Things in Santa Cruz are moving forward!! This is a big deal and makes me very happy. I’ve been here for almost two weeks now. Time doesn’t really mean much at the moment – mostly my schedule is work sleep work and all the days seem to turn into one another. At the moment I am taking a brief break to update you all on my time in Santa Cruz, and also for my sanity! It is looking likely that I will be heading back to La Paz on the weekend or early next week.

After two weeks we are finally making progress in the water and sanitation response. The first week was difficult because there was a lack of information available about the conditions in the affected communities. So, I spent a few days with teams of people gathering data and evaluating the situation in some communities. There are, however, still some communities that can’t be reached by road because the floods washed out a lot of roads and they haven’t been fixed.

Aside from that I have spent a lot of time coordinating the water and sanitation committee, attending a lot of meetings and trying my best to get things done. This has been quite frustrating up until now because no one else really seemed to be doing much! Plus the fact that I was not supposed to be the coordinator of the group because technically it should be someone from the government. I can’t say no one else did anything, but the fact that this is an emergency and there are a lot of people living in tents and schools and other temporary shelters just doesn’t seem to register.

But, like I mentioned, we are making progress! Today we placed an order with a large supermarket for 1000 hygiene kits. This is likely the first batch of 3000 – 5000 for people living in camps and shelters. The kits contain basic hygiene items like toilet paper and toothbrushes and towels. We also purchased 25 metal barrels that are going to be cut in half and used for garbage containers. I also taught about 10 hygiene promoters yesterday and 15 today what information we need to be collecting from the communities that they visit (they are starting to go to communities and camps to do hygiene promotion and are now going to be bringing information back so that we can use it to determine what is required). The committee is also going to start distribution of water containers and monitoring the water quality in affected wells. Hip hip hooray!!!

There are still a lot of things that I would like to see move forward before I go back to La Paz. The person who is going to replace me is here and the next few days I will teach him all I know. It’s amazing how much you can learn in two weeks, and I need to pass it all on in a few days!