Aaron Antrim’s blog

Yesterday I went on an all-day mountain biking adventure with an Italian, Spaniard, and Switzerlander, and older by me by at least six years. The sights, the company, and the ride were all wonderful. Only the bike was a real pain-in-the-ass.

Starting right at the hostel, Casa Margarita, in Creel, we were able to enter directly into a wilderness area which I believe could be managed by the Tarahama, the indigenous people of this region who have successfully capitalized on tourism by selling crafts and charging entrance to many places, but still practice much of their traditional way of life. They live high up in the bluffs in the summer, and low in the valleys in the winter. They grow corn, beans, and other crops.

The Tarahama are famous for their mountain-goat like ability to travel up and down the canyon sides and hunt deer and play sports over this terrain as well. One of their main hunting techniques is to chase deer off the edge of cliffs onto spikes or traps they’ve set below. They are fantastic runners, and run races of 100km in the steep up-and-dpwn terrain in sandals which are today made of cleverly recycled tire remnants.

We visited “El Valle de Los Monjes,” (panorama above, composite of 5 original images) which the Swiss woman compared to to Brice Canyon in Arizona. There were impressive and colorful spires of rock reaching up, I would estimate, at least 50 meters. I’m assuming that the spires were formed from more durable pieces of rock, and that softer pieces of the original rock were worn away. The backdrop to “El Valle de Los Monjes” is another incredibly green valley. In fact, everything around Creel here in the Copper Canyon is an incredibly lush, including abundant evergreen trees. For this reason, hiking with the Europeans yesterday was especially disorienting. Plenty of folks have commented that the terrain, the grass, and the forests have the appearance of the Swiss alps, and so hearing German and Swiss-German spoken at the hostel made me all the more disoriented. One thing, though: I don’t think you will find a nice hostel with two meals a day for less than $10US per day in the Swiss Alps.

After visiting a lake, the Italian, Spaniard, and I left the Swiss to bike to a waterfall. The ride there was really fun, on very poorly maintained roads through pastures and valleys, and the sides of the canyon we biked up to were tall, making for great views of the canyon below. If, that is, it wasn’t for the thick rain which prevented us from seeing much more than faint outlines in the grey of the air. I’m including this picture of Alex, the Italian, just because he looks so miserable in the photo. Despite the appearance of this photo, though, Alex was having a great time, as he was a very adventurous and positive person. We were all having a great time; even I was after I had two blowouts (one occurred after the first tube was replaced), and I ended up riding on the rims for a few kilometers. It was a shitty bike anyway, and place I rented it from was a rip-off, so there.

aaron :: Aug.07.2006 :: México :: 5 Comments »

Click a panorama for a larger view.

I’m fighting with myself over whether to move on from Creel or stay longer. I arrived Thursday night, and though I will probably stay one more night, I wish I had at least two weeks more. If I really wanted, I suppose, nothing could hold me back, but I feel a need to get back home before the end of August, and, what’s more, I would like to be better equipped for backpacking. As I am traveling right now, I have a large backpack and very big duffle bag filled with extra clothes, including dress clothes for different Parras program functions. I’m even carrying Ajay’s wireless router back to the states for him. In short, I don’t know what, if anything I’m geared up to do, other than be a human UPS truck. I’m definitely a bit too heavily weighed for adventure travel.

Certainly, I’ve packed differently from the Italian I met anoche whose main cargo was his digital camera and all it’s striking pictures of D.F. (Districto Federal, or Mexico City USA folks), and crocodiles in a fishing village. He literally carries only a few other things in a small bag. This example for a mode of travel, especially when combined with the pics, has inspired me. Yes, with Italians one may have to tolerate a certain amount of pridefulness, but they do seem to have some pretty good ideas on how to travel and live.

I’m the only person from the U.S. I’ve met in Creel, and I’ve met many people over the two nights and one day I’ve been here. Currently, there’s only one other person here who speaks English natively, Ruby from Wales. I’ve encountered many folks from Italy Germany, one from Switzerland, one from Span, and many from D.F., which I sometimes end up getting the impression is it’s own country inside México. Though warnings of D.F.’s dangers abound, most of the travelers who have been say it’s an amazing, cultural, and at times beautiful, at other times ugly, city.

I’ve pondered the absence of other travelers from the U.S. here out loud, and one answer I’ve received is that they’re all in Acapulco,, and other resort regions, doing nothing but drinking, laying on the beach, and taking advantage of anything they can that walks on two legs. This is an extremely unfair generalization, only one of which I’ve heard made in the course of some of the US-American-bashing going on here, like, for example we eat large quantities of low quality food, and spend the money that we save by buying cheap food on oversized cars and homes. From this statement you might guess I’ve participated in some of the aforementioned American bashing, and you’d be right. But I’ve worked to cite other to counter some of the nastier generalizations, too.

aaron :: Aug.06.2006 :: México :: Comments Off

The 7:30 bus to Torreon passed me when I was a block away from the bus station this morning, which was a major bummer. I didn’t know that the next bus doesn’t leave until noon, so I’m loosing over four hours waiting for another bus. Come to think of it, it’s kind of like how my solar hot water project went, with delay after delay bringing about a last-ditch effort at the end. Hopefully this trip won’t involve the same stress of the last week of my project.

The last week of the program, I was unable to sleep one night until past three in the morning. In addition to all the excitement and urgent socializing and work of the last week, it was because I just couldn’t feel a sense of closure without our project having been realized. As of last Thursday we had a design document, nothing more, in addition to having done some test to determine the viability of solar hot water in Parras, and repairing a solar hot water system that was built last year and installed at a residence.

Even though I was working in a group of three, I felt ultimately more responsible for what I perceived to be the failure of our project. My group had looked to me to set goals, run meetings, and define assignments, which was a great opportunity for me to work on skills that I know are going to be important in my future. Thing is, though, I found this reponsibility to be especially stressful in a place and situation where just about every action item, no matter how simple, is blocked by all sorts of hurdles, from the difficulty of trying to figure out how to use Skype to call mobile phones here (otherwise it costs $0.33/minute! Telephony is ABSURDLY expensive in México. Thank god for the irrational exuberence of all the telecoms in the U.S. in the late 90’s. Because of them we have so much unused fiber optic line laid that long-distance has almost become to cheap to meter. For more, see Thomas L. Friedman, It’s a Flat World, After All. Wow, digression alert! Back to the topic: the language barrier was always difficult when dealing with hardware stores, Zaragoza #1, the house with the existing solar hot water system, Hotel Perote staff, or just about anything. Plus, we had so much work already and so tle free time that dedicating more of that free time to our project just didn\’t seem easy. Additionally, not having access to good computers whenever we needed them (actually I was the only one in my group who didn\’t have a laptop, which is going to seriously undermine my efficiency and efficacy in any project I\’m working with), or mobile phones ended up making it more difficult to meet, organize, and work efficiently. All these setbacks, though, were part of a learning experience about what it is to work on appropriate technology projects in a “developing” country. I put developing in quotes because México and Parras are hardly developing . There are more new cars on the streets here than in Arcata! But in some respects, as with any country, México is still developing, and it provides a kind-of halfway simulation of a developing country experience for a \nU.S. student.Hotel Perote owner Ignacio “Nacho” Chacon was on vacation for a week in Hawaii last week, and so when a staff member at Perote went to Torreon last Monday to pick up supplies for our project and found out there was a problem with Nacho’s check (banks and stores are REALLY picky about checks here), he wasn’t able to get any supplies for our project. After the night I couldn’t sleep, I called Nacho’s mobile phone in Hawaii and got permission to go with Fernando to Torreon, put all the supplies on my tarjeta de credito, and be reimbursed by Nacho after his return. Nacho had thought materials would total around $150-200 USD, but I told him it could be more like $500. “Whatever it is, I will pay it,” he said. When I told Edgar about this, he was really impressed. He said Nacho will sometimes just choose people who he trusts, and with those people money is not an issue. The project ended up costing more than $700 USD, which Igacio expediently paid to me yesterday morning over breakfast at Perote.

I went to Torreon with Fernando the morning of the last official day of our program to get supplies. I never thought I would appreciate Home Depot as much as I did. Everything in one place! So differenet from the countless fereterias in Parras which, though convieniently located, and helpful, often don’t have what you\’re looking for. Directly after getting materials for our project on Friday, I went to the goodbye party for us, which all the host-madres organized. People were crying at saying goodbye — some were getting ready to depart immediately after the party that afternoon, photos were being taken, and I was gearing up to complete our project (actually, first I just wanted to head up and go swimming). Everything happened on very little sleep the whole week. Thursday night I had slept less than 4 hours.

The next morning when I visited Hotel Perote, a hole was already being cut in the adobe wall to run the PVC pipes up to the rooftop solar collector from the pumps. I was excited but got let down when I discovered we had the wrong pipe: Home Depot didn’t carry the one-and-a-half inch schedule 40 PVC we needed, and so had given us something different. More delays, another call to Igacio, more gasoline and toll-road fees, and on Monday morning, 7am, I was back in the non-airconditioned Chevy truck with Fernando, headed for a run-around in an ugly city of a half-million people to get more and different supplies on Monday. That afternoon the solar collector had been constructed and was on the Hotel Perote roof.

At one point I was working with about five Hotel Perote staff on the collector, so it went together really quickly. I learned some about plumbing from working with those guys, and I’m sure I could learn a lot more. Lonny (our AT teacher) says that plummers in this town are as numerous as software developers in San Francisco, and he seems to be right, though I’m not sure why it’s such a common skill. It was quite a scene, being the sole gringo working with all these guys. No one spoke English. I was able to communicate the design of the system, and a little more, but not much more. I shared their break with them and some Coca-Cola, and got a better look at these beautiful brick dome roofs they’re putting on seven new rooms being built. I wish I had pictures.

I went to Torreon with Fernando the morning of the last official day of our program to get supplies. I never thought I would appreciate Home Depot as much as I did. Everything in one place! So differenet from the countless fereterias in Parras which, though convieniently located, and helpful, often don’t have what you’re looking for. Directly after getting materials for our project on Friday, I went to the goodbye party for us, which all the host-madres organized. People were crying at saying goodbye — some were getting ready to depart immediately after the party that afternoon, photos were being taken, and I was gearing up to complete our project (actually, first I just wanted to head up and go swimming). Everything happened on very little sleep the whole week. Thursday night I had slept less than 4 hours.

The next morning when I visited Hotel Perote, a hole was already being cut in the adobe wall to run the PVC pipes up to the rooftop solar collector from the pumps. I was excited but got let down when I discovered we had the wrong pipe: Home Depot didn’t carry the one-and-a-half inch schedule 40 PVC we needed, and so had given us something different. More delays, another call to Igacio, more gasoline and toll-road fees, and on Monday morning, 7am, I was back in the non-airconditioned Chevy truck with Fernando, headed for a run-around in an ugly city of a half-million people to get more and different supplies on Monday. That afternoon the solar collector had been constructed and was on the Hotel Perote roof.

It’s really difficult for me to understand and follow Spanish slang. I feel like if I am talking with educated people, I can understand almost everything they say, because they follow all the grammar I have been taught, and many of the words they use are latin-based and so they have similar-sounding English equivalents (cognates). But with these guys… about all I could make out was “chinga” and “wey” used about twice each in every sentence. Chinga means fuck, and whey is sort of like man or dude, as in “Hey, man, what’s up?” I’m not sure if whey is gender-neutral, though.

I think most of the guys who were putting this system together with me were pretty skeptical it will work. I hope it does, to demonstrate that solar hot water is a viable technology here. It should be, as they get more sun in the winter, and it rarely drops below freezing, making the risk of bursting pipes less. I’ll be able to get a report when Igacio visits his cousin (Prof. Francisco de la Cabada) in Arcata this winter. Gotta go catch the bus!

aaron :: Aug.03.2006 :: México :: 8 Comments »

Either today at 2:30, or early tomorrow morning, I will be on a bus leaving Parras bound for Torreon.  It’s a sad and happy picture, as one can expect of any departure.

I finished my project Monday.  Actually, it’s not finished, but has reached a stage of completion.  For those of you who don’t know, I was building a solar hot water system to heat a pool in winter at a local hotel.  Our team had drug our heels too long, and we paid in the end by having to make a last ditch effort to pull things together.  The main reason I’ve stayed in Parras longer than I planned to was to wrap things up at Hotel Perote.

It’s remarkable how well things wrapped up with the project, considering I was so nervous about it.  The owner of Hotel Perote has been gone for over a week, and he just returned last night.  I worked with his staff to buy the materials in Torreon (about one and a half to two hours driving from Parras), visiting Torreon twice.  I never thought I would appreciate Home Depot as much as I did.  In Parras, you end up going to about 5 different fereterias (hardware stores) to find a role of duct tape (but there are 2 on every block).  Then I assembled the the system, with as many as five Hotel Perote staff helping at once.  Remember that no one besides Igancio Chgacon (the owner) and his daugher speaks English at Hotel Perote, and you’ll understand why I am pleased with what we were able to do.

I wish I could post pictures of the solar hot water collector in its interim state of completion.  Unfortunately, Ariana left with her flash card reader, and my camera doesn’t seem like talking with P.C.’s or Linux boxes much.

In the meantime, you can check out our still unfinished write-ups at appropedia:
Parras Solar Hot Water for a general description of solar hot water potential and projects in Parras.

See the Hotel Perote page for specific details about the Perote
system: Hotel Perote Pool Solar Heating System (Appropedia)

At this point, the Perote document is all in future tense, but much of it will soon be changed to past tense.  Since these documents are on a wiki, correct any errors you see, or add comments. Just click “edit” at the top of your browser window.

I wish I had more time to recount some of the things I’ve done during the last several weeks when I haven’t been making any regular blog posts, but I’m anxious to leave Parras, see more of México, and make my way back to the states pronto.  One of the topics I want to write about is the play we wrote and performed, entirely in Spanish, in a local theater here.  It was losely based on a telenovela (soap opera) that everyone watches.  I’ll have to work my way backwards from this point, I suppose, in my blog.

From here, I’m off first to Torreon, a new and uncomfortably hot industrial city I don’t like very much, from which I will catch an 11 hour bus to the city of Chihuahua in the state of Chihuahua.  From there, I will explore the Baranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon) by train and maybe a little by foot.  Last night, I saw my host-dad’s home video of his trip last year to the canyon.  Looks amazing.  In the canyon, I’m going to be making my way to Los Mochis (or some variant spelling).  Ignacio Chacon has a friend who owns about half of Los Mochis - restaurants, hotels, etc. - and he has given me his info.

From Los Mochis, I will be traveling back to California, bound for L.A. via Tiajuana.  I’ve heard this bus ride is about 18 hours.  If I can get a cheap airline ticket, I’ll take it.  It’ll be my first visit to L.A.  I’m super excited that I’ll be able to stay with a friend from HSU and hang out with friends from HSU and Bard in L.A.

That’s the plan, anyway.  I’ll keep you posted.  I wish I could take more time with this email to really spill everything about the last  week: the goodbyes (I’m next to last to leave), the ups and downs of my project, my host family and the people of Parras, but it’ll have to wait until a little bit later.

Hasta pronto!

aaron :: Aug.02.2006 :: México :: No Comments »

11 July 2006

A note on the photos on this page: if you click any photo, you will go to a larger view of the image in the Parras 2006 online gallery, where you can check out other photos. Unfortunately, there are very few photos of me, because I have posted most of the photos we have in our group’s gallery. I’m working on changing this.

I keep getting more and more behind on my blog posts, but I want to get it all in, so I’ll need to step it up a bit. After our program visited General Zepeta, we began a natural building unit, which meant getting out of our classroom and getting covered in the muddy clay substance which is used to make adobe bricks. By the end of the unit, everyone had blisters on their hands. Many had hurt their feet, and were feeling glad for getting their tetanus booster shots before they came. Even though it was hot and exhausting at the time, now everyone misses building adobe bricks.

To make adobe, you start with a wet mixture of sand and clay. It was unnecessary for us to mix sand and clay because the soil which was delivered had a lot of clay in it already. We let our mixtures sit overnight in a Mount Saint Helen-shaped mound, the crater filled with water, so that the clumps would dissolve. The next day, we mixed the material with our feet, and added in paja, or straw, which provides the tensile strength to hold the large adobe bricks together as one unit when they are dry. It’s not 100% necessary in areas like Coahuila, where there is little seismic activity, but still a good idea. The completely mixed substance is then “cut” using hoes, which chops up whatever dry clumps might still be in the mixture, and pulled away from the pile to be loaded into wheelbarrows to be hauled away and made into bricks.

The forms used to make Adobe are called adoberas. They are filled with the adobe “dough,” as I’ll call it here, which is pounded and kneaded in so that it fills all the corners without structurally-unsound air pockets. If the adobera is wet and clean when the material is put in it, it will lift right off after all the material has been placed in it, kneaded, and the top has been smoothed off. What is left is a wet adobe brick in the shape of a brownie, about four inches tall by one foot wide by one and a half feet long, which will dry in a few days. For the structure we were aiming to build, which, unfortunately, will not be seen through to completion while we are here, 1,400 of these very large and heavy bricks are necessary. We were able to make about 1,000 bricks. The remaining will be purchased from an adobe brick maker.

One of the reasons Adobe is an appropriate technology is because of its thermal properties. The old houses here are exceptionally cool and comfortable during the day, without air conditioning, because the Adobe bricks slowly absorb and hold heat throughout the day, heat which would be making the interior of the home uncomfortable if it wasn’t held by the adobe bricks. By the evening, the adobe walls will have absorbed a significant amount of heat. As the air cools, the opposite heat exchange that occurred during the day will occur, and the adobe bricks will cool as they let off the heat they absorbed during the day, warming the interior of the house during the cool night. Recognizing the utility of these thermal properties requires taking a different approach than is conventionally taken in U.S. building codes, which recognize only insulative material. Adobe, since it transfers and absorbs heat, is not insulation, but thermal mass. Even in Mexico, where adobe had been a popular building material for a long time, it is not impossible to get a bank loan to build an adobe structure. As to why this limitation is in place, I am not sure.

Another reason Adobe is an appropriate technology here is because the materials for it are all locally available and so they don’t need to be imported using fossil-fuel powered transportation. Also, making adobe employs local people. Frequently, appropriate technology implementations are less expensive in terms of materials, but require more labor, and adobe exemplifies this. The adobe bricks are labor-intensive to build, but require inexpensive materials. Especially because of the availability of inexpensive local labor, adobe seems especially feasible and appropriate here. For more on adobe, check out the adobe category on Appropedia, the site our AT program is using as it’s main information platform.

This point about appropriate technology and its high labor need is an interesting and necessary discussion. I admit I am obsessed with efficiency, not only in my own life, when I will confess I have read at least one of those books with someone wearing a suit on the cover telling you how to squeeze more out of your time (it’s really quite good, Getting Things Done, by Greg Allen, a business productivity expert who emphasizes “mindfulness,” a persuit he borrowed from eastern traditions). I will become instantly frustrated and critical if I work with any organization which I think is running inefficiently, and employs too many people and is therefore wasting public money or overcharging their customers because of high staff overhead. This is a distinctly American mentality, which I refuse to give up. At the same time I understand the occasional value of labor over automation, which is such an important reoccurring theme with appropriate tech, and it has instructed my behavior as a consumer for a long time now. When I purchase more expensive organic food, for example, I assume that the food is more expensive because of the higher labor overhead, which is necessary because the “less efficient” farm doesn’t use the same petrochemicals which allow modern farms to get higher yields per farmer. However, I assume (I hope correctly) that the organic products I buy not create more safe jobs for farmers, but also are higher quality. Too often, efficiency comes at the expense of quality in the American economy.

One of my favorite examples of appropriate technology is from our teacher Lonny. He compares Blackboard with Moodle, two online learning management systems HSU uses. Blackboard, an expensive commercial product is being phased out in favor of Moodle, a free “open source” solution. The thing is that Moodle isn’t really free, because it requires a lot of technical staff to run it, whereas Blackboard comes with service and support from company. He estimates that the two solutions actually cost the same but posits that Moodle is more appropriate because running it and refining employs local people and builds our local pool of technical expertise and local economy. Since HSU can build their own refinements onto Moodle, and borrow the open source refinements of others, we end up with a higher quality service.

aaron :: Jul.11.2006 :: México :: No Comments »