Monday-Wed:
For the first part of the week we basically just worked with Matt out at the Community Center again. We continued to finish up the metal chicken-coop design as well as painting cabinets/walls, placing tile, and continuing to work on calcualations and design for the wood-dryer. I can't remember if we've really explained this or not, so in brief summary, this project is basically going to use a large area "solar-collector" which will receive heat from the sun and then channel that hot air into a smaller room where the wood will be placed. In this area it rains a lot of the year, and local carpinters are unable to do there work when the wood gets wet (all well as using newly-cut wood). With our wood-dryer, we are designing the unit so that it will have fans, vents, temperature sensors and controls, and well as a specific area of solar-collection, insulation, and a heat-storage area (maybe a rock-bank) that will hopefully keep the wood drying at all hours of the day. While this project at first seemed almost impossible, Heather has been working with Matt on the physics calculations regarding heat and energy, and Devyn has put in a lot of work on the EE circuits side of things, as well as the rest of our team giving input and feedback. I don't remember which day, but earlier this week, a couple members of our team were able to drive to San Miguel and actually speak with a carpinter about the project and about using a plot of land to actually build the wood-dryer. Devyn and I talked a lot about which components we would need for the electric circuit, but unfortunately Microcontrollers are nowhere to be found in Guatemala, so the actual electronic side of the design will have to be created in the US and mailed down here to Matt.
Thursday:
On thurday, our group jumped into the projects again. With help from everyone, we were able finish out the chicken coop, and Parker and Cam began documentation on the project which will count for a part of their "engineering internship" this summer. Katy and I did some work on putting up tiles in the bathrooms to protect the walls behind the hand-dryers. Laura and Dillon worked on painting different parts of the building as well as placing tile around the base-line of all the walls (in Guatemala all the floors are tile or cement, and since they are mopped regularly, there needs to be a short border of tile along the bottom of the walls so that the paint doesn't just become dirty brown). In the afternoon, we talked with Marcos (he works at the school in El Gorrion, and he went to the beach with us) and he said that kids were playing soccer at the school. So we all took a break from our engineering work to go visit the kids at the school. We played for a little while with the kids, and then the 5 teachers at the school challenged our group to a "futbol" match (which we lost about 1-8). After this, we got to help hang up some pinatas for the kids to hit (they would do this by blindfolding a child, giving them a 3-foot wooden rod, and then hoping that nobody got hurt as the kids dove in and out of the swinging batter trying to grab each piece of candy that fell out). Overall it was really fun, and that afternoon we ended up going back to Magdelena to play soccer with those teachers once again at the nicer concrete field in town ($3/hr).
Friday:
Yesterday was awesome for several reasons. First, Parker and Laura have both been feeling better after a couple days of feeling sick. Heather was actually still feeling pretty sick (she stayed home for two days), but today she's actuall y feeling a little better finally, so you all can keep praying for her! Katy had a couple of funny things happen to her at the site (ask her about it), and we also finished up doing all the tile in the bathrooms. Since we had some extra pieces lying around, we decided to get creative, and we built a mosaic on the wall of the women's bathroom, and a cross on the men's bathroom. Pretty artistic for some engineers :) Also later in the day, after we were done with our work, Carlos (the SI Art site leader, and the captain of the local running team) brought his group of runners to the community center. Since I work at Super Jock 'n Jill at Greenlake, I was able to bring down a bunch of shoe donation, as well as some gear and shoes directly from the Brooks running company. We were able to hand these out to the local team, as well as a couple of girls who run in Magdalena. Last year I was able to send down some shoe donations, and everyone on the team was still wearing those from before, so it was awesome to give them all shoes and running clothes (they previously had no access to good running shoes/clothing because it would cost way too much). It's great to see them running out here in the mountains and to supply them with proper footwear! (we've also been running everday at 5:15am...)
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