Tuesday, August 7th Queretaro, Mexico
Ola familia y
amigos, que tal?
As you can see from the date signature above I
have finally arrived at my final destination of Queretaro, Mexico.
I am staying at Hostel2Patios in the old centro historico of Queretaro. It is a very nice hotel and has a colonial look and feel. The whole hotel has about 20 rooms of which as of now 15 rooms are being occupied by IBM CSC participants. You can imagine that that´s causing some remarkable moments ;)
The view from my room:
Today I would like to inform you a bit more
about my specific CSC assignment. As mentioned in my previous blog I will be
part of the Strategic water plan team for the Queretaro Commission of Water. The
Queretaro Water State Commission is the government institution in charge of
planning, coordinating and operating projects related to potable (consumable)
water and drainage in benefit of the whole population of the Queretaro state.
Their main mission for the coming years is
to coordinate the development of supplying water to the population of the
state, ensuring the service with quality.
You might ask yourself why supplying water is their
main mission, but please take into account that some parts in Mexico are quit
difficult to reach (desert areas and mountains) and hence supplying water to
these so called marginalized zones is still a quit difficult task. With regard
to the Queretaro
state currently about 9% (approximately 90.000 people) of the population still
do not have access to portable clean water. Most of these people still use
water from rivers, rain tanks and wells. The problem is that the
quality of this water can not be guaranteed by the Queretaro state and in some cases the water
is even contaminated, causing sickness and quit recently resulted in the dead of
young child.
To assure that these incidents will not happen
anymore in the near future the Queretaro Commission of Water has launched in
2010 the program “Agua cerca do todos” or in English “Water for
Everyone”. The main goal of this program is to provide (clear consumable)
water to all the Queretaro
citizens by 2015.
To get a bit of a feeling of the program and the situation in Queretaro, please have a
look at this 3 minutes movie. It is in Spanish but I think the context can be
understood quit well.
The project is currently well under way and the first improvements have
been made. Basically the Queretaro Commission of water has defined several
infrastructure relates strategies to provide water in these marginalized zones.
In terms of infrastructure you should think of pipes, water trucks bringing
water to the marginalized zones, portable self-filtering systems, etc.
Although the project has definitely paid off, the Water Commission of
Queretaro government would like to review their existing program and in
addition would like to gain some external insights in how this program can be
made more sustainable towards the future. One of the contributing factors to
the sustainability issue is the relatively fast growth of the state of Queretaro in terms of
population. Every day about 40 new families arrive at Queretaro state, meaning that approximately
about 100 new people who need clean and portable water arrive every day.
Therefore the Water Commission of Queretaro government
has asked the IBM CSC team to embark on a status review of their existing
services and infrastructure of their current program “Water for Everyone”. In
addition providing recommendations on how to make this program more sustainable
trough the time so that also in the future all Queretaro inhabitants can benefit from clean
and portable water.
So this will be my task for the
coming 4 weeks. Of course I will not be doing this by myself but I am having
great support from my fellow team members Pratiba (India),
Monica (Sweden), Laura (USA)
and Sandeep (India).
Below you will find a picture
showing the majority of the CSC Mexico 1 team (coming from 11 different countries) in front of the
statue of Benito Juarez (former Mexican president and considered to be one of
the biggest Mexican leaders of all times).
Yesterday the kick-off session for the whole project took place at the Queretaro Government. All teams were introduced to the respective counterparts from the Queretaro government. And the Queretaro Mayor welcomed all IBM particpants to his great city. Apparently the IBM CSC project gets a lot of attention from the Queretaro press. Interested about what was said during this kick-off meeting, practice your Spanish now:
More to come in my next blog in a
couple of days so stay tuned ;)
Buenas noches
Yuri
#ibmcsc Mexico team 1
#ibmcsc Mexico team 1
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