Building a Dam

So today I built a dam. Well, I helped anyway. We hiked out to our site from the village, which took about an hour, and started clearing out the area. We had been out there for about an hour when almost everyone from the village showed up to help. We had done some of the clearing out and cleaning up the rock but once they showed up we basically stepped back and let them do most of the work. It is kind of a weird thing going out there to do the work and then letting someone else doing it but C_ explained that is the goal of their community transformation projects. One of the key things is getting the people to not view this as a hand out but to get them involved and have them take ownership of the project. We are basically facilitators and provide help when needed. We built the dam where two streams flow together from the mountains in this small ravine. We basically gathered together a bunch of rocks from the area, stacked them up, added a pipe and a lot of concrete and there you go, you have a dam. It ended up being about 3 1/2 foot high and about 10 foot long. It looked pretty good, much better than we could have done on our own. As C_ aptly put it "if there is one thing these people know how to do, it is build a wall." I think we could have finished the project a lot sooner but all the locals took like a 2 hour lunch break and didn't get back to work until it started raining. It rained quite a bit but quit right before we hiked home. I'm glad I didn't have to do a ton of the work today because I haven't been feeling so hot. I think I ate or drank something last night that didn't sit so well. The combination of that and sleeping on a wooden mattress meant that I got about 2 hours of sleep last night. The food here hasn't been bad, just not much of it. We've had rice and then the random piece of meat thrown in a pot to boil. I've been eating but not getting a ton of nutrition. There is nothing more fun than running across mountain goat trails when you're tired. And I'm not kidding about the mountain goat trails either. Today we literally had to scare the goats so they would move out of the way and we could get by. The trail wouldn't be as bad if there weren't places where there had been rock slides. There are some points where you basically have to run for a few feet and just keep moving so that you don't slide off the cliff. Physically it has been pretty demanding. I'm not as sore or tired as when I've run the White Rock, but that is different because you just run and you can put your mind on coast. This takes a lot of focus and paying attention to what you are doing because you can literally fall off a cliff and die. But back to the dam... The end goal of this dam is to deliver water to the village that we are staying in. After the rainy season is over C_ and some other guys are going to come back out and connect a bunch of pipe about 2 miles and run it to the village. He was telling me that during the dry season they can only water their crops about once every two weeks, and hopefully this dam will more than double their water. I also got to see our friend that we brought with us share with a bunch of the locals. While they were working on the dam he got up and started telling jokes or something and within 30 seconds he had the entire crowd listening to his every word. He was speaking in their local language and I couldn't really understand much of what he was saying, but when he talks he has everybody listening to him. When we got back tonight at dinner we found out that we're getting to take the boat home unless something happens, which will be great. Without the boat, the trip back might take us two days. And how often can you say that you took a rowboat across the 3rd largest river in the world?