Day 3: Patagonia Youth Enrichment Center

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 By Willis and Max:


Today we walked down to Patagonia's youth enrichment center which helps support the local community of 800 people. We witnessed their conservations efforts to capture rainwater during their monsoon season. The way that they captured is by collecting water in the gutters placed onto the roof, then letting them flow through a pipe that was approximately 4 inches higher than the cistern. This allows enough water pressure to push the rainwater into the tanks. The tanks had a T-pipe for over flow, the water can flows to another pipe leading to a rock basin, that waters a tree which will grow to shade the cistern in turn keeping it cool and able to last longer. 

We helped build a rock lined basin to improve irrigation into their fruit garden and prevent erosion. In addition the rock basin allows water to go into the ground instead of being evaporated. The group laid down a liner and stacked rocks  to complete the rock basin.

In addition, we added an extra cistern which helped double the capacity of water they are able to hold. The process was to measure the two cisterns and level the ground in the middle to make the pipes flow into the tank at the same height. We increased the ground height by 9 inches by digging with shovels, filling the wheel barrows dumping and leveling.

We also got to use a demolition hammer- which is a mini jackhammer. The purpose of using the demolition hammer was to loosen the soil in order to expand the garden to accommodate the increase in water. The entire group helped to weed the garden.  In the meantime Willis laid down some bars and Yohahn, our school Videographer, blessed us with his camera skills. 

We ended the day with a couple tacos and a meeting about the reading homework from the previous night.

Bye, love you guys.







































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