (we would do half days on Saturdays and generally take Sundays off). We would eat dinner right after until 6:30 pm. After that would usually spend an hour or two typing up our field daily reports as well as make any important revisions to our plans that happened frequently due to site conditions. We would usually be completely done with work around 8 or 9 pm. A couple of nights we had to work later due to the necessity of making further design changes.

The project was running just about as smoothly as it could be. The only problems we were running into were due to site conditions that we couldn’t have expected. We had to change the design of our sedimentation chamber and valve chamber on our spring catchments because we couldn’t excavate anymore into the side of the ravine. We had to expand part of our first spring catchment because a community member identified another spring that we could connect to the major catchment. While these did include delays to our project schedule I had made sure we had plenty of slack when scheduling out the project during the school year and it was luckily just enough to accommodate our design changes.

For two days during the project we learned how hard the community members were working hauling the material down the ravine. We didn’t have enough workers to move down all of the sand/aggregate mix and cement so we decided to pitch in and carry buckets down. Now what looked like a cakewalk for the community members who could do this all day left our team taking a well-deserved lunch time nap and making it one more hour after. I cannot really describe how hard the community members would work, and there would be old men in their 60s working right alongside men in their 20s and 30s. It was quite motivating to see how hard these community members would work for this project that would benefit them all.

We would spend our Sundays sightseeing. Now where we were staying in Peru is in the beautiful sierras and we were in a gorgeous valley with mountains all around us. I spent my free time going on a couple of local hikes but as a group we visited the city of Cajamarca which holds a deep historical significance in Peru. It holds famous archaeological sites like Cumbe Mayo which displays the ancient Incans ability to engineer water distribution systems as well as being the site where the spanish conquistadors landed and held atahualpa (Incan Emperor) captive.