Mexicali can't win when it comes to its water pollution problem
Between Two Rivers: The e-coli stop here
A new chapter is being written in the 100-year saga of our notorious New River . Last year, a new treatment plant became operational, and finally most of Mexicali ’s raw sewage was being treated. Fecal coliform levels in the New River at the international boundary dropped several magnitudes, and regional officials were rejoicing that decades of effort were paying off in a big way. The River was not clean, but it could no longer claim its place as one of the dirtiest rivers in the world.
This was the good news. Now for the bad. At a meeting of the International Boundary and Water Commission’s Colorado River Citizens’ Forum on March 3, Jose Angel from the California Regional Water Board reported that recent testing showed river contamination levels back up to levels approaching raw sewage.
The news was especially disturbing to US officials because our tax money had in large part paid for a state-of-the-art pumping station, 27 kilometers of pipe, and a $12 million bank of treatment lagoons to send the water south toward the Colorado River delta. What had gone wrong?
Francisco Bernal, an engineer with the Mexican section of the Boundary and Water Commission was asked if the recent earthquakes might have damaged the pumps. After his very lengthy answer, I wrote in my notes “earthquakes not responsible for sewage bypass into New River.”
In fact, the CESPM ( Mexicali ’s public works) had purposefully bypassed raw sewage into the New River instead of pumping it south as agreed. The bypass began on February 19 and ended March 12. You see, a second irate party has objected to Mexicali pollution.
South of the treatment plant is another “river” formed by agricultural run-off: the Hardy River. Upwards of 1000 vacation homes have been built along the Rio Hardy, most of them occupied by Americans who enjoy fishing, skiing, and the generally laid back atmosphere.
Back in December of 2007, residents noticed that Rio Hardy smelled a little funny. River users had the water tested, and discovered it was no longer safe for human contact. This coincided with treated sewage from Las Arenitas lagoons flowing into an agricultural drain and then into the Rio Hardy. Though the river camps are more than 20 river miles south of the sewage lagoons, there seemed to be no other explanation for the contamination.
Meetings with CESPM officials ensued, and apparently residents had enough clout to persuade them to bypass about 320 liters per second of raw sewage directly into the New River--and into the United States.
Diplomatic heat brought the situation to a full boil, with California Senator Diane Feinstein intervening via our EPA and State department. That’s why the waste water was once again fully pumped south. But the story gets worse.
On a tour of Las Arenitas on March 27, we were taken a couple of miles south of the treatment lagoons along the pipeline sending treated water toward Rio Hardy. There in the middle of open desert, CESPM had sledge-hammered open the pipe and was allowing the water to gush out into the sand.
We were told that the water had been properly treated via a 19 day trip through the lagoons. But this water still exuded a foul stench and ran gray-green and very turbid.
Three days after our tour, on March 30, a friend and I returned to trace the flow of water in the desert. The CESPM officials had told us they had diverted it to a “farmer’s land.” US government officials were satisfied that the water was at least going south and not into our country. But I needed to know if the water was actually ending up on farmland.
From the break in the pipe we had to make several giant loops to keep tabs on the water flowing through a low area going south. We noticed a CESPM truck paralleling our course some distance away. We reached the fields of wheat alongside the highway at the village of La Puerta and headed back north. There we saw a stream of water inching southward like the flickering tongue of a snake.
The CESPM official arrived at the same spot a few minutes after we did, accompanied by a single worker wielding a shovel. “Where’s the water coming from?” I asked him. “A well in the desert,” he said. Then he raised his worried eyes to the fields about 300 yards distance, and said ruefully, “It’s getting awfully close to that wheat.”
That was last Sunday. I’d bet plenty of money that today, that treated but foul-smelling smelling sewage water is still being dumped into the desert.
Jesus Mosqueda, owner of Campo Mosqueda along the Rio Hardy told me, “This is the only river Mexicali has. They have to keep it clean.” He was hopeful for a solution by April 15.
The Mexicali water officials now know what Octavio Paz meant when he said, “Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States .” Now Mexicali is an even worse position. They can’t send water north to the United States , and they can’t send it south to Rio Hardy. Where will they send it?
bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 05.02.08 @ 05:26 PM PST [link]
When Learning is Really Tested
The Overhead Projector College Readiness Test
I’ve discovered a quick and easy way to test my students for college readiness. It costs very little and requires no pen, no pencil, no computer, and no calculator. All it takes is an overhead projector.
For those who haven’t been around a school room for some years, an overhead projector is a metal box with an arm above it like a periscope. You set it on a desk to project images on a screen from a sheet of transparent plastic.
This is how my test works: In my reading classes, we start every session with two students using the overhead projector to present a brief analysis of a news article. You would think that the hardest part of this exercise would be to read the article, understand it, and report on it. Not true. It was a surprise to me that the toughest part of the assignment is to operate the overhead projector itself.
The first day of class I announce that every student will have to give a presentation. I stand at the overhead projector, folded up like a great blue heron’s neck, and tell them, “Watch this. You need to do this. When it’s your turn, you need to prepare the projector and the screen. It will be your day.”
Here’s the lesson:
1. “Release the arm with your thumb right here and rotate the arm up until it clicks into place.” Click!
2. “Unwind the extension cord from the front here and plug it in the wall at the front of the room.
3. “Push the orange button on top the projector, HARD, so that the light comes on and stays on.
4. “Now put your plastic sheet down on the glass--just like any piece of paper that you’re going to read. Look at the screen.
5. “Adjust the image by moving this mirror with your hands. See the mirror and how it moves everything on the screen?”
You the reader of this newspaper are reading these directions, but my students can see what I’m doing. You’d think that would make it rather clear. I do it slowly, pointing and repeating. I continue,
6. “See this round knob on the arm? Turn it to raise the head of the projector to focus the letters.”
They come into focus.
Then I walk a few steps away from the projector and come back with the plastic and introduce myself as if I were a student and do a sample presentation. I then ask for volunteers.
At the next class session, the volunteers–confident people–work the machine. They may fumble with a little, so I help them. At the same time, I give all the students another lesson. “Here’s the mirror to move the image; here’s the knob to focus it.” And off we go.
I remind the students that when it’s their turn they need to come a little early to pull down the screen and ready the machine. From then on the students see others use the overheard projector at the beginning of every class.
In a class of 30, how many college-age students can accomplish the whole show–coming early, pulling down the screen, setting up the projector, and giving the presentation? In a typical class—5 or 6.
Those are grade A choice college students. They might not be particularly academically prepared or even score very high on an intelligence test. Doesn’t matter. Those students I am delighted to have in my class because they can accept the responsibility of doing such a simple task.
What about the rest? Probably another 16-18 can use the machine all right, but they don’t dare touch it by themselves. They’ll sit in their desks until I’ve arrived and called them to the front of the room. Why? Because they are afraid they might do something wrong.
The last 6-8 students form a varied pack. Some just show up on their day with an empty sheet of plastic. A few arrive late, which naturally ruins the timing of the assignment. Or they don’t show up at all. The real prizes are those who walk to the front 12 weeks into the semester like they’ve never seen the overhead projector before.
I’m a teacher by choice, and I’m ready to teach all comers. That’s what a community college is about. Operating an overhead projector is not complicated. If a student can’t muster enough interest as he sits in the classroom to learn how to use it, he’s not ready for college, or a job, or any activity with the minimum of responsibility. He needs to master something even simpler, like a shovel or a broom, before he’s ready to enjoy taxpayers’ donations toward his education in a college classroom.
bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 05.02.08 @ 05:21 PM PST [link]
Looking for the Soul
Where to Point the Finger
I was at a restaurant recently where two groups of cyclists were getting to know each other. The usual confusion about names ensued. One person called out, “Now who is Cliff?” and the fellow sitting across from her pointed to his own head.
The one who wanted to know Cliff looked up to the guy standing behind him. “You’re Cliff?” she asked.
Then the real Cliff once again pointed to himself, this time to his heart.
“Oh,” she said, “I thought you meant that guy behind you.”
As a student of culture I’d learned about this variation of body language. We in the West generally point to our chests to locate ourselves while other cultures—Chinese, so I’ve been told—point to their heads.
Cliff was a guy from Georgia now living in Yuma who first pointed to his head then made the adjustment to repair the communication. That in itself interested me. But it also got me thinking again about a recurring question that has confounded all thinking people, and that is the question about our identity. How do you locate personality? How do you locate the soul?
If you can point to your head or your chest to locate yourself, does that mean our personality, our soul, has parts to it?
You would think that the soul is just one thing–a single unit–for we want to believe that our soul is immortal. After we die our soul goes to heaven, hopefully–or the other place. And to be immortal, and therefore immaterial, it just can’t be the sort of thing that can be broken down into parts—part of it in our head, part of it in our chest.
But the idea that our soul has parts seems to be really the common cloth of our daily existence because our personalities can visit so many different moods. If we are happy and joyful, our soul carries that aspect. If we are depressed and low, such is the quality of our soul. Caught up in the passion of rage when we are slighted or wronged, our souls seethe with that special power that springs from anger.
And when we are sexually excited, we have surrendered ourselves to the erotic nature that comes with being a human animal.
So even if we accept that the soul somehow inheres in the mood of our attention—be we happy, sad, angry, or sexually excited—we’ve accepted that the soul has parts that can be active or quiet.
Oh, but maybe I’ve just identified emotions, and maybe I haven’t looked deep enough into the human spirit. Many thinkers simply dismiss all of that as something lower in human nature. They would say that the soul is beyond that. The soul is something finer and more elegant, and passions pull us away from our true nature. The Buddhists would agree with some of that, for their program of meditation and purification is to help a person realize that the passions of emotions and sexual attraction should be overcome in order for a person to understand his own soul and those of others.
The Hindus have taken a different approach. They developed a language for identifying the parts of the human personality. They call these parts chakras or energy centers which are associated with parts of the body. There are seven of them. Moving upward from the base of the spine, sexual organs, solar plexus, heart, throat, brow, and crown, the Hindus explain that our temperament has seven qualities, beginning with a drive to survive, then procreate, then seek power, then feel compassion, then communicate with others, then to see the connections with all things, and finally to be wise and calm in complete identity with all of creation.
In this way, Eastern thinking has a way of talking about personality that many in the West have adapted to show the soul as it inheres in a physical body.
With this kind of framework, the question about where should we point to when someone calls our name gets a little more complicated, for it could be interpreted as asking which sort of energy dominates in each person. A person who is always angry should point to his abdomen. A person who can’t get sex out of his mind should point to his genitals. A person who is caring and full of compassion should point to his heart.
A person who is analytical and thoughtful in communicating with others should point to his head. And I suppose that the person who the Eastern mystics would call “self-realized” would point to a place above his own head—to the sky, to the heavens, to the divine. As a check on our own orientation throughout our days, we should reflect, when someone calls our name, where to point our finger?
bmcneece@adelphia.net">bmcneece@adelphia.net">brian on 05.02.08 @ 05:19 PM PST [link]