Month: March 2010

Thirsty Peruvians harvesting fog with nets Buzz Up Share
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( in the light of the recent meeting of launch accelerator i attended at nasa, this news will be of interest to those concenred with water. in india prof Girija saeran had tried this in kutchh with good results)

Catching fog with nets is the solution to water scarcity for people who live beyond the reach of utility lines in this sandy hillside shantytown overlooking Peru’s capital, Lima.

Lima, which along with Cairo is one of the world’s two driest capitals, gets only a few drops of rain each year. But thick fog from the Pacific Ocean blankets the coastal hills surrounding the city for eight months a year as hot tropical sun mixes with cold waters of the Humboldt current.

Using nets similar to those used in volleyball, residents condense fog, drip-by-drip, into drainage pipes running down the hill into tanks that store hundreds of liters (quarts) of water for irrigation, bathing and cooking.

“Pure water from fog, can you believe it?” Noe Neira, Bellavista’s community leader said, as he dipped his hand into a brick tank filled to the rim. “There was so much water in the air and we didn’t know how take advantage of it.”

President Alan Garcia won the 2006 elections in part on a promise to deliver water to millions of impoverished Peruvians, though as he nears the end of his term, Lima’s long-term water problems are more vexing than ever.

Lima depends almost exclusively on glacial runoff for water. The United Nations, which has called March 22 World Water Day to raise awareness about shortages, says melting caused by warming in the Andes has already cut by 12 percent flows to the country’s arid coast, where two-thirds of the population lives.

That has left the government not only trying to lay more water mains to improve delivery, but also looking into installing desalination plants along the ocean or pumping water out of the Amazon basin to secure future supplies.

Even after a decade of booming economic growth, about a quarter of Peru’s city dwellers and half of its rural residents still lack access to working toilets and clean drinking water.

Bellavista is no different. Like most of Peru’s poor, the community gets its water from tanker trucks that sell it for two soles a barrel ($0.71), about 10 times more than what residents of Lima’s richest neighborhoods pay for tap water.

“We’re paying like millionaires for water,” Josefina Ortiz, a mother of three, said as she waited for a tanker truck outside her plywood home in San Juan de Miraflores, another slum far from Bellavista. “We’ll never be able to progress because of the lack of water.”

A SCALEABLE SOLUTION?

The nets in Bellavista, which were set up by biologists at German non-governmental organization Alimon e.v., turn fog into a viable alternative to end dependence on overpriced and often contaminated water from trucks.

“Sometimes trucks won’t come up here for days, so we store water from fog as a backup,” said Sandra Atusparia, who lives in Bellavista. “The only thing I regret is that we don’t have more tanks for storage.”

Though the netting system in Bellavista is rusty after just three years of use and it runs dry during Lima’s short fogless summers, poor residents dream of having the mayor net the hillsides surrounding the city.

“This whole area lacks water,” Abel Cruz, head of the group Peruanos Sin Agua (Peruvians Without Water) said, pointing to thousands of plywood homes with tin roofs built by squatters surrounding Lima. “But with 50 nets, we could supply them all,” he said of a series of shantytowns on Lima’s south side.

When I play with little mice
Who change their appearance every now and then
I don’t know who is playing with whom
But it is sure that
They don’t mean that their antics will
Always be understood
Because even they don’t know why they
Do what
They do always

Dot ask me why
Have I yearned for the rays of a setting sun
To fall in my courtyard
Do they have a possibility of shedding the colours
Which I am in love with
Or is it just that
It is cooler
When sun sets
Lines below the eyes don’t look dark enough
If only the gel of life
Will dissolve them to give way to
The dried clay like strength
Resonance
Of resoluteness

When you watered the new seedlings
Of shoe flower and the marigold
In the community garden
Who knew the fragrance of those flowers
Will permeate all the walls we had created
To stop the essence of essentiality
Flowing through the city
Full of strangers

The shores have complained to the sea
I did not pay enough attention to them
But when did I do that
Why are these expectations arising now
When I am on the verge of relinquishing
The charge of the garden
In which lots of flowers grew
All these while
But a butterfly changed every thing

There was a commotion when she decided to
Take liberties with what she will
cross-pollinate

I have not known how long we have
Seen the shadows of
Silent, sad, and surrealistic sights
Of time and tide
Wait for the waves to settle
the debts of sand on the shore
For having absorbed all the pain
All these years
Without complaining,
When will there be a monument built
In honour of all the moments
That are precious because of their uncertainty
And tentativeness
And indecisiveness and
The desire to see beyond the screens and
The key boards

20 march 2010

When the curtains can’t hold the truth
From peering through the windows
What do you really do, close the window,
draw the curtain
or just tear these apart
let the rays of naked sun come through
because moon is too shy to admit
the transgressions of life are not
like a progress of an eclipse
which will pass eventually
and then rays will have a right of way
some day, some how, some where,
no matter you say

detours of desires
are not the pathways
on which one ever finds
peace that beguiles
and lulls one to assume
that the end is near,
the fire is now determined
to consume all the leftover memories
that were the seeds
of my poems
delete them,
lest they envelop the air
which we breathe
and so may emerge
a being that is absorbed
completely by the passion
pf perseverance in vain

2006