This is Belen, sandwiched between the city of Iquitos and the Itaya River. Or, in the case of Pueblo Libre, the neighborhood where I’ll be working, extending out into the Itaya River. That satellite image probably doesn’t really qualify as “current conditions,” but it is where I’ll be by tomorrow evening.
Right now I’m in San Francisco, having torn myself free of the Hudson Valley on the heels of a blizzard, after more than a day of wrestling fruitlessly with icy roads and plowed-in driveways. I booked my flight here so that I would have a 24-hour visit in the Bay before meeting the GI crew at the airport. I go to meet them in just a few hours now.
I’m vacillating constantly between the feeling that I’m underprepared, that I need to be somehow “cramming” to get ready for the experience ahead of me; and the more rational perspective that there is no way for this first, short, trip to be anything but preliminary, introductory, and exploratory. And more, that there is no amount of preparation that could substitute for responding with flexibility and sensitivity to the conversations and landscapes I find myself in as I meet Belen.
There is also the fact, I remind myself, that I have put time in. I’ve spent much of the last two months familiarizing myself with the global conversation about holistic, community-participatory, ecological sanitation initiatives. First, of course, by establishing that there is one! To my immense gratitude, there is, and it is extremely well-developed. While the real holistic and community-led projects are still in the minority, their success is well-documented and seem to be generally regarded as the model for future work. To see a not-yet-well-organized collection of traces of that research, go to my collection of sanitation links. I’ll post about particular standout projects soon.
During the same period, I “discovered” and made contact with the folks I call Team 2 - that other collection of groups collaborating on a clinic/water/sanitation project in Belen, that I wrote about here. In short: yes, there is one, and no, they didn’t know about us and we didn’t know about them. Now we do, and I’ll hopefully be meeting with some of their folks next week in Belen.
(In my own private reference system, the group I connected with first
- the GI/PAHO/Bola Roja/Airline Ambassadors/UPCH group -
of course gets labeled Team 1.)
In other news of the thrilling, there is an Engineers Without Borders team in Australia that is working on a design for a floating composting toilet, adapted for the floodplain conditions in the Cambodian fishing villages on the lake Tonle Sap. They were as excited as I was (or nearly, anyway) to discover that there were other folks working on ecological sanitation in a similarly challenging terrain. We are set for some exciting collaboration.
Did I really just describe a composting toilet as thrilling? This work is changing me.
Funnily enough, I only discovered and made contact with the Tonle Sap team last week. It took two months of research that, however fruitful about ecosan generally, yielded just about ZERO resources for doing ecosan in a floodplain. Only then did I say to myself:
To hell with it! Why shouldn’t I just google “floating composting toilet?” What have I got to lose?
About 15 minutes later, I was chatting live with the Tana Tan, the team leader of the EWB-New South Wales Floating Latrine System Pilot project! There may be some sort of lesson here for me, about not neglecting the obvious just because it’s obvious, or something like that.
OK, I’ve been staring at this thing long enough. Meanwhile, there is a sun setting over San Francisco out there. I’m going to go look at it.
I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to blog from Iquitos - probably a little - but have no fear, I’ll be documenting the trip extensively. Even if I don’t end up getting any internet time when I’m down there, I’ll fill you in when I get back.
