Thursday - D3P5

We continued to work towards the close of Thursday, encouraged on the one hand by our forward progress, sobered by the reality that well over half of our effort was going into remediation rather than new construction. Mike and I continued to contemplate optimal placement of the new tanks. Factors in this decision initially seemed to focus on tank height, trying to strike a balance between height of water inflow from the main tank and height of the outflow spigot on the chlorine tank. There is a very limited "sweet spot" for this so that we don't lose available head for filling, yet we don't wind up with a nicely chlorinated foot wash. This may be difficult to visualize so you'll just have to take my word on it. I will provide a hand drawn site map of el rancho to try to save words.

Now,  I will freely admit that this map looks like I scanned it out of 'Winnie the Pooh'. In fact, that is exactly what I did then made a few crucial changes. In any event, we had originally planned to put the chlorine barrels to the left of the large main water tanks,  but the ground slope gently downward from left to right so that there is less height on the left side than the right. More importantly, on the west side, there is a large steel fence post that is essentially unmovable. It effectively blocks the passage way where we would otherwise have sited the tank. Left of the tanks was a no-go. There were no barriers to the right of the large tanks and the height differential was more favorable. The problem with this design was that the valves and spigots on the main tank were facing left. These were fixed and could not be moved. The only way of making this work was to come off the existing valve, place a 90 degree elbow then a second 90 degree elbow to create a U-turn then run 3/4" PVC piping under the large tank stand then use a few more 90 degree elbows and bring the pipe up and run it into the side of the chlorinating barrel. The only, I repeat only, problem with this design is that each system required five 90 degree elbows for a total of 10. We had 2. It was looking like finishing the project meant a trip back to Bocas for a visit to Richards.

We broke for dinner. I got back to the shack and availed myself of the luxury of the camp shower I had strung on a pulley in the non-functional shower stall and had a nice cold wash down. I felt like a million  bucks. While the rest of the group went up to dinner, I made a brief detour to Ramon's house to pay my respects. He came to the porch and greeted me warmly. The sorrow in his eyes was unmistakable and my heart grieved for him. His silence was the sound of ultimate suffering. We said very little but he asked when I would be coming back. I understood that this meant he needed this time to be with his family and that we would have to spend time together at some later date. Very sad as I had so looked forward to spending my time with this quiet and gentle soul. I walked slowly back and joined the others.

Dinner this evening was scrambled eggs, rice, beans and patacones. It did not bother me in the least to give my eggs to Frank, explaining how much I disliked eggs. Frank's comment was that I must be quite a picky eater. I love that kid. Truly, I do. We put a good dent in the bottle of hot sauce that night, which provided even greater impetus to get back to Bocas. After dinner we gathered up empty bottles, the three water filters and a pack of cards and headed back up to el rancho for what was to become the nightly water filtering party. By this point, we would have long exhausted the supply we had carried in so we were now totally independent of bottled water. I was delighted. This was the way it was meant to be done and we were living the example we wanted our friends on Isla Popa to follow. We filtered about two dozen bottles or three liters per person for the night and day to come. We could always make more.