A Bullet List Through the Head

A water project sponsored by the NGO FONCODES—a well, tanks and water lines for 47 families—was completed in November of 2011 in Rama Guzmán, a caserío of Callanca. Unfortunately, the engineer in charge of the project did not seem to view as a significant problem the fact that there was no electricity to run the pump, which requires 220 volts while due to the poor quality of the electric service in the area only 140 volts were arriving to the site of the well.

That’s just one of the problems that the water project faced. Here’s a bullet list through the head of some of the irregularities:

• Likely substitution of inferior materials for materials listed in the specifications on the part of the head engineer and the president and treasurer of the citizens’ committee in charge of the project (this is soon to be verified or refuted by an investigation to be carried out by the NGO that funded the project)

• Likely theft of the difference in cost of materials by the head engineer, president and treasurer (ditto as regards the investigation)

• Collection of fraudulent signatures on the part of the engineer’s assistant and use of those signatures to validate documents stating that the engineer had provided training to citizens in how to operate and maintain the well and its electric pump

• Subsequent flight of head engineer to the jungles of the Amazon (after first refusing to answer his phone and finally changing his cell-phone number)

• The aforementioned low voltage at the site of the well (located more than a kilometer from the nearest transformer)

• Subsequent petitions to ElectroNorte (the electric company) to install a new transformer nearer the well and provide new posts and cable for the entire caserío of Rama Guzmán at a cost of 150,000 soles ($55,000)

• Refusal on the part of the president of the citizens’ committee in charge of the project to donate the land on which the well is located after having publicly vowed to do so in public meetings held prior to the inception of the project

• Unexplained disappearance of all the materials left over after the “completion” of the project

• Failure to in fact complete the project; because there was no electricity the well produced no water for over a year after its supposed completion

• Refusal on the part of the president of the citizens’ committee to hand over the key to the well hut so that the electric pump could be tested; refusal of the president to hand over his copy of the specifications so that it could be determined if the specified materials had or had not been purchased and installed

• Refusal of the president and treasurer to attend any public meetings of the committee once word got out about possible irregularities

If you’ve ever had a fishing reel backlash on you then you can appreciate the complex nature of the untangling that each and every one of the elements in this list required.

I won’t attempt to detail how we solved each of these problems; instead let’s take one example, the electricity issue.

The problem was this: not only was the well too far from the transformer but the “grid” in Rama Guzmán was hopelessly outdated and overburdened, implemented twenty years ago for use by fewer than thirty families and now being used by 80-100 families, many of which had simply spliced into a neighbor or relative’s line and were sharing a meter. People had extended the grid by erecting skinny wooden posts or tree trunks and stringing low-tension wire from post to post in order to reach their houses. Where the cable was adequate, trees had grown up and into the wiring, their limbs in contact with the cable, drawing off current. As a result, instead of the required 220 volts, the previously mentioned 110-140 volts were reaching the well site.

ElectroNorte doesn’t hand out projects worth 150,000 soles out of the goodness of its own heart. Many people and a few kindly coincidences contributed to the eventual implementation of the project. Years ago Feliciano Mendoza had rallied the population to petition a plan from ENSA. Each family contributed 15 soles and ElectroNorte technicians came to Callanca, surveyed and measured, determined the number of posts and the amount of cable required, and drew up a plan illustrating the location of each electrical pole, the transformer, etc. The problem was, there was no well project at that point and so the plan didn’t include the well.

 

It would require a novel to recount all that we’ve been through in the pursuit of 80 or so missing volts. First, in November, the JAS (Junta de Agua y Saneamiento or Water and Sewage Committee) in Rama Guzmán solicited a solution to the problem. ElectroNorte proposed a project that would have included posts, cable and a meter so that they could charge Rama Guzmán for the electricity consumed by the use of the pump. ElectroNorte’s solution was that Rama Guzmán should pay the 2,500 soles that the project would’ve cost. This would not have solved the problem, however; without a transformer (15,000 soles) nearer the well to generate the power to deliver 220 volts the pump would not have operated or would have soon burned out due to the low voltage.

I’ll mention only briefly what happened during the following months (bullet list number two):

• First a meeting at ENSA with an enginner named César Manayay about the possibility of implementing Felix Mendoza’s ambitious electrification project for all of Rama Guzmán. He first said the project would be implemented in early 2012; later the date slipped to “sometime in 2012.”

• A trip to Chiclayo with the Alcaldesa of Mosefú, Rita Ayasta, and Victorio, the President of Rama Guzmán’s JAS to speak with the General Manager of ElectroNorte and request implementation of the aforementioned project or an immediate provisional solution to the problem of low voltage at the well site.

• A follow-up meeting with the General Manager in the office of the Alcaldesa in Monsefú. The Gerente suggested a probable solution in “about a month-and-a-half.”

• Following these meetings Engineer Manayay came to Rama Guzmán and made measurements for posts and cable and asked us specific questions about the electric pump and the energy requirements for the well. We asked how long it would take to schedule the installation of the required components; “about a month-and-a-half,” he said.

• A trip to Ocinerg, the oversight agency for public utilities, to discuss the possibility of filing a complaint against ENSA for poor-quality service (insufficeint voltage) in Rama Guzmán. The Ocinerg lawyers encouraged us not to file a complaint immediately but instead to try to work out an amiable solution with ENSA.

• On Ocinerg’s suggestion a trip to the ElectroNorte maintenance facility in Chiclayo. The engineers there have direct control over resources and after consulting Engineer Manayay they promised to look into the matter and give us an answer in a week.

• A week later I called Maintenance. They said that they could not proceed without a formal complaint filed with Ocinerg! If we filed a complaint how long would it take to schedule the installation of the required components? “About a month-and-a-half.”

• Since two weeks of Engineer Manayay’s month-and-a-half had already passed I returned to him for a solution. He said he thought I’d filed a complaint with Ocinerg. When I said I hadn’t, not yet, he promised to coordinate with the General Manager of ENSA and attempt to get the project back on track. I called three more times  during the following weeks. The third time Manayay told me that the problem had now been passed along to another engineer, Enrique Llontop, who was responsible for projects in the Monsefú area.

• I spoke with Llontop; he and Manayay came to Rama Guzmán to investigate the situation. By now I was speaking of the project with such familiarity and confidence that Llontop mistook me for the engineer who had drilled the well and overseen the water project. It turned out that Llontop’s family was from Callanca. Finally, we’d encountered a friendly face at ElectroNorte.

Does this look to you like a setup that would deliver 220 volts?

“About a month and a half” turned into about four months but Llontop came through for us. He secured a transformer worth 15,000 soles from his bosses at ElectroNorte. He put the project up for bids from outside vendors whose work it would be actually to execute the project. That company arrived and began to dig holes for posts and trim trees so that they wouldn’t interfere with the new lines. From that point on only the normal number of screw-ups occurred. For instance a dispute occurred because the road to the well is a private right of way owned by two persons; the property line runs down the middle of the road.  When ElectroNorte installed the posts leading to the well on one side of the road the owner of that half of the road demanded that they be removed and installed in the middle of the road so that they’d prejudice neither party. Everyone managed to shine on in the face of such idiocies and the electric project was finished by November of 2012, exactly one year after it was first proposed.

 

That’s how one and only one problem was resolved. If you multiply the number of bullets in the second bullet list above by the number of bullets in the first bullet list above you get the number of bullets we’ve pumped into our brains over the course of the past year trying to solve all the problems.

But none of that mattered so much on Saturday, January 12, 2013 when Miguel, a handyman from the Municipalidad, arrived at 7:00 o’clock in the morning to drive the golden spike that would connect the two wayward projects; that is, connect the well and its electric pump to the newly completed electrical grid in Rama Guzmán. Was the connection a streamlined, quick, efficient, high-tech procedure?  I’ll let you be the judge:

We’d scavenged about 50 meters of still-usable cable from the 20-year-old cable that comprised the wiring replaced by that of the recently completed electricity project. We carried a roll of this cable, a rickety ladder made out of crooked tree limbs, a length of rope, a wire cutter, a shovel and a machete with us to the well site. We used the ladder to access the electric pole nearest the well. By tying the rope to the end of the heavy electric cable and climbing high enough to attach the cable to the previously erected wooden post and threading the length of rope (followed by the cable) between tree limbs we were able to pass the cable from the first pole to the second, attach the cable, and thread the rope between tree limbs to the next post. In order to accomplish this one person stood on the ladder, another climbed a tree and hauled the cable between mangos and through openings in the foliage. When we got to the final post where the electric company´s cable ended, we pulled the cable taut from below while Miguel affixed it to the post and connected our cable to ENSA’s cable, standing not on the topmost rung of the ladder but in fact on the tops of the two rails of the ladder in order to reach the cable delivering the electric company’s 220 volts.

Digging up one of the electric poles from the obsolete project to use in an expansion of the new project.

At the well site, when we opened the door to inspect the well itself, a few bats flew out of the well hut—a little brick casette housing the well—that hadn’t been opened for a year. Everything seemed still to be in place, nobody had stolen anything nor by the looks of things had there been any serious deterioration of the components. Somebody climbed down into the well on a metal ladder affixed to the concrete casing of the well. He called for us to lower a rope; he tied something onto his end. We hauled up a 1.5 liter plastic bottle half-filled with what had once been Inca Kola and that been floating in the well water for a year.

A few meters from the well hut we dug a “pozo a tierra” about a meter-and-a-half deep, a hole where we could drive a length of rebar into the earth as a ground. We connected a length of copper wire to the rebar and connected the ground to the the wiring that would eventually connect to the control box for the pump. When the hole was dug and the ground installed, we refilled the hole, shoveling in dirt, then pouring in buckets of water mixed with mineral salts, then shoveling in more dirt.

We called Yesenia, a friend who was shopping in Chiclayo, and asked her to buy us a thermo switch to act as a breaker for the system in case of overloads or shorts. Miguel chiseled a few holes in the brick wall of the well hut so that we could insert the ground wire and the wiring that descended from the electrical pole nearest the well. He asked someone to bring him a lightbulb from a house nearby so that he could verify that current was reaching us. The lightbulb lit on the first try! He then chiseled a hole in the concrete apron of the well hut so that we could bring the ground wire up to the height of the switch, tested with the lightbulb again, and connected all the wires to the switch inside the well hut, using a butter knife he’d borrowed from a neighbor as a screwdriver.

We all watched anxiously while he tripped the switch, now connected to the pump. The submersible pump hummed happily twenty feet below us. Next we opened the lever that controlled the flow of water and my friend Victorio climbed a metal ladder on the face of the well tower and looked into one of the tanks. It was beginning to fill with water! It took the 1-horsepower pump about 50 minutes to fill three 2,500-liter tanks.

Finally, we opened the valve that connected the tanks to the community water system. Victorio ran to the nearest house and opened the valve controlling the household’s water and connected a length of hose to the open end of the pipe whose flow was controlled by the valve. I was watching from about 50 meters away. I saw a jet of water shoot out of the end of the hose! Everybody cheered.

I jumped on my bike and pedaled to the houses nearest the well, then to a dirt lane that is the main thoroughfare of Rama Guzmán, shouting, “Hay agua! Hay agua!” (Not “The British are Coming!” but “There’s water!”) I stopped occasionally to watch a family test their connection and confirm the arrival of the water and the force of the water pressure. Later in the day we found and sealed a few leaks in the system but as of Sunday, the following day, every family had its water.

It’s been said many times that water is life; that water is the most basic element that sustains us; but let me say it one more time because on this day it was clear exactly how much truth that statement contains. And the element that sustains life is even sweeter when it’s been a little bit difficult to come by.

One last thought: to the people I’m living with it’s a very, very big deal, it’s a luxury and they’re delighted, when water comes out of a hydrant in their front yard and they no longer have to haul it fifty meters in buckets from the nearest hand-dug well. I don’t know if that thought embarrasses you a little but it definitely does embarrass me. Not that that will keep me from whining about important stuff like too much foam in my latte when I get back to the U.S., but it's worth mentioning.

Yesenia (left) and Victorio (right).