Aftermath Part III

There are about 180 bags of cement sitting in my basement. The remaining 20 have been transported up the river to the site of the repair of one of the irrigation ditches. Every morning I am awoken by a dull banging on my door at around 7 am. This is the boy who carries the bags 2 at a time on his mule up to the construction site. I walked up there myself two days ago with my camera, and got some good pictures! Where there used to be a sheer wall of crumbly, dry dirt there is now a carefully constructed rock wall cut into the side of the cliff, and paved on top like a sidewalk in the US. Like some one needed to make a fancy path for some reason. Right now they are working on the sides of the irrigation ditches, having carried several large planks of wood up there to serve as molds for the concrete. It looks good! I’m excited, and relieved, to see the work in progress.
I also went over to look at the other irrigation ditch that they laid with plastic for temporary watering purposes. To be honest I wondered a bit when they told me about the temporary plastic. Couldn’t we find a way to make that permanent? Plastic is much cheaper than the cement I have already purchased. But after seeing it, I am again relieved. The plastic, being uncontinuous, leaks, and where it leaks, the water escapes into the crumbly dirt and it does it’s thing. That is, it crumbles. There are a whole bunch of new rock, tree, dirt and other stuff fallen into the riverbed. So, in the interest of the irrigation ditches lasting any time at all, the cement is in fact necessary. My understanding of the scale of the problem of the irrigation system came slowly. First I walked up one side of the river, then I walked up the river bed, and finally up the other side of the river. It was on this third trip I really understood the engineering problem these ditches represented. Smack in the middle of 100 ft cliffs of crumbly soil was where the ditches had to go for a gravity-powered system to work. But due to the flooding, the riverbed run right up to the base of cliffs, and when the river is at flood, it doesn’t take much time at all for the river to eat away the cliff causing the whole thing to fall into the river. Again. That’s right, this could easily happen again. Thanks to my father, I keep thinking: “We need a better mousetrap.” The problem with better mousetraps is that they require more money and people who are actually engineers, not just engineer’s daughters. I can envision all I want but I don’t know what it takes to make it actually happen… for now, the villagers and I have settled for the original mousetrap. We are all praying God sends rain in more moderation this year.