Farewell to Jarabacoa... for now

The river monitoring trainings finished, the equipment packed away and transferred formally to our local project partner organization Plan Yaque in Jarabacoa, Julie and I were driven to the Santiago airport by Erick Conde of The Nature Conservancy.  Erick's skills, personal dedication, good humor and friendship add so much to this project. 

Back in Boston, unpacking the wonderful coffee Plan Yaque gave us as a farewell gift, I must admit I'm eager for the next trip to the highlands of the beautiful Dominican Republic.

Julie Wood (CRWA), Erick Conde (TNC) and Kate Bowditch (CRWA)

Training Day 2 in Jarabacoa

William Hernandez from Plan Yaque, CRWA's local partner in Jarabacoa for our Twinning partnership project, helps train new volunteers for Plan Yaque's upcoming volunteer "citizen science" program.  A very successful day all around.

The volunteer team t-shirt

Field training in Arroyo Los Gatos

CRWA's Julie Wood spent the afternoon yesterday training a committed and enthusiastic group of river monitors on Arroyo Los Gatos (Cat's creek) in Jarabacoa, this beautiful small city in the highlands of the Dominican Republic. 

This equipment, ranging from simple home-made sampling baskets to sophisticated monitoring meters (purchased with funds from ERM Corporation Foundation), filled three huge suitcases, and will live here at the offices our local partner organization Plan Yaque for use by technical staff and volunteers.

Plans are underway to begin a monthly monitoring program at five sites here, a pilot project that Plan Yaque hopes to scale up to the whole Yaque del Norte river.

Calibrating equipment with CRWA, TNC and Plan Yaque staff

Calibrating equipment is always a challenge, and the first time, with new equipment, took the whole afternoon.  Our Twinning project partners Erick Conde, from The Nature Conservancy and William Hernandez and Julian Holguin  from Plan Yaque (our local non-profit partner) worked with CRWA's watershed scientist Julie Wood, practicing, and learning to train others.  

Field testing next!

Dominican Baseball Finals 2014

Dominican baseball finals!!!!! Tied in a best of nine series, Escogidos and Licey played a great game last night - definitely the loudest baseball game I have ever been to.  A band in the stands, flag-waving fans, cheerleaders... awesome!  Julio Lugo and Pedro Ciriaco, former Red Sox players, and an excellent pitching performance by Valdez, weren't enough for Escogidos, who lost 3-1.  TNC's Eric Conde, lifelong Licey fan, came with his Dad and they were two happy guys.  One more win and Licey wins it all.

                           Kate Bowditch and Julie Wood at the ballgame in Santo Domingo

CRWA is on the road again!
Julie Wood and Kate Bowditch are in Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic for a week-long stream monitoring training program.  As always, it's beautiful, warm and sunny here.  We're not in Boston anymore!

Thanks to a generous grant from the ERM Corporation Foundation, we arrived with three huge suitcases full of monitoring equipment, ranging from simple tools like secchi disks and digital thermometers to sophisticated meters for measuring dissolved oxygen and conductivity.  We also brought key monitoring gear for our volunteers such as safety vests, waterproof notebooks and of course team t-shirts!  Amazingly, we got all our equipment on the plane with the exception of a small bottle of sulphuric acid, which we use for meter calibration, and everything came through customs without a hitch.  Hopefully we can replace the sulphuric acid here.

We were met at the Santiago airport by Erick Conde, TNC's watershed engineer, and our Twinning project's technical expert.  Following a lovely stop en route to Jarabacoa for a coffee, we spent the afternoon touring possible monitoring sites, collecting photos and GPS coordinates, and getting to know our small urban streams a little better.  Today we've spent the day with the technical staff and Director at Plan Yaque, going over logistics, doing database training and then this afternoon meeting with several representatives of USAID.

More to come...

CRWA and TNC present Dominican Republic River Twinning Project at WWW

CRWA's Kate Bowditch and TNC's Francisco Nunez present our Twinning project at World Water Week in Stockholm.  The presentation, which included three other Twinning projects sponsored by the International River Foundation, capped off an amazing week with water and river advocates from across the world.  CRWA is thrilled to be part of the growing global network of environmental advocated for better water management.