No Hay Agua

Escuela Juan Montalvo, one of the schools where I have a garden project, is located on the top of one of the hills here in town. We did a lot of work to prepare the garden for planting, which we did two weeks ago.  First we had to clean the location. Then we had to level it. I asked the dept of public works to give us a half a dumptruck of fill that they were hauling away from another worksite. Then we had to get actually plantable soil. The teacher arranged that one, and another dumptruck deposited a mound of earth.  The problem was that the school is surrounded by a wall, and the gate was too small for the trucks to ender. Thus, between the two deliveries, we spent about 10 hours of classtime filling buckets, boxes, a wheelbarrow, and probably a couple of other types of containers to carry the dirt inside. File that under things you could not pull off in an American School system.

As I said, we planted two weeks ago. Unfortunately, nothing is growing because it turns out the school hasn't had water consistently for the better part of two weeks.  Water, being a slave to gravity, doesn't make it up to the tops of the hills when the resevoir is low and there is little pressure. Thus, while in most of the city there have been one or two days of outages, none of which were long enough for the tank at my apartment building to run dry, the people who live up towards the tops of the hills have been having to fill tanks in the moments when they have had water and make it last for an indetermined period of time. Yet another reason I'm glad to live where I do.

As for the garden, we were pushing the limits of being able to harvest during the schoolyear two weeks ago. At this point, that's pretty much out of the question. It could be posible to meet at the school in the summer, but I don't really want to do that, and any plans are entirely dependant on having reliable agua in the first place, which probably won't happen until the rainy season comes in January. One more setback and I think I'm telling the teachers that there isn't any point in continuing this year, and that we're better off waiting until next year, when we'll be able to begin by planting. It's too bad for the kids who have done the work, but it's also the only logical decision.