Honduras Aquaponics

 This May, I was not with the rest of the 2013 class at OSU receiving my BS in Mechanical Engineering; I was in a rural village in Honduras.

As a graduating senior this past school year, I had a capstone project. I chose the multidisciplinary capstone, which simply means that not all of my teammates were mechanical engineers, and we received a more interesting project.

There were six of us, and not one of us knew much about aquaponics (I for one had never heard of it). But we read a book about it learned that it's a way of growing fish and plants together such that the fish provide nutrients for the plants, and the plants clean the water for the fish (with the help of some bacteria).

By February we had designed a system that we could build out of materials locally available in Honduras (no easy task). We built a prototype on OSU's west campus in March and got it up and running with fish and plants. As May approached, we were fairly confident we would be able to build a working system in Honduras.

Of the six team members, three weren't able to go to Honduras due to prior obligations and visa troubles. The three remaining team members, our faculty project advisor and a translator departed on the first Saturday in May. Graduation was on Sunday.

We faced a number of hurdles, not the least of which were several bouts of traveller's diarrhea, one case of heat exhaustion, and procuring gravel (which we had been assured from the start would not be a problem). In addition, the plastic liner of the fish pond had a hole (which we didn't realize until it was partially full). Then when we got the new liner, we inspected it, found no holes and filled it... only to realize that it was leaking, too! Ultimately we just patched the original liner.

However, we also received immense help from the Overholts, who are missionaries down there and who graciously shuttled us and all our building materials from the hotel to the worksite and back. But what blew me away was the help we got from Carlos, on whose land we were building the system, and the other residents of Siete de Mayo (the village). When we started digging, they grabbed a shovel. Within our first two days there, they taught us a considerable amount about how we would build the system. As we worked together, they asked us questions about how the system was going to work, what they would need to do to maintain it, what they could grow in it, etc. Before we were remotely close to finishing, one man in the village even asked us how he could get on in his land, telling us he had the money to buy it. Their help and enthusiasm for the project has me convinced that they won't allow the system to go the way of so many humanitarian endeavors and break down, but will maintain the system and possibly even spread the idea of aquaponics. We really couldn't have asked for better people to build it for.

Mid-May we planted beans and cucumbers (among other things). Partway through July, Carlos began harvesting full-grown cucumbers and beans (for those of you who don't garden, that's pretty quick for a non-commercial setup). And given that the temperature and hours of daylight don't vary widely during the year, they should be able to continue growing vegetables at that pace (provided they are able to keep it filled with water during the dry season, October to May).

Since then, I personally (not to mention my teammates) have been contacted by more than one person about doing more projects related to aquaponics. I'm so excited about what the future may hold!

Lifeguarding and Car Accidents

There are car accidents on our corner ALL THE TIME.

The people coming down our street get to the 2-way stop, and can't see the cross-traffic (which doesn't stop, as it says just below the stop sign). So instead, many people just gun it and hope for the best. Most of the time this works. Most of the time.

In the two years we've been in this townhouse, I've been on the scene of probably five accidents at this intersection, and heard of several others from the other folks who live in the area.

Case in point: Tuesday morning, I went out on my porch in the morning before work to soak up some fresh air. I'd been out there no more than a minute when I heard screeching tires. I looked over to see a taxi smashing into the side of a red sedan.

Immediately, I threw on some shoes and then ran over to see if anyone was hurt. Per usual - and thankfully - no one was. After that, I went back inside to get some water bottles from the fridge, placed there for just such occasions (which just goes to show again how often these accidents occur).

Anyway, I was thinking about that situation later that day. How was I able to jump into action instantly when I saw the crash? I don't know about most people, but I think my natural reaction to something like that would be to wait for a minute, deciding whether it's my problem to worry about.

But I was a lifeguard for several years. And as a lifeguard, you're trained to jump into action instantly, to run toward the danger.

Being a lifeguard is certainly not as dramatic as being a firefighter or EMT or anything, but in some ways, I think it requires the most diligence focus, the most readiness, and an unusual kind of decisiveness. EMTs and firefighters get a call; something very obvious says, "GO RIGHT NOW."

As a lifeguard, on the other hand, your sign to jump into action is often both far subtler and much more ambiguous: a dark area on the bottom of the a crowded pool; someone who is swimming laps, but instead of being horizontal in the water, they're somewhat diagonal. And if you're not fully alert and diligently watching, you'll miss these things.

And then you have to make your own call; at every moment you are deciding whether what you're seeing indicates that it's time to jump into action. And the time between the warning sign and the moment you must to make the decision to jump, you have at most a few seconds. There's no time to ask, "Is that person in the area of the pool I'm watching, or is the other guard supposed to cover them?"

You just go.

And while the opportunities to jump during my daily life are far less frequent than they are as a lifeguard, they do happen. And as someone who has the training (First Aid, CPR, etc.), I think I want to be the kind of person who fosters that readiness and decisiveness, a visceral inclination to run toward the danger. So even though no one is usually hurt on my corner, it's the perfect training ground for when the warning sign of real need appears.