Day 17 - Wednesday March 5

First of all, I just wanted to say thanks to the folks at EBMUD for all your support - it is so nice to see all of your supportive comments when I am feeling down. Special thanks to Mitch for all your comments, not to mention that special delivery that you sent me via Dave C. before I left. Also, you are awesome for looking up UPVC specs - seriously, I could use your expertise on all this stuff here :).

So today was a pretty busy day. This morning we got the Silpaulin that will be the wetland liner. We spent the first part of the day trying to level the wetland and ensure that it sloped in the correct direction, which was no mean feat as we don't have alot of equipment. So we spent over an hour surveying the wetland, and then figured out where we needed to dig. Again, since we don't have a translator, it was very difficult to try to tell the villagers what we wanted them to do (and why we were doing it). So we figured the best way to do it was to show them. So we started digging and smoothing out the area. The villagers caught on pretty quickly, and promptly took the shovel out of my hands. Once we got the ground sloped correctly, we put down the PVC liner. We spent the rest of the afternoon putting down the first layer of soil, and then starting the 2 foot berm around the perimeter of the wetland. This took quite some time as the villagers carried the rocks to us one plate full at a time. After several hours, everyone was too hot to continue and we halted work for the day. Tomorrow we plan to head out to the village very early to complete the berm and install the first layer of gravel for the inlet and outlet areas.