Greece, Day 16: Janitorial Engineer

If you had asked me to predict the top 5 things I would be spending my time on…
no, the top 10 things…
heck, if you had asked me to list my job responsibilities until late into the evening, the point of the day where you get silly, get creative, think outside the box…
even in this moment I would never have predicted that the most critical,
most time-consuming,
most obnoxious part of my days would center on my unplanned role as a Janitorial Engineer.

Imagine you’re a Syrian for a moment.
you make your journey through Turkey,
pay your money to a fly-by-night boat sales company,
land in a strange land, full of an even stranger assortment of Westerners, half hippy, half evangelical, half professional disaster-chasers,
get pulled out of the water,
grab a change of clothes,
get a banana, water bottle, and HEB (high-energy-bar),
and finally sit down for a moment to relax,
to breath in the safe air,
an incomplete trip to be sure, but one that has crossed a critical juncture,
and you close your tired eyes, relax, and breath.

Until your bladder interrupts. Or even worse, your colon.

You get up, take your bag of belongings with you,
and find the loo.
What is that!?!
How does it work?
Do I climb up on it?
Surely they don’t expect me to put my arse on it!?!

I don’t actually have video evidence to corroborate what is occurring behind closed doors, but I believe it involves something along the lines of this:

Which is not as easy at it looks,
as found out through the various broken parts and pieces damaged on our watch (well, not ‘watch’).

I’m not even going to mention the introduction of toilet paper, which, let me tell you, isn’t as intuitive as you may assume.

And given that our toilets are trailer-park quality plastic (literally a single wide of toilets), it doesn’t take much to break them.

Imagine if you had a giant box of cereal with a give-away plastic toy inside, except that the toy was a CPT (cheap plastic toilet).
You love cereal, so you eat lots of it.
You keep collecting these CPTs until they fill a corner of your house, 12 of them,
and finally your mom nags you to get rid of them,
because, seriously, why would you need 12 CPTs in the first place? Three, maybe four at the most.

So you donate your CPT collection to an Assembly Camp that has 1,000 plus different people each day run through the property,
people who have never seen a western toilet,
who have GOT TO GO, but don’t know how…

It is not difficult to predict how things turn out for the CPTs.
They are quickly reduced from the pride of one serious cereal-eating fool,
to a series of daily repairs,
daily phone calls from a dozen volunteers to the one person they know who loves toilets: their Uncle Alan.

So here I am, me and my WASH team, fixing what we can, ignoring what we can get away with, trying to keep the trailer park of CPT’s functioning, which turns out to be a full-time job for a Helluva Janitorial Engineer.

And as I write this, a newly-arrived refugee is opening a Western-world toilet stall door for the first time to find an elevated toilet. They will pause, decide if they really need to go, and be forced by the natural functions of their body to make do, climb aboard, and take aim.

Don’t worry, we’ll be there tomorrow morning to fix it.

Greece, Day 1: Moving Closer to Pigeon Forge

I am 17 years old, a senior in high school, venturing with a group of church friends to a youth conference in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee for a proper dose of Bible teaching, slushy skiing, and flirting. Which of these most sincerely motivated our attendance, I am not sure we know ourselves.
It is the last night there, the night where the musicians play "Just as I am" until every kid within 3 counties is pouring their hearts out to God and country and their nearest friend, I am there, praying, listening, and being called by God for His service.

Embedded in my cautious appraisal of this situation is a sincere heart and clear memory of God asking me to do for Him what he asked. What exactly that was, I couldn't say. A vision, hazy yet certain.

One year later, I declare “Civil Engineering”.
Four years later, I venture beyond our borders to discover the world I will one day save.
Two years later, I am a father, a future daddy of four, and completely out of control of my own destiny. I seek, pray, and search for opportunities to go with God somewhere, anywhere, to do something, anything.
And He is quiet. He certainly seems quiet.
Often I think of that night in Pigeon Forge, battling between one of the most real moments of my life, and the tumult of not doing what I am made to do, be what I want to be.
I love my wife.
I love my kids.
I struggle to prove that my longing for the breath of God in the grittier portions of His creation does not represent my feelings for her and the kids,
that I am not running away from them or the crazy-love life we have.
Many years later, the door begins to open.
A chance decision to escape for a weekend, see a friend, sit in the back of a conference and mind my own business, and I am asked to come to a desperate place with insurmountable challenges and use the most unlikely skills to help design a residential subdivision through the middle of a property so desperately unsuitable that the entire overpopulated community had avoided it for two hundred years of city sprawl.
4 months later, and I am there again, gaining clarity, sitting on the roof of an unfinished hospital on Ash Wednesday, the soot of Jesus' sacrifice marking my forehead, staring over a sea of desolation,
praying
and journaling
and listening.
And He continues His conversation.
He picks up where He left off 16 years before.
The beginnings of clarity.
One month later I am accidentally honest with a near stranger and find myself on a ledge, facing a decision, fear in my gullet.
Do I follow His voice? How do I know? How can I be sure?
And she walks to me, my faithful wife, while I am weeding and planting and generally wasting time in the garden. She walks up to me: "be the person I married."
And I do.
We do; she and I and God and a little bit of clarity, in a decision that brings me closer to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
Four years later, the journey to Pigeon Forge takes me the island of Lesvos, Aegean Sea.

WASH Practices and Skills

eMi Communities of Practice

Yammer response from Kevin Hale, eMi WASH disaster response volunteer:

Skills for WASH work that come to mind:

1. Calculate:
1. The dosage of chlorine to add to a well or other supply to disinfect it.
2. The amount of chlorine required to provide a safe but effective level or residual chlorine for drinking water.
3. How much water is required for drinking for a given population
4. The amount of available chlorine in whatever source is available
5. The TDH required to pump a given flow of water from a well of specific depth.
6. The required kWh of portable generators to run such pumps efficiently.
7. The amount of appropriate fuel required to run the generators.
8. The probable amount of wastewater flows for a given population
2. Use & Do:
1. Use and understand the results of, and the differences between, water test kits.
2. On-site percolation tests to determine the size of leaching basins/leaching fields required to serve a given population
3. Understand:
1. Cultural norms with respect to latrine use in the area being served
2. Level of disinfection required for water uses, that is drinking/bathing/washing and the ability to communicate this to the population being served.
4. Different water filter technologies and the physical sizes of viruses, bacteria and helminths with respect to the filer sizes.
4. Principles:
1. High tech solutions are rarely appropriate in the undeveloped world and certainly not in disaster response work.
2. Whatever solutions WASH teams recommend must be easy to understand and easy to maintain, and that local population must be instructed in how to maintain them with locally available skills and where any necessary resources for maintaining them will come from,
3. As in any consulting situation, teams must understand that the 'client' had not had years of engineering education and experience and likely will not fully comprehend what is recommended without teaching them the basics.