“Swing And A Miss.” (2006.10.09)

Greetings bloggers. When we last left our hero (that’s me), he was prepping to drill his first well and work was starting to pick up around Hardeman as well. I have been working with the hospital on planning a health fair for the town that is supposed to take place on Tuesday, which has been quite a bit of time organizing and trying to get funding. I told them I would look into a source I had and now it seems like they are counting on it, and I’m not sure if it’s going to come through or not…I think that it will but if it doesn’t, that is not the way I wanted to start things off in Hardeman. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. Also, my boss Tim came to visit my site last Tuesday. He makes trips to everyone’s site to talk things over with our work partners and check up on how we are doing. He seemed pretty satisfied with what was going on here in Hardeman and gave my work partners some new ideas for things I can be working on. All in all, it was a good visit. He left Wednesday, and that same day the rest of the Santa Cruz well drilling crew, fellow volunteers Andy and Bryan, showed up so we could head out early the next morning to go and do some drilling.

We piled into a small 4-door pick up with Aldo behind the wheel and our friend Isac Bedia riding shotgun. For more on these people, see the previous post. We set out around 4am with a load of 3 meter plastic tubes and one 6 meter long pipe tied down to the top of the truck, jutting out of the back and towering over the front. It was quite a site to see.

We drove north. Way north. I am 4 hours from the city, in a pretty small town, and the towns just keep getting smaller and less populated the further north you go. The road also gets nastier, which I hadn’t imagined was possible. We bumped along as the sun came up, illuminating huge fields of soybeans with backdrops of palm trees and jungle. It struck me that we were smack dab in the middle of what used to be pure jungle. When people talk about rainforests getting chopped down in the states, this is what they meant. I am right here, watching farmers take over land with the only farming method they can afford, slash and burn. Something that is about as bad for the earth as possible. But we all do what we need to survive, and for them it’s slash and burn farming. I’m not about to tell them to stop trying to survive. We ended up at a river about 4 hours north of Hardeman. We got out, loaded all of our equipment and tools into canoes, and crossed the river. We then carried it all a few hundred meters to this tiny village called Pueblos Unidos. My first impression of this place was that it was straight out of a National Geographic magazine. It was almost exactly what you think of when you think of someone in the Peace Corps. The people had moved there no more than a month ago, and all the houses were made of sticks with palms for roofs. The Big Bad Wolf wouldn’t even need to huff and puff in order to blow these houses down. There were about 60 or 70 little huts, and people were all our working in the surrounding fields. They had come from all of the towns we had passed through on our way there, some even from Hardeman. As far as I understand it, this was just state owned property that hadn’t been settled on yet, and they all came up to start anew and stake their claim. I was in the middle of the Bolivian frontier. I wished I had a coon-skin hat, but it would have been a little hot.

We got to the center of “town” where we would drill. We sent out a few Bolivians to cut down some trees to use to build our derrick and also put some people to work carrying water from the nearby river to fill up barrels so we could drill. In order to drill we usually need about 2000 liters of water. They had two 100 liter containers, so after they were full, they would have to continue bringing water throughout the drilling process as we used it up. The river was about 100 meters away and down a steep embankment, but those women worked hard bringing water in tiny buckets to fill the barrels. They knew that if they put the effort in now, they might have clean water to use as soon as the next day. Up until then, they had been drinking out of the same river…brown as can be and most likely contaminated with farming fertilizers and pesticides. But they had no choice. That’s why we were there. We were there to bring them clean water.

It took a little time to get people organized and explain the process…apparently our buddy Isac Bedia had not done as much prep work as he had claimed. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I’m still at the point where I am too trusting of some of the things Bolivians say. I’m sure after a few more instances like this I’ll get where I need to be as far as not believing a word they say. We got moving and were advancing nicely, moving along pretty quickly. Usually when we drill, we use a clay substance called bentonite, which we mix with water and pour down the well. Bentonite seals off the walls of the well as well as makes the mixture we are drilling with a thicker consistency so it brings up all of the tiny particles. In the zone we are drilling in, bentonite is key because it is so sandy, and if there isn’t enough bentonite, the well can collapse and all the work is in vain. However, Isac Bedia had told us instead of using bentonite that we could use the clay that was along the river. I was a bit skeptical, but he said he had drilled wells with it before and it wasn’t a problem. I felt better when the clay got there and it looked pretty legitimate. We mixed it up with water and got it to a good consistency and started dumping it down the well. It started pouring down rain in the middle of drilling, which was actually kind of nice because it had been incredibly hot and sunny before that…the rain was a welcomed guest at the drilling site. But then we started having problems. It should have been a red flag when after we changed pipes it was hard to get the rig going again. This means that at the bottom of the well, some of it is collapsing and holding onto the rig. But we always managed to pull it out and drill through the part that had collapsed. Then we hit 18 meters.

Right before the pipe change at 18 meters, I felt the rig advance really quickly, which meant we hit some sand. Bryan took a sample to make sure it was sand and we stopped to change the pipe. We took a little longer than usual because we had to oil the pulley and when we went to get moving again, the rig didn’t budge. We jiggled up and down, side to side, attached sticks and tried to pull it out Raiders of the Ark style but just ended up breaking off the plastic tubes. Our well had collapsed, with our rig in it. We were done for the day.

We tried a few wild ideas to get the rig back out, but to no avail. I stuck a piece of tube down the hole to see where the bottom of the well was. The tube stuck into some mud at 7 or 8 meters. Since we were at about 18 meters, this meant that our rig was buried under 10 or 11 meters of crud. There was no hope. It was gone. What does it mean when you lose a rig? Well, first of all it means that we screwed up. We should have taken it more seriously when it was hard to pull the rig back up so many times. We should have dumped a ton more clay down the hole and stopped advancing but just pumped the clay mixture up and down to seal the sides of the well more. We shouldn’t have taken so long to change the pipes, especially after it had advanced so quickly there at the end. It also means that we are out some money. The custom made 6 meter tube and drilling bit probably cost close to $100, which is a small fortune in the Baptist Well Drilling Business. That can be a whole well if you work it right. At this point, our money is coming from a sort of slush fund of money that was left over from Riley’s old project, and once it runs out, we have to find new sources of funding. So we’d like to make it last as long as we can. Losing a rig is certainly not the best way to save money.

Lucky for us, there are a few other rigs in the zone that we can use, so now it is just a matter of hauling another one up from the Montero area and getting back to Pueblos Unidos to give it another shot. We are also bringing a bag of bentonite this time to help prevent another crisis. It sucks, but this is just another part of well drilling. Most everyone loses a rig now and then, it’s just a little disheartening for it to happen on our first well. I think we were a little too gung-ho and didn’t do enough of the proper prepwork before we drilled. We learned the hard way, but it was quite an effective lesson.

We got back to Hardeman late that night, after driving through an incredibly treacherous rainstorm on a mud filled “road,” during which there were at least 3 times I was sure we would be seriously injured and about 4 other times when I thought we were stuck and would spend the night cold and wet in the truck. But I have to hand it to Aldo, he kept his cool and masterfully made it through all of the rain, mud, muck, ditches, stopped trucks, road blocks, and even a locked gate. Definitely one of the more interesting car rides of my life.

The next day we slept in a little bit, which I figured we’d earned. We called our boss and gave him the bad news. He wasn’t that upset, but scolded us big time for not using bentonite. We then developed a new plan of attack to get back up there and get those people some water. I packed for San Julian, the veritable Mecca of Baptist well drilling, where my friend Carlos and I would work on some new bits to make up for the one buried in the ground. Andy and Bryan are in the city today buying bentonite and getting the other rig situated to get moved up here to Hardeman. Depending on a few things, we will hopefully be back up in Pueblos Unidos this Thursday to give it another shot. We must press on. Hopefully my next entry will include pictures of smiling people drinking clean water. Dedos cruzados.