Airline March Madness
Spring Break is almost here, and that means S&T students are headed back to Guatemala to do more water quality studies. David Moluf checked in earlier this week when the students finally made it to their destination. Sorry, David, we're just now getting this up:
The GE 352 class has embarked on our second trip of the semester to Guatemala. We arrived in Guatemala City on Tuesday afternoon around 2:30 local time, almost a full day later than scheduled. We also arrived one classmate short of our full contingent, much to our sad dismay. When we left the St. Louis airport on Monday morning, we had 10 undergrads, one grad student, and one favorite professor. While en route, one of the students became super sick, and we made an emergency landing in Little Rock, where an EMT team was waiting to escort the student to the hospital. The student is doing much better now, but we´re not sure yet whether he will be joining us later or not.Due to the stop-off in Little Rock, we were late for meeting our connecting flight in Houston, and the airline said they wouldn´t be able to fit us on another flight until the following day. They were, however, kind enough to set us up with some hotel vouchers (at the oh-so luxurious Ramada Inn) and some meal vouchers as well. Thus, we spent the remainder of St. Patty´s Day soaking up the Houston sunshine and ambiance. (And by that I mean that it was cloudy, and there were planes flying overhead about every 5.4 minutes.)
On Tuesday though, we finally caught a flight south (albeit after about another 3 hour delay at the airport due to high winds), and were greeted with the pleasant Guatemalan spring weather, and the unpleasant Gutemalan customs officials, who wanted to dig through our boxes of scientific instruments. Eventually, they were satisfied that we were here for legitimate reasons, and we boarded our trusty Toyota Haice van for the 3-ish hour trip to Chichicostenango. Everyone was pretty zonked after all the traveling, and we all called it an early night.On Wednesday, we began in earnest with doing our water quality studies at Pastor Tomás´ home. The family was busily engaged in repairing their all-purpose Toyota pickup in the yard, and we did our best to not be a hinderance while testing their household water for various and sundry things like turbidity, bacteria, arsenic, and other exciting nouns. The most exciting part of the whole day, though, was finally meeting Pastor Tomás himself (which we didn´t get to do on our previous trip in January).
This evening and tomorrow morning we will experience some of the holy week festivities in Chichi, and then in the afternoon we will be visiting the Hogar del Niños orphanage in Lemoa to do more water sampling and to follow up on our last visit back in January.
¡Hasta luego!
--David Moluf