Working in the Tucson office this week and hopefully will be able to add some photographs of a few recent water projects in Durango, Mexico, and in Nevada, USA.

Springs in Turkey

There is a tradition in rural Turkey of honoring a loved one who has passed on by building a tiled roadside spring.  This seems to me to be a very nice way to memorialize someone.

There is a picture of me in this blog standing next to one of these roadside "springs."  Actually the water is piped to the location next to the road from some distance away.  This particular spring supplies water to a tea house on the other side of the road which is famous for being the meeting place of Kemal Attaturk and the Shah of Iran in the 1930's.  There is a similar spring nearby known locally as "iron melter spring"  because the pH of the water is naturally very low, and it wreaks havoc with the iron pipes in the nearby village.

I went to the tiendita on the corner of the plaza in Guazapares Chihuahua last week. The driller was supposed to show up with a pipe truck to drill a well and he was missing, mechanical failure was suspected. The village of Guazapares doesn't really have phone service but the tiendita has a satellite phone and for a few pesos a minute you could call.

It was a long shot that the driller would be in a place with cell service, but worth a try. As the young woman behind the painted green wooden counter dialed the number for me, a young boy rode his burro up to the tiendita and came in to buy some shoes for his burro. So as the young woman was waiting for some radio waves to bounce off a satellite far away, she was counting horseshoes and horseshoe nails. God I love Mexico.

This week I am back in the office after spending last week doing exploration drilling for a potable water supply for a village near Temoris, Chihuahua. I love this job because I get to take the Chihuahua Pacific train ("ChePe") to Estacion Temoris from Los Mochis. The coutryside is beautiful...steep mountains, pine trees and apple orchards. Where I was working last week there was no electric power and the kids rode horses to school.