Skip to main content

From Guatemala: Here's where the fun starts

So here is where the fun starts.

We arrived back in Guatemala yesterday for the start of a P3 trip (for me, this is my second trip). 
We have 3 goals for this trip: 1) To become trained in IMAP's understanding of greywater reuse. 2) To characterize components of the pilot systems including the greywater, the performance, and the clogging rates, and 3) To receive an understanding of the community and its potential interaction with the system.

Through Eliska Rejmonkova, professor from UC Davis and our adviser, we connected with a group of chemistry students at the University of San Carlos (USAC) in Guatemala City and they graciously picked us up from the airport and helped us in searching and collecting reagents and other materials.

We slept in a hostel provided by USAC and today we are going to continue finishing up our materials shopping and then potentially head over to the Lake Atitlan.

Guatemala is just as beautiful as I remember it and we haven't even been to the Lake yet. The fact that I am here with six people closer to my age rather than two people a bit older than myself does provide a much different lens by which I am seeing Guatemala. I know this is going to be a great 3 weeks and I look forward to sharing it with my readers.

Imaan Taghavi, undergraduate student, civil engineering, UC Davis

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...