Life abroad: As Robert sees it

This week I had to make a short notice trip to Northern California. I applied for the Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship and my first interview is next week. I say this was short notice because I had not decided to go ahead with my application until I actually found the tickets to travel back to California. Rasa and I bought $100 round trip tickets from Guatemala City to LA on Spirit Airlines, it was a special they had. For the whole trip it cost us both only $634 but took 3 nights to make it there.

The first day we were on a direct bus from La Ceiba to Copan where we spent night #1 in a $7.50 bed. The next morning we took a minibus to the border. You can just see my ear in the left of the picture, Rasa is crammed in the back left.

This was a store front in a small town while traveling to Chiquimula by local bus.

We made it to Guatemala City Airport in about 8 hours. The biggest city in Central America and you can still find goats downtown.

We arrived in LA about 1:30am and Rasa had a 6am flight to Sacramento so night #2 was spent on a bench in LAX. Forgot how cold it was there in May. My flight was in the evening so I spent the day talking to Seamus and Ying and drinking coffee.

We arranged our plans so we could meet up with my Dad and step-mom. We also went to visit Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Rasa is knocking to see if we can sleep here for night #3.

If this doesn’t explain California, maybe the next one does?

My parent’s: larger than life.

The next day we set off by car for Eureka. Only another six hours until we reach my mom’s house.

Robert Kent Jr- robjkentjr@gmail.com
Wat/San/Health Consultant
www.RobRasa.com/hisblog
Cell: +504 9871-5396
Work/Home: +1 (631) 458-1119

Well it’s been awhile so this email is a little dated. I’ll try to catch up this weekend with the seven posts I am behind. You’ll have a full inbox next week.

We finally found a rock crusher near La Ceiba but there’s a problem; cost. To buy the crushed rock it is going to cost four times as much so for now we have decided to stick with the river sand.

We checked into buying a rock crusher and it was $5,000 for a used one. A little bit out of our budget so Willy try to make a crusher out of this.

Another problem the old molds were giving us was uneven sides. You can see in this picture how thin the side wall is compared to the top.

We fixed this by adding two gaskets into the mold to make the walls a bit thicker. The only problem with this is that our tops need to be made a bit bigger now to fit the filters.

We were still having a problem with fissures on the filter bottoms until Willy went against conventional wisdom and started compacting the cement about an hour after pouring. By doing this, we have eliminated the fissure problem during the first 24 hours of curing.

We wait until there is a heat difference between the middle and sides. When the middle is considerably hotter, compact the sides with a 2×4 as in the above picture. After this, smooth off the top with more cement. Using this method we have made 55 filters without a leak on the bottom.

Now we just need to wait for the rain to stop so we can paint them.