My Summer in Nicaragua with EOS: June 25-July 1- My Week w/ David in the Campo

On Monday David travelled from Leon to attend our weekly planning meeting. He had attended the World Congress on Biodigesters held in Managua at the beginning of May and gave a report to the rest of the EOS team. After the meeting and finishing up a couple of things, I travelled with him back to his house for the week in order to do a water boiling test with his stove and to complete a survey of some of the beneficiaries of the biodigesters in the area.

He lives in the San Antonio Valley near the city of El Sauce. It is very rural. They do not have electricity yet, so if families want power, they need to use batteries and solar panels. There is no running water so I had to use an outdoor shower and latrine again. There was actually no cell service either. It was a great week for reflection and speaking nothing but Spanish.

Both Tuesday and Wednesday were the same for me. I hung around the house in the morning because David had work and their two kids had school. This meant that Rosa, his wife, had to be home in order to work at their little store at the front of their house. Then, once the kids came home around noon, their eleven year old daughter Kimberlee could run the store for the afternoon. Therefore, Rosa went with me both days to conduct interviews in the afternoon about the biodigesters. On Wednesday, I also did my first stove test. The reason I am doing a test on David’s stove is because he was willing to hook up an “artisanal” stove to his digester. It is a homemade stove that EOS promotes. It is cheaper than a store bought stove but it is not very nice looking. It is just a metal pipe with some rebar around it to support a pot.

On Thursday, I was able to do an entire day of interviews because the kids did not have school. I also attended a women’s empowerment meeting with Rosa. Friday, I conducted my last two stove tests and also helped David make a tortilla maker, and Saturday I made my way back to San Isidro. Throughout the week, I also helped Rosa cook and helped David with fruit plants. I also had some great conversations with David about his experiences with biodigesters and technologies in general. He is a very smart man who has a lot of experience and knowledge about a lot of different things. He also likes to invent things, like the tortilla maker.

I have not had time to actually process the survey information but there were a couple of patterns that really stuck out. The first is that everyone loves their biodigester, even if it was malfunctioning at the time. They only had good things to say. They have recognized how much it has improved their lives by using less wood and inhaling less smoke. They also love the extra time they have now that they do not have to spend time trying to light wet wood. The second pattern is that people only use cow manure. They would not even consider using any other type. The third pattern is that everyone seemed to have a slightly different management protocol. Some families only added a bucket of manure every two weeks while others were adding manure almost every day.

I am looking forward to processing the information from the surveys and then figuring out additional patterns, strengths, and weaknesses of the biodigester as is and potentially thinking of ways to improve it using the data from my water boiling tests. Things are really starting to come together!