I´ve been on the computer a lot lately (obviously), on FB, checking email, reading the news, etc. becuase I really do have a lot of free time down here. Plus, practically every place in this small mountain town has wi-fi. I´m super glad I brought my iPhone with me becuase in the past, I´ve never thought to do it. I´m even kicking myself a little for not bringing my laptop, as I have a TON of great pics that I look forward to uploading when I get home. So, if my updating is annoying you, feel free to ¨hide¨ me, but if you´re still interested in reading my updates (obviously, if you´ve gotten this far you are), thanks for joining me once again :)
For those of you who are wondering what´s been going on with the orphanage, I want to give you a few more details about what exactly transpired that has lead to the most recent, major event, which is the water situation. On Saturday, after I blogged, I went out with Lourdes and she helped me navigate some of the ¨clothing stores¨ here in Copan. Basically, if you´re looking for clothes here, you have two options. Option one is to buy the ¨name brand¨ clothes for a bit more money. In reality, you´re getting rip-off designer clothes (Abercrombie shirts do NOT go for $10 anywhere that I know of), or you can hit up the stores where Goodwill clothes go to die. We picked through a vast assortment of clothes trying to find stuff that we thought would fit the kids. We hit a couple of stores for several bags of clothes, socks and underwear (about $150 worth, so you know that was a lot) and then she came with me up to the orphanage (in all her life, she had never been). When we got there, the place was crowded with foreigners (missionaries), who had come with bags full of stuffed animals, Beanie Babies, etc. The kids and adults were crowded inside blowing bubbles, holding kids, etc., so we decided to wait outside in the Tuk Tuk for them to leave. After a few minutes, some of the kids came out to see me and you could tell that the missionaries were curious as to who I was and what I was doing. I got out and asked one of the guys where he was from, what he was doing, etc., and he told me that they were from Tennessee on a trip with their church. He went on to tell me that they had brought a general contractor with them, so I immediately asked if he could give me an indication as to what was going on with their water system (or lack thereof). While we were outside talking, a few other guys came over and introduced themselves, all about my age and all extremely friendly. Then, a couple of minutes later, one of the girls from inside came out to tell me that ¨the director¨was coming because she wanted to meet me. I had mixed feelings about this, but knew that at some point, I´d have to make contact in order to do something better for the place.
She came about 15 minutes later and began our conversation by telling me how grateful she was for the help. She told me that she´s really struggling and doesn´t have the $$ to suppiort the kids and that feeding all of them is really expensive for her. She told me about her 14-year-old son who died a number of years ago, falling off a mountain, and how after, she founded the orphanage. I still can´t say I have full trust in her, after all, it´s hard to when you´ve heard so many bad things, but I have to say that she struck me as a genuine woman. I may never know, but at least I walked away feeling better about the situation. We went outside and all had a good look at their water reservoir outside and she began explaining to me what was wrong with it. She told me that years ago, she had a pump, but that it had blown out and she couldn´t afford to fix it. You see, all houses down here have reservoirs in the ground, but getting that water into your house and into the tanks is another situation completely. As it stood, there was no way to get the water from the ground into the tanks that sit on the roof of the second floor. Once you can get water to them, gravity does the rest. So, as she was explaining all of this to me, and I was trying to translate to Eric, another guy, Luis, comes over and explains that he lives in a nearby city (but he´s working with the church on their trip), speaks Spanish (obviously) and has an uncle who works at the church here in town and does this kind of work. I passed the convo off to him so that he could get some more specifics, and a few minutes later, we knew exactly what needed to be done.
This morning, I went to meet Luis and Eric at the local hardware store. We looked at pumps, then went back to the church to meet his uncle. From there, Eric diagrammed a plan and the uncle and I were on our way up to the orphanage for him to check it out. His buddy came up as well, and we inspected the place for a while, with them talking back and forth and me trying as best as I could to understand a foreign subject in a foreign language...lol
The uncle (Jose, I think) and I went back to the store and for the next hour or so, he and his buddy put together a list of everything we needed. We opted to trade up for the delux pump so that we could be a little more certain it would have enough pressure to get the water all the way up to the two tanks. With parts, everything came to about $275 and they´re going to charge us about another $200 for labor (two to three days worth of work). They´re also going to build a new box to house the main water valve (it was buried in dirt/sewage) and also are going to build a new ¨door¨to cover the ridiculously dangerous reservoir that sits directly in front of the front door. After buying the supplies, they were off to begin their work. I´m going to head up tomorrow with some more groceries and check in on them. I´m kind of holding my breath until Wednesday, when the job is supposed to be done. I´ll let you all know what I find out when the time comes!
Ben
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