Thank you so much for your prayers yesterday for the meeting over the Fresh Water project. Things went well, though maybe not in the way that we had wanted. Let me explain what happened.
First of all, two members of the community that is located next to the camp traveled by bus from Santo Doming and arrived in the big bus terminal in the south of Quito at 8 am yesterday morning (they had to leave at 3:30 from their homes!). I picked them up from the bus terminal and drove them up north where the meeting was going to be. Once we got there and met Santiago, the FACE coordinator for this project, we found out the location for the meeting had changed so we had to drive to another part of town. We ended up being about an hour late but the engineer that we were meeting with was kind and understanding.
In the course of the discussion, this is what we found out. That the office we were at actually could NOT authorize the Fresh Water project for the community that we had hoped; that authorization is given by the local authorities there in Santo Domingo. But, what we did find out is that this division of the government was in fact planning a huge fresh water project for a very large area that encompasses much of the area south of Santo Domingo, in which this community and the camp would be included. This is very good news! It means that the community will not have to pay to do the project themselves. However, there is still one difficulty in that this is a very large project being completed by a very large division of the government and even though the engineer explained that the project should be completed within two years, we have many suspicions that it will take much longer. So, at this point, the community and the camp have a decision to make as to whether they are going to wait and have the project complete by this division of the government or if they are going to try to do it themselves at a much quicker pace.
The day concluded by me dropping the two gentlemen from Santo Domingo back off at the bus station in the south of Quito. Santiago and myself are planning on being in Santo Domingo on September 18th to attend a town hall meeting to discuss these two options and what was presented by the engineer.
The Santiago Partnership