Welcome Rainy Season!

And the good news just keeps on coming...
In the past few days, we have made progress on our project in the ordering and testing kit areas. After visiting all of the villages, and categorizing their specific problems and needs, we were able to set a priority and order to which we will help these villages. The two villages that we have decided to focus our attention is village 6, Nong Bua, which was the original plan (according to our EWB application) and a neighboring village, village 5, which seems to have a very similar situation as Nong Bua. So the next question arises, what is in the water?
At the outset of this project, we had had a problem getting our hands on a water testing kit. But we think that our problems are almost over. We had been in touch with P. (Ms.) Monthana and she has led us to a new opportunity for a water testing kit. We have received a quotation from this company for most of the equipment we need; for some of the testing we will need to run some samples to a government lab in Chiang Mai, only a couple of hours away. We have also purchased about ten glass sample bottles, in hopes that with the bottles, the testing kit, and the government laboratory we will be able to find out what is wrong with the people's water. We are still more concerned about the mineral and chemical content than the biological content, however, we will still test for all possibilities. But what happens after we find out what is wrong with the water?

We treat it, of course, so people can safely drink it. Yesterday, a few of us met with P. (Mr.) Joe, the government mechanic to get a general idea about how much it would cost to rebuild some of the villages' water systems or perform some maintenance. He told us that here, in Thailand, when a problem arises, in almost all of the villages, there is a water council that has been trained and will fix the system. However, none of the villages can afford to replace the parts to the water system including pipes. The whole system can cost well over 400,000 Baht, which is more than 12,000 USD! So, there is some major fundraising to do if we need to replace the whole system, but there is a strong suspicion that we will, at most, need to replace the pipes. P Joe was not able to tell us how much the pipes would cost, but he did say that he was going to get us the catalog that the contractors use for supplies, and that would have the prices we need. He made it seem that the piping would not be too expensive. We are working hard but we only really have about 3 and a half weeks left to get all of the information we need to bring back with us to the States. Four-day weekends are not really helping our time-crunch.

Today marks the official beginning of the Rainy Season on the Buddhist calendar. This means that we have the rest of the weekend off. Traditionally, in Thailand, people bring candles to their local temples that are supposed to last the rest of the rainy season, three months. The story behind the candles go something like this:
Everyday, monks walk from home to home or to street vendors asking for food and blessing the sick and other monk-ly duties. During the rainy season, as the name suggests, it rains a lot and it would be more difficult for them to make their rounds. So, a long time ago, the Buddha told all of the monks to stay inside for the whole three months of the rainy season. These candles, which are decorated and given to the temples, are supposed to bring enough light to the temples for the monks to fulfill their duties, studying, praying, and whatever else they might need to do inside.
It is a very important holiday to the Thai people and we were given the rest of the week off, Thursday and Friday, so we decided to take a trip to a wonderful town named Pai.