Sophia's Peace Work

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Fishkhaboor  (Site F3) - 23 September 2013 (It's my birthday!  It's my birthday!  It's my birthday!)

Today was our media event (in the afternoon) but we had to get to serious work to be prepared.  As I feared, the Tarada had taken a beating on the road from Hasenkeyf, Turkey to Fishkhaboor and needed some TLC.  The Guffa also needed some attention and the Kalak which had come from Hasenkeyf with the rest of the team needed small bit of work as well.  But we were fortunate that four of the people who had helped in Turkey had decided to come along as well: John Crofoot (Hasenkeyf Matters), Jennifer Hattam (Hasenkeyf Matters), Firat Argun (the Kalak builder), Hsolo Jiwa (GreenLife CSR).  The latter was doing research on the Ilisu Dam in Turkey and had agreed to come along for the next leg as the Flotilla photographer.

This was good news as we were seriously undermanned and eventually decided that we didn't have enough people to take the Tarada down the river.  They would stay with us for the three days we spent in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The following are photos of the Tarada repair work (the Quffa is in the foreground of the first and last picture):

 



I also spent a fair amount of time working on preparing the water quality equipment.  Two of the brand new probes of the multi-meter had functioned only one day in Hasenkeyf and but then started giving faulty readings.  Nothing I was able to do at Fishkhaboor could fix them so they would have to wait until I could get an email out to the manufacturer.

We were to have a media event in the afternoon, so we got the raft ready and the paddle board out. Here is JH getting the raft ready and I used the paddleboard to do some of the sampling from (sorry no pictures of the press event because I was busy doing show and tell with the WQ equipment):



We had a good local press showing ... KurdSat, NRT, KNN, Sumaria, and Dohuk TV and people reported seeing us on TV later. A good start.

The only unfortunate part of our location was that we had the constant lights off the bridge and were across from a gravel mine that seemed to operate almost around the clock and were intent on dumping huge loads of gravel into the river so that they could get their big excavator closer to the center of the river.  The racket it made of ear-splitting!  But we tried our best to enjoy our location.




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