Set up to fail

Just days before I left on vacation to the States, I received disturbing news about the water project in Paletales and Almendras. A SANAA técnico previously uninvolved in the project and a new temporary SANAA engineer from Tegucigalpa had visited for the first time, re-surveyed the communities in half a day with their altimeter and industrial measuring tape, and promptly declared that the entire two months of work done up to this point is useless and has to be re-done.

They say that the dam is leaking on both sides and is so poorly constructed that it isn’t even backing up water behind it. They complain that the month-old storage tank in Paletales that the Canadians came all the way from another continent to help the community build is too small, and lacks valves in the right places. Furthermore, according to them, both of the tanks have been located in inappropriate places and storage tank for Almendras has to be relocated even though all the materials for the tank have already been carried there and the hole for the foundation has already been dug. Oh, and the 4 kilometers of foot-and-a-half-deep trenches between the water source and the communities that have taken almost two months to dig are too shallow, too circuitous, and go in the entirely wrong direction such that water from the source couldn’t possibly arrive at the community storage tanks. They lambasted the foreman for his supposed incompetence, even though until now, no one from SANAA has ever bothered to meet him even once since early May when he was first hired in a praiseworthy, rapid, after-the-last-minute effort by Alfalit to get a foreman immediately upon the Canadians’ arrival, when the two that SANAA supposedly hired stopped showing up because SANAA wasn’t paying them. Although it is the responsibility of SANAA to provide a supervisory engineer for their projects, no such engineer has ever visited the foreman to give him detailed instructions, designs, or any requirements of the structures that he is supposed to build. Furthermore, it was two engineers from SANAA who measured out the dimensions of the storage tank in Paletales, thus making it too-small. It was also a SANAA engineer (of course a different one from all the others previously mentioned) who chose the faulty storage tank sites. Not to mention that the foreman has repeatedly requested materials from SANAA since early May, including valves for the storage tank and rebar to reinforce the dam, without any response to date.

When all of this came out three weeks ago right before my vacation, I wasn’t yelled at specifically by anyone at SANAA or Alfalit but I felt the obvious. Doesn’t the gringa have a masters degree in hydrology? Wasn’t she sent by the Peace Corps to be a technical help rather than a disguised hindrance who needs her hand held? How could she have possibly messed up this badly and gjven recommendations to build a system in which the water wouldn’t even get to the communities? And even worse, I imagined the thoughts of the community members who had trusted me when I gave them direction to dig trenches in the “wrong” direction: Doesn’t the gringa have any respect for the time we left our fields where we grow the crops that feed our families, and instead worked on the water system? Doesn’t she appreciate the backbreaking labor of digging kilometers of trenches across steep, jungle-covered hillsides with only picks, shovels, and human sweat? How could she seriously ask us to do all this work over again because she messed up the design the first time around? At least all of that was definitely what I was thinking to myself.

But the fact of the matter is that I was set up to fail. I designed this water system from a topographic study done three years ago by someone unknown to me. Actually, there were two studies done by this same unknown person and a hodgepodge of handwritten notes. The two studies don’t jive in key locations in the water system, and the notes were left to me by the engineer who was previously my local boss until this past March, but who now refuses to speak to me because I started working with other engineers instead of letting him cloister me as his personal assistant. Numerous times I expressed my frustrations and doubts with the quality of the data that I had been given to both of the engineers I now work with, but they continuously brushed me off because they were too busy. I even tried to check the study myself with my own altimeter and GPS because they couldn’t or wouldn’t loan me theirs, but mine ended up breaking and so I couldn’t verify the study one way or the other. For months ahead of time I reminded the engineers that the project needed to start when the Canadian group arrived in May, and that materials and a contracted foreman needed to be in the community by that time. Of course, none of this happened and this project was virtually ignored no matter how many times I asked for supervision or support. In the end, I could only assume that no response from them meant that I was to use my best judgment. Unfortunately my best judgment was based on what SANAA now claims is a totally bogus topographic study, and my complete lack of construction experience.

Of course what stings most is that SANAA isn’t entering the picture until now, two months into all the hard work that has already been done. They have been utterly negligent in their supervisory responsibility, which in the end makes everyone look bad, not just them. And as far as I’m concerned, they’re well on their way to re-damaging their relationships with my organization (given that I will recommend that they not get another volunteer when I leave, just as the volunteer before me made the same recommendation), with Alfalit, and especially with the communities. SANAA has a particularly bad reputation in the rural areas around Olanchito because of previous promises that the institution has made and not kept. This type of mistake is one more reason why a community leader told me today that although he is willing to work hard for a water system, he has no faith in SANAA’s decisions because they keep changing engineers and “each one undoes the work of the previous one.”

I couldn’t agree with him more. But to be fair, the blame doesn’t lie with any particular engineer that has worked on the project. Of the few SANAA-Olanchito employees that actually work in my office, the engineers work the hardest. They do all the administrative work they aren’t getting paid to do while the politically appointed administrators, who have earned their jobs through nepotism and cronyism, watch World Cup games in the reception area all day. For reasons I don’t understand, they aren’t given funds for new hires that could reinforce them, so they are forced to manage and visit up to 45 projects at a time, projects which are so widely spread over the extensive and remote departments of Yoro, Colón and Gracias A Diós that they regularly travel and work day and night. And they resign themselves to accepting blame for a lot of what goes wrong with their projects, even when the blame isn’t theirs but is the fault of the institution that sets them up to fail.