From Guatemala: First Impressions

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

We arrived at the Villa Toscana, near the airport in Guatemala City an hour ago. The going rate per person for the triple we requested is $25 which is darn cheap for the quality of hotel. Due to Guatemala City's danger at night, we ordered from the hotel's delivery service. I write this blog on an empty stomach as my $9 chicken ceasar sandwich is on its way.

Tomorrow we plan on meeting with Hugo, a student at a university in Guatemala City, who has offered to translate and provide us answers to a lot of our general gringo questions like how much tip and what's the cost for tuk tuks, a small cart transportation that's common in Guatemala.

After meeting with Hugo we are going to meet with Vicky, whom we believe is also a student and is connecting us with ERIS, a group of engineering students who have taken it upon themselves to study the Lake Atitlan's transformation in hopes of developing solutions to the environmental crisis.

Vicky also has worked with Harold and Stephanie (a UC Davis grad student working under direction of Prof. Eliska Rejmankova) on a pilot vertical flow wetland system (identical to the one I helped build at UC Davis) in Santa Catarina, a town by the Lake.

Harold built this system with Stephanie on his previous trip in April. Vicky has expressed interest in us adapting the system for Tzununa, a small village by the Lake. We will learn more about her work during our meeting tomorrow.

For now, our food is about to arrive and my metabolism is beginning to slow down, reminiscent of a mid day during Ramadan.

Imaan Taghavi, undergraduate, Civil Engineering, UC Davis

Comments

Welcome to the UC Davis Blum Center Blog!

Here you will find updates on our organization, and blog posts written by each of our Blum Fellows about their experiences abroad. Make sure to check out our website at blumcenter.ucdavis.edu, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/UCDavisBlumCenter to get regular updates and see our upcoming events.

Manufacturing in Phnom Penh by Purva Juvekar

During winter and spring quarter 2017, my teammates and I (Team WASHOut) designed a sanitation station using a Biosand Filter. This was our effort towards providing clean water to students in floating schools on the Tonle Sap lake. We were provided with the opportunity to go to Cambodia and implement our project in person through the Blum grant, and we worked with Wetlands Work!, our clients for the senior design class. Figure 1 Rendering of Sanitation Station We spent our time at UC Davis designing the station – sketches, CAD models, renderings, dimensions, engineering analysis and testing. We made a prototype in Davis, which we showed during the Senior Design Showcase in June, to test flow rates and water quality standards. The next step was to take the design to Phnom Penh and manufacture it there. We got to work as soon as we got there. My teammate and I were introduced to people on the WW! team who could help with translation, and we began scouting the city to fin...

Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Closing, By Abe McKay

Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Closing (3 of 3) 2017.09.12 In my second week in Kenya, I was back to visiting farmers, both with Vibrant Village and through other connections. However, I receive my biggest surprize in between site visits. I was walking with Ernest Kulali, a field officer and farmer from Vibrant Village, and he was telling me about the effectiveness of farming techniques. Using traditional methods, Ernest was getting 20kg of maize (corn) in a season from his shamba , his farm . When he switched to using purchased seeds and fertilizer, the same land produced 360 to 540kg of maize. What!? I had him run the numbers by me again, 20kgs → the range of 400kgs. I still didn’t believe it, but Nick the Vibrant Village director later agreed that farmers were seeing that magnitude of increase. Not just doubling their income/food supply, but a twenty-fold return! Further farming modifications will not yield as large a jump, but that sort of scale encouraged me that changing te...

UC Davis Blum Center for Developing Economies

Search This Blog