Engineers Without Borders – USA, Denver

Hope you receive this message in good spirits. We have visited Malingua Pamba for 4 days and have now returned to Quito. The group has gone onto the famous Otovallo market and the equator today and I have stayed on in Quito to leave in the AM. About half of us got sick with diarrhea, fever, and chills but it only last about 12 hours. Nothing serious. Here is an overview of the project.

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We examined the water right document and found that MP holds the rights in common with another larger village below in the valley (Tenguche). Tenguche is actually a collection of several villages. Together they have the rights to some springs and a diversion from a creek for irrigation. They have a water committee representing the collection of villages. Paulino, the MP president, is the head of the committee. We are looking at the project covering the whole system now.

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They already have a lot of pipe in the ground. Several years ago they got an NGO to provide the materials for the start of an irrigation system. The locals had to plan, design and construct it themselves. They built a diversion and laid the main trunkline ( 9 cm pvc) and also several small tanks and pressure breaks. They must have a high point in the line or air bubbles because the water does not flow. It is thus not being used. They really want help with troubleshooting this system and completing it. It needs the laterals and taps to individual fields. There is really no irrigation currently being performeed in the area now. They only get one potato crop now using natural rainfall. Potatoes are their main food source and we ate them for every meal. They also grow chochos, lupine seeds like beans, as a cash crop. It can handle the summer drought. The soils in Tenguche are more sandy and do not grow p otatoes as well as higher up.

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There is an extensive potabhle water system in place also. Three springs are captured up at about 12,000′ There are taps all around MP and they seem to have plenty of water. The taps are outside houses or groups of houses. In fact there is considerable waste with leaking valves and fittings. Black polyethylene irrigation pipe is the main material. Tegunche seems to be a different story. For the 3 days before we got there they had no water. The story was that someone turned off the valve from the tank in MP. Hard to believe. They resorted to gathering water out of a muddy hole in the ground. The water comes through MP first and then downhill to Tegunche. There is a lot of local jealousy in Tenguche. They are still looking for a Pam. In contrast to MP many of the houses in Tenguche have indoors water taps, showers, flush toilets, septic tanks. This system needs some better flow splitting devices and the locals want a major expansion of it. The main lines seem to be about 1 inch. The quality of the drinking water seems to be fine based on our field screening.

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They are gearing up to put a third story on Pam’s school and we had earthquake concerns. The village was flattened sometime in the 90’s. We gathered info on the concrete and steel design for future earthquake safety analysis. The government is also building another school building next door trying to turn MP into a regional education center. And yet they will not even supply a teacher for the existing school.

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The Malinguans were very gracious hosts and did their best to accomodate us. We slept in the upstairs of the school. The locals moved their beds there for our use. Very damp and wet weather. They had a 4 hour welcome ceremony for us the first day. The band played on into the night the same sounds, not really a song. And we ate lots of potatoes. Brent’s Spanish was a major asset.

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We basically gathered info, got a drawing made of the drinking water system, gained understanding of the drawing of the irrigtion system we had, and made no specific promises. We trained a kid to take read and record from a rain gauge. We did not place any weirs in the creek. Their right from the creek is limited to a stated flow and someone has already decided on the pipe size. We need to meet as a team on our return to Denver, compile all our data, and analyze it. We had difficulty using the GPS units. One did not work and the other did not agree with the map. It may have been how the datum was set. Took us a long time to figure out where we were on the topo.