Nothing ventured, nothing gained

Last week I was invited by US Southern Command to speak at COPECO about the use of face recognition as a form of biometric identification during times of crisis. (Disclaimer: I work at OpenRain which is an affiliate of img surf where I developed Mugr)

COPECO (Comisión Permanente de Contingencias) is the equivalent of America’s FEMA. They’re the organization responsible for making sure Honduras and her neighboring nations are well prepared for handling various disaster scenarios like earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes.

This was the first time I’ve been to Honduras and the first time I’ve traveled out of the United States since becoming an American citizen.

I learned a lot from this trip.

1. Honduras has hundreds of bilingual schools at the preschool, primary, and secondary levels, which is the American equivalent of K through 12. One preschool taught French and Spanish: Spanish-speaking students learning French from French teachers.

   This is amazing for two reasons: 1) the students are learning two languages and 2) they start learning at a much younger age. This should be the way we teach multiple languages in America. It doesn’t have to be Spanish, because I believe there should be options like Arabic or Chinese, but we ought to encourage our kids to learn to speak multiple languages.

   Learning a new language is actually quite fun, but difficult to do if we’re only taught three to four times a week beginning at the 9th grade, as it’s done in American public schools.

2. COPECO’s headquarters is built on a Honduran military base. The construction of COPECO was a joint effort between Honduras and America. Funding for half of the building was contributed by Honduras, and the other half by America. This was done through the efforts of the U.S Agency of International Development.

   Entrance to COPECO

   Honduras’ Flag

   From the American People!

   During this trip, there were several other organizations demonstrating a variety of technologies aimed at supporting Honduras during a crisis.

3. A yurt is an easily dismantled and transportable man-made shelter used by various nomadic tribes in Central Asia. A hexayurt is a hexagonal shaped, man-made shelter, built from local resources for as little as $200USD per shelter.

   During a natural disaster, one challenge that arises is providing shelter for thousands and thousands of disaster victims. If your country doesn’t have a stadium or a bunch of cancer-causing trailers lying around, one option might be to construct a hexayurt.

   Hexayurts are quickly deployable, cheap to construct, and environmentally friendly which makes them highly useful for meeting human needs where available services are inadequate.

   The hexayurts we constructed in Honduras were made out of compressed wood, string, and super-powered tape.

   Dan making the roof

   Col. Bartone building the walls

   A smaller hexayurt

   

   Completed hexayurts. Honduran army + students from local university. (Not the entire Honduran army)

4. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provides a boatload of information geared towards assessing an earthquake’s impact.

   PAGER (Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response) is an automated system that provides information about the scope of the potential disaster so that various agencies can prioritize their disaster response. It does this by combining information from ground instruments as well as feedback from actual people, which effectively makes it a social web application for measuring earthquake impact.

   ShakeMaps are another neat service. Earthquakes are typically measured by magnitude and epicenter. It turns out that the complexities of the Earth’s crust (rock and soil) influences the propagation of seismic waves (ground shaking) through out a region. Instead of providing simply the magnitude and epicenter, a ShakeMap represents the ground shaking produced by an earthquake.

5. The presentation by Pat McArdle on solar cooking pretty much blew my mind away. A solar cooker is a device that uses sunlight to cook. That’s it. No wood, no gas, no coal. Just sunlight.

   A solar cooker

   Chicken del la Solar

   Chocalate cake

   These devices are deceptively simple looking and yet they work remarkably well. Pat made a chicken dish, pasteurized water, and even baked a cake. You can build one easily or you can buy one online. If I didn’t believe in science, I would still be in complete disbelief that something so simple could work so well.

6. On the last day, a small group of participants were invited to the local children’s hospital. The situation, I’m sad to share, is grim. The hospital has 400 beds, 8 intensive care units, and only 2 critical care units. The infant mortality is 23/1000. The hallways are packed and patient occupation is at 139% often resulting in two children to a bed.

7. The military personnel responsible for organizing the event were among the brightest, most talented, and incredibly motivated group of individuals I’ve ever met.

8. I felt incredibly ignorant (not in the pejorative sense) for not knowing more Spanish. I live in Phoenix, Arizona dammit, why don’t I already speak it?

Some fun things I learned:

1. You can buy Cuban cigars in Honduras and bring back a small amount for personal use. I’m talking 3 or 4 cigars, not 13 or 14 boxes. In order words, try not to look like you’re a dealer.

2. The local word for “awesome” in Honduras, is “micizo,” pronounced mee-sue-so.

3. Google.com will redirect you to Google.hn and localize all your results in Spanish. All your results will take you to the Spanish version of the website, if one exists.

4. There’s a city of Arizona, Honduras. It has a population of about 5,000. Tegucigalpa, the capital city is home to about a million people.

   An evening in Tegucigalpa

5. According to our translator, Tegucigalpa is home to the the largest soccer stadium in Central America. Go fútbol!

6. Honduras spends a large portion of it’s national budget buying down the price of oil.

7. The president of Honduras does not live in the Presidential palace.

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