LLANO LARGO, HONDURAS — The warmth of the cookstove fire belies the blustery wind outside, whipping through the pines and occasionally lifting the corrugated steel roof under which we sit uneasily. I am with my volunteer interpreter/research assistant/daughter, sitting at a small wooden table in the kitchen. We are in Llano Largo, the highest point in Central America and also the client community of my course in international water-system design, Honduras Water Project.
Our presence here is unlikely – less than a month ago, we canceled our planned trip here with the students in the course because civil protests and rioting followed a hinky re-election process for the nation’s president. But a window of calm opened just after the new year, and with barely 24 hours’ notice, the two of us scrambled to travel to this rural indigenous community to gather enough physical data for the students to begin system design.
Our Lenca hosts couldn’t be more kind. Navi, a water board member, has elected to cook for us while we stay in the community, and her hands are busy slapping the dough to form the best-tasting corn tortillas imaginable. She overloads our lunch plates with fried plantains, frijoles indios, eggs, queso (of no particular variety – it’s simply cheese here, making the former Wisconsinite in me wince), avocados, and tortilla after tortilla after tortilla.
Our reconnaissance trip will last only five days, including two days of travel to and from the community on rutted roads and steep, winding curves. That leaves just three days to lope up and down the steep mountains gathering flow data, pipe routes, source availability, and – most importantly – all the attitudes and expectations our client community bears toward this proposed water system.
This last detail is the most important. It’s a premise of my research – and of my course teaching – that it’s not enough to understand the technical constraints of an engineering project. Engineering is about addressing human needs, and so we must understand the people with whom we’re working, from their particular beliefs about the value of water to their community’s political structure to their interactions with neighboring communities. By learning the unique characteristics of the community, we’ll design a better infrastructure solution that meets its needs, not only now but in the future after we’ve gone.
For now, that means enduring temperatures around the freezing mark in homes that are not heated, shivering around the cookstove fire and eating the freshest possible food. It’s a propitious glimpse into the lives of a Lenca community.