Water

I’ve been working on two well projects in Callanca, one of which has gone so unbelievably badly that I haven’t mentioned it up to now. The other well project went smoothly and we inaugurated the well last week.

These are “artesian” wells; that is, holes in the ground about 40 feet deep lined with cement. An electric pump draws water from the well into an elevated tank and from there the well resembles our water systems in the U.S.—the elevated tank provides water pressure, a system of PCV pipes connects the tank to individual homes.

The Mormons—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as Mitt’s Church—provided the funds for the well we inaugurated last week. They furnished funds for the well itself, the elevated tank, and a “caseta,” a small building enclosing the well. The Municipalidad provided the “tubería”—the PCV pipe—and some haphazard oversight of the project. The people of Rama Guzmán did the heavy lifting, they dug the 40-foot-deep well with the spades they use for turning the earth in their fields and also dug the ditches in which the Municipality laid the pipe.

I was interested in working on water projects because in 2009 I’d briefly assisted in a well project in Puerto Indio, a jungle town in Panama. I learned quite a bit about improvised water systems and that’s basically what the water systems in Callanca are like. They sort of work unless somebody decides to steal half the materials from the project or substitute inferior materials and pocket the price difference or unless the engineer in charge is a dope, which frequently he is.

 Elevated tank of a well in Puerto Indio, 

Panamá, 2009.

In these projects it’s hard to tell if the Municipality is stingy and inept or if the people whom the project will serve are out of touch and don’t know what’s going on because they’re not paying attention. At any rate, none of the beneficiaries of the project realized that they were going to have to dig the well and dig the ditches for the pipe that the Municipality was providing. Nor did they know that they’d have to pay out-of-pocket for almost every item that didn’t have printed on some easily accesible surface: I am a pipe. They had to pay for the meter and connection provided by the electric company to measure the electricity used by the well’s pump; they had to pay for the paint to paint the caseta; they had to pay an employee of the health department to chlorinate the water; when the well started to fill up with sand they had to pay to have the sand pumped out. Finally, when the project was nearly fully implemented, the Municipality sent a truck to haul away all the materials left over from the project, pipe, connections, valves, etc.—items that the community would need for repairs and replacement parts to keep the water system functioning properly in the future. So this will cost the residents money eventually as well.

It’s pretty much every man for himself in public projects in these parts. Or in any project for that matter. When a family is building a house or adding on an addition, a knowledgeable family member must be present full-time to oversee the project and make sure that an adequate number of bags of cement are used to pour the floor, that the bricks, gesso or paint specified in the agreement with the contractor are in fact the bricks, gesso or paint that the contractor uses, etc. Otherwise the builder steals half the materials and charges the owner for them.

The other well that I mentioned, the one whose implementation didn’t go exactly as planned, could conceivably be in operation by February. I’ll have a considerably longer story to relate when and if that happens.