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...
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