Día 2

Lunes 9 Julio 
On Monday we made it our mission to talk to the people at PEBAL (Programa de Educación Básica Laboral) who had set up those four fog collectors in November 2011. We really wanted their advice about where to set up ours and were interested to know how they chose their site.


We took a mototaxi to their headquarters in San Juan de Miraflores and were told that the director was in a meeting all morning, and that she was very busy and important. We had some questions prepared and with Victor's help added more while we waited in the courtyard. As soon as the director left the meeting Victor jumped up and quickly told her all about our project in the hope that she would make time to talk with us later in the day. He ran back over to us yelling "ahorita vamos vamos vamos!" ("Now!! Let's go go go!!) and we hurriedly followed the director, Ofelia Montes López, into her office.


We (well, mostly Ofelia and Victor) spoke for about 20 minutes about the fog collection project. Being the director of the whole organisation Ofelia wasn't directly involved in the technical side of the pilot project, but she knew a lot about the shanty town in general.


Ofelia told us that: 

• 80% of the shanty town's inhabitants were living on private property, and the other 20% on government owned land. 
• There are 3 main risks for the shanty town's inhabitants (pobladores)
1. Fire: The house are (poorly) constructed mostly of timber and there are sometime accidents when food is cooked over a gas stove or open fire
2. Sanitation: Because there is no running water there are lots of problems with hygiene, especially in regard to toilets.
3. Falling rocks: The hills are covered in loose rocks, gravel and dirt that sometimes fall and damage the houses (and injure people). Peru is also prone to earthquakes (at least one big one every 25 years) making this problem even worse.
• It would cost 1.6 Billion Soles (AU $596 Million) to solve the water problem in various parts of Lima by 2017.

Luis Huaman, a biologist who works with PEBAL, then joined our meeting. He worked on the fog collection project and knew a great deal about the technology- even quoting the same reports we had read for our literature review! Luis was really interested in our project and was keen to be involved, saying he would help in anyway he could. His pilot project was barely a year old, and was collecting less water than they had expected (only 1L/m^2/day compared with 5L/m^2/day in Villa Maria Triunfo- a nearby shanty town) so he was very encouraging of our desire to improve on existing designs.

We made a plan to visit a site that he thought would be good for our investigation first thing in the morning (at 5am- when there is apparently the most fog) and that he could help us update our plan of attack afterwards.

I was so stoked that we had found Luis, his personal experience with such a similar project is invaluable and his generosity and readiness to help was incredible. We're really looking forward to working with him!