Day 15: Last Work Day

Hola from Suchil! Today was our last true workday, so a lot of big milestones were reached today! We had 3 different teams working on different secondary projects. One team finished sewing rain protection covers for our dryers. This was an idea that was brought forth by the community members, who have become really invested in the project!

The next team, our experimentation team, held a meeting with the community members to discuss the experimentation process. We have decided to treat our project as an R&D type project, and the community members will be helping us design and implement experiments that will optimize the use of the dryers in the mesquite flour process and make improvements to the dryers. The mesquite flour project team had a lot of great suggestions and questions about experimentation and the operations manual and building manual that we plan to leave with the community. Carlos suggested creating a Facebook group to facilitate communication over the rest of the summer about experimentation, so we will definitely be staying in touch and collaborating on experiments. We are just overwhelmed with gratitude and admiration for how invested this team is!

The third team finished a chute to transfer the pods from the roof directly to the milling area. This will reduce time in the process and also allow the mesquite flour team to more safely transfer the large bags of pods (costals) to the milling area. We got to test this chute out today with pods that we dried in the ovens!!

Chute Team with Completed Chute

Installing Chute on Roof

Installing Chute on Oven

Placing Pods in the Ovens

Weighing Dried Pods

"Testing" out the Chute

Testing Pods in the Chute

Ovens on the Roof

As we walked home today, it really felt like we were saying goodbye to all of Suchil. Tomorrow is our last day in Santiago Suchilquitongo and over the past 14 days this pueblo has really touched our hearts, challenged our minds, and opened our eyes. We stopped at a convenience store near the grand entrance and said goodbye to the store owner, a local woman who we have been buying ice cream bars from. The dog that followed us to our worksite on our 5th day in Suchil was sitting near the convenience store and followed us halfway home. It seemed like she was saying goodbye too!

Tomorrow is our last day in Suchil and we will have a ceremony introducing our solar dryers to the families involved in the mesquite flour project, say thank yous and goodbyes and have a celebration dinner. These 2 weeks have flown by so fast and we're not ready to leave or say goodbye. However, we're definitely excited to see what's in store for tomorrow!