Maryhelen Shuman-Groh
I decided to go diving – of course! You didn’t think I would spend time on a Caribbean island and not go diving, did you?
From the dive boat
Scott's Head
Approaching Scott's Head
Still, I am trying to incorporate every outing into my project. Today I did it by talking to the guys on the boat about their views and experiences with water here. Between dives during our surface interval (for the non-divers out there, surface interval is that time we spend on the surface ridding ourselves of built up nitrogen from diving to prevent DIS, aka, the bends), we head into the small town of Soufriere so the crew can pick up some lunch and return a borrowed tool.
Soufriere, Dominica
I observe several women visiting a small cement building and walking away with large containers of water. The dive master tells me that many families use the public water supply as the cost of hooking up their homes and monthly bills is outside their means. This makes me wonder how much of the 95% of Dominicans serviced by DOWASCO have service to their homes and how much of that percentage means that they access government water supplies through such public areas.
Public Water House in Soufriere
I spent several hours today trying to design a survey. No wonder people get paid to do this kind of work! It seems every question has a qualifier or sparks another series of questions! I’m trying to develop a survey that just determines household sizes, water use and costs for water but it just gets bigger and bigger because we don’t know where the water is supplied from, if it’s running into a home or whether they get it from a public source, and it grows expotentially when trying to add the ‘where does your water go’ factors – privies, outhouse, septic, public sewage… so on and so forth. It’s giving me a headache.