SAN JULIAN
Now is the dry season.
Wild fires and slash-and-burn farming produce smoke so thick that it smudges the sun and and blankets the sky. At times, ash floats down like some sort of infernal snow. And the dust. The clouds behind vehicles envelop roadside pedestrians, and some stretches of road require four-wheel drive to steer through their dust-filled ruts.
The Spanish Conquistadors called our area of eastern Bolivia, "the Green Hell." The title is especially appropriate title during our dry season.
So now is when communities and farmers take notice of their neighbor's wells and discover the Water For All (WFA) ministry, headquartered in San Julian, a booming market town of about 5,000 people. Here my mom organizes a cottage industry program for our neighborhood's women, my dad designs and implements affordable technologies for small farmers, and said farmers come to ask about getting water.
The people of the village San Juan de la Cruz, for instance, contacted our neighbor, Don Teofilo (Mr. Theophilus, in Spanish) whom my dad trained to drill and who has drilled more of our wells than anyone else in the world.
Since my parents were still in the United States at the time, my dad sent help to organize a well club in the village. The families of San Juan de la Cruz had drilled six wells by the time my family and our crew of interns arrived, and soon we would help them drill four more.
The CrewThe seven of us include:
Meghan Neal. She left James Madison University in Virginia with a BA in English and an African studies minor, prompting her to find a human needs project that would send her to the continent of her latter studies. Being the only girl in the group did not dissuade Meghan from coming or cull her sense of adventure. She pops out questions and observations without hesitation, studies Spanish rigorously, and has ventured to the market here in San Julian on her own. She is spunky if ever there was spunk.
Rob Glahn also graduated from JMU. He majored in economics and took several African studies classes with Meghan, and so it was that they discovered the WFA program together via the Internet. This is his first trip outside of the United States, although he does have the distinction among us of having traveled to about 150 concerts and nine music festivals. He rarely goes anywhere without a large pair of cheap sunglasses and a bandanna to uphold his curly, red hair, which matches his bushy red beard.
The only other intern with a full beard has been Allan De Laurell, a burly brown beard that gave him the appearance of a jolly lion whenever he laughed. A week into the trip, Allan shaved all of his beard except for the mustache, which gave him an uncanny resemblance to the heroic virtual plumber Mario. Allan graduated University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2003 with an English BA, and, although accepted to graduate school, he decided to become a farmer, so he joined various agriculture programs and organic farming communities around the world until he arrived at the World Hunger Farm in Waco in January 2006.
Kris Hiew likewise came to Bolivia from the WHF. Kris had known Allan since high school in San Diego, California. After graduating high school in 2000, Kris bounced around, as he once said, "from culinary school, to film school, to no school" until he went to the WHF at Allan's invitation in March 2006. Kris and Allan saw my father's well-drilling demonstration at the WHF (my parents trained and lived there before going to the mission field), and together they came.
Thus we have one pair from JMU (Meghan and Rob), another from the World Hunger Farm (Allan and Kris) and finally we have a pair from the Baptist General Convention of Texas' Go Now Missions program: Matt McGee and Jeremy Boucher.
Matt McGee, a BS '07 Hardin Simmons graduate with a degree in accounting and finance, arrived in Bolivia wearing a pair of closed-toed shoes and a shirt tucked into his pants. His shoes are still closed and his shirt remains tucked, by far our most consistent dresser. The camera, however, has been McGee's trademark. He takes pictures of everything that moves, and then everything that doesn't. Most of us have essentially abandoned our photographic equipment and almost wholly depend on McGee's digital documentation. For instance, here is a link to McGee's pictures, an album on Facebook:
http://hsutx.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2012336&l=220b6&id=152600384
McGee has traveled before with the BGCT and so has Jeremy Boucher - a 6' 4'', 190 pound Dublin, Texas native with a mathematics degree from Howard Payne and a Texas accent that rivals only my father's in terms of twang-per-syllable. Along with his usual construction and hardware store summer jobs, Jeremy went to Indonesia in 2006 to help with tsunami relief, and last summer he spent two weeks in Jordan meeting with Muslims in coffee shops to learn about Islam and to present the Gospel if the opportunity arose.
Meghan, Rob, Jeremy and McGee all arrived at Santa Cruz at 8 a.m. with no incident. Not so for Kris and Allan. They took a 41-hour bus ride from Waco to Miami, and then flew to Bolivia via a flight that gave them an 18 hour layover in Lima, Peru. There they met a friendly person who showed them around Lima, took them out to eat, and then decided to let them pay for the meal. Exhausted and cheated, they arrived at their final destination at 5 a.m.
My family let our travelers catch their breath at a hotel where we had been staying. The later arrivals ate breakfast, the earlier ones slept.
Then we whisked them to San Julian by a three-hour, rented bus drive. My mom and dad spoke of lodging logistics on the bus. Our heads bobbed and swayed with the driver's pothole dodging, and the weary voyagers' eyes glazed over - caught between the twin traveler characteristics of wonder and jet lag.
Arrival at San Julian
Every small child on our dirt-road neighborhood poured into my parent's lot to see us. My 12-year-old sister Margarita headed the troop of children once we finished unpacking, and the troop solicited our company for games. One such game is called "baseball," a sport involving bricks for bases, wooden slabs for bats and a series of rules which, through its intricacies, could warm the hearts of bureaucrats across the world.
We played such games even before familiarizing ourselves with our quarters. We guys are sleeping in a house that WFA has rented, located a few plots of land down from my parent's parcel. At my parent's place, there are three building.
One building has two rooms, one for Meghan, and one for the ladies' cottage-industry. Another includes my parents' room, my sisters' room, and a living room area. Connected to that building is an office room, which does in fact have an Internet connection, the connection I am using now. Finally, we have the kitchen and dining area, which includes a bathroom with a shower.
Meghan uses the kitchen shower, and we at the boy's room have the blessing of an "hace-viuda" shower, which translates to "widow-maker." The device is an electrical shower head that heats water as it comes out. Touching the ungrounded appliance delivers a 220 volt shock. We rinse with caution.
Other than our bathroom, the guy's house is essentially one long room with seven beds. Carlos Cruz Perez also lives with us.
Carlos wandered to Bolivia from Colombia and wound up working on well drilling with my dad. He is our instructor, of sorts. He speaks Spanish slowly and clearly, the result of working and befriending other gringos, such as Peace Corp volunteers, and speaking Spanish with people who aren't accustomed to the slang and accent of Colombian Spanish. Carlos has also drilled dozens of wells, and he has trained other people to drill dozens of wells, such as the people at the village where we would go the Monday after our arrival, San Juan de la Cruz.
The First Weekend
The next day, Saturday, my dad took us on a tour of a plot of land where he was experimenting with irrigation and fish ponds. Later in the afternoon, we made trips to the market to shop for groceries that we would need in San Juan de la Cruz.
Saturday evening we played music on guitar and violin and continued playing with the kids. Kris' cheerful antics and gestures have made him especially popular with the children of San Julian. My youngest sister, Marilu, considers him to be the funniest thing she has ever seen in all six years of her life.
Sunday we rested, and my dad gave an orientation in the afternoon: a slide show presentation of the technology and a talk about incarnational ministry, agriculture, sustainability, the necessity of Christianity in human needs efforts, and so forth.
I'm firmly of the opinion that my father could teach collegiate courses in missions, well-drilling geology, church history, animal husbandry, anything you want to learn in agronomy, Bolivian politics and a blend of all of the above, and he can illustrate each element of the technical detail with anecdotes and stories from personal experience. He continually repeats his lectures: during dinner, while he's driving, as we're drilling, etc.
He spoke effortlessly during that Sunday afternoon orientation for four hours.
At night we had church in the thatch-roof building beside my parent's lot. Finally, for the first time during the trip, nostalgia burst my heart that night like the waters of an exploded dam. Clapping and singing songs from childhood. My mind swirled with memories.
I was back.
SAN JUAN DE LA CRUZ
Jeremy almost single-handedly repaired the flat on the way to San Juan de la Cruz. He spent about 40 minutes leveling the ground with a shovel, clearing out a space for the jack to fit beneath the Landcruiser's axle. The rest of us looked for dirt clods and sticks to put in front of the vehicle's wheels and stared out at the fields surrounding us.
We were semi-stranded in the middle of an arid dirt road that ran through the middle of a private ranch. We had two cars, so there was no terrible danger. In fact, the flat only set us back about an hour, an inconvenience.
Had we not been able to use the ranch road, things might have been much, much less convenient. The only other way into the town is by horseback around the ranch, and then by canoe up the San Julian river. The ranch encloses San Juan de la Cruz. Fortunately for us, San Julian's municipal government granted us use of the road, which the owner begrudgingly conceded.
The people of San Juan de la Cruz and the ranch owner have been in a land dispute for several years now.
San Juan de la Cruz, with about 20 families living there, has existed for about 50 years. Its residents say claim papers that entitle them to 325 acres of wilderness beside the river San Julian, in an area that the still-living founder (I'll relate my interview with him later) pioneered and homesteaded. The founder said he gained the title papers with the help of a Catholic priest who brought in a government delegation from the capital.
The ranch claims more than 25,000 acres of land. About four years ago, the owner wanted to claim the unused land of San Juan de la Cruz, land which the homesteaders of the village have not yet developed, a takeover justified, according to village residents, by the you-don't-use-it-you-lose-it school of economics.
Don Ramiro, a San Juan de la Cruz resident, said he and his neighbors peacefully petitioned the ranch developers to please remove your bulldozers from our land. The ranch crew threatened to call in the police if they didn't stop bothering them, so the villagers persisted in bothering them and encouraged them to involve the police.
"They [the ranch crew] kept saying, 'We have papers, we have papers.' And we said, 'Then show us the papers.' Of course they didn't have papers. Where would they have gotten papers? We have the papers," Don Ramiro said.
So after the third petition, the residents of San Juan de la Cruz grabbed their shotguns, rifles, machetes and shovels, surrounded one of rancher's hired gunmen ("the cockiest thug," Don Ramiro said), and ran off him and all the other ranch employees to the nearest town.
That was in 2003, and the ranch owner now allows - again, begrudgingly - the San Juan de la Cruz villagers use of his ranch road to their homes. I knew none of this when we arrived. Everything seem serene, idyllic, and everything was peaceful throughout our stay.
The Day to Day
We set up camp beneath a few mango trees which bordered the central soccer field. Every night we heard the fruit bats screeching at each other in the trees, and every morning the neighborhood livestock, pigs mostly, ruffled around our tents until we were awake enough to shoo them away.
A family lived a few feet to our left, facing the soccer field: three boys of grade-school age, their father, and their mother, whose lack of all but three teeth did not lessen the breadth of her smile. She always smiled, when we left our camp site and when we returned.
A thatch-roof building on our right stored the well materials and groceries we brought. Doña Valvina, Don Ramiro's wife, cooked our meals. We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner at a table outside their one-room house, on their dirt-tiled and thatch-covered porch.
Those meal times at Don Ramiro's served at as excellent opportunities to discuss how our situation compared with various pop-culture films (prompted usually by Kris and sustained by everyone else), what constituted animal cruelty (courtesy of debates between Meghan and Allan, given their observations and interpretations of the condition of livestock and ragged dogs in our area), and how our location "is just like Central Texas" (courtesy of everyone from Texas).
This last topic of discussion never lasted long, but it has become a standard subject for every new area we encounter. For instance, those of us acquainted with Central Texas have seen smoke there before, and there is smoke in San Juan de la Cruz, QED "San Juan de la Cruz is a lot like Central Texas."
The food around the table was also excellent. We brought most of our own food, although on a few occasions we ate emu eggs, emus being a smaller, South American version of an ostrich.
We devoted that entire first day to setting up camp. The next, we went to drill.
For now, know only that it involves an abundance of mud. It is officially called the Baptist Well Drilling Method because "good Baptist people have supported us and made the technology possible," as my father says. However, the title is also fitting because the method involves well-drilling by immersion.
Every evening we returned to our tents drenched in mud still slick on our clothes, caked on our heads and streaked across our faces. And so it was that almost every evening we washed at the river.
The Rio San Julian was less than 100 yards from our camp site. Everyone uses it for laundry and washing, and so did we, with Jeremy's Red Zone Old Spice Bodywash (we're still waiting for them offer corporate sponsorship). Down river a bit, the villagers told us that there are electric eels, anacondas (sicuris [see-coo-rEEs], people call them here) and sting rays. Fortunately, all we ever felt was cool water at our chests and fine sand beneath our feet.
Allan, unfortunately, did not join us after his first venture into the water, because his back quickly swelled with what looked like hives. He used our portable shower bag after that.
Otherwise, bathing in the river was pleasant. One evening we saw monkeys in the trees, solidifing the impression that we were swimming in the Amazon River Basin, which we were.
Drilling
Given the river in the area, our wells were rather shallow, about 18 to 20 meters (57 to 64 feet), so the drilling itself went quickly. The 10 families of San Juan de la Cruz's well club had drilled six wells on their own already, so they were our teachers. Carlos had taught them well.
Most of what we did that first day, once we made a straight pilot hole, was rowing. About four people constantly pull on a rope to move the entire rig up and down. The inertia picks up the mud in the hole, mud made of water and cuttings from the bottom, and spews it out the top and into a settling pit which recycles water back into the hole.
We switched off rowing with the well club members every so often and reached our depth by noon. Then we put on a larger bit and reemed the hole, that is, made it wider to insert the well casing easily. Then we stuffed the casing into the well. Think of casing as the brick wall that lines a large water well, only in our case the casing is two-inch plastic pipe.
Then we developed the well. We put in piping with a one-way valve on the end, and we slush the water inside to break up clay lining the wall of the hole, thereby increasing the water level and recharge rate of the well. Only after developing the well does one put in a pump, which is made on the spot that the owner can easily take out and repair alone. Then the well is done.
At one well, we interns spent more than half the day developing the well while the San Juan de la Cruz club began drilling the next well.
Only one person at a time could pump out the water at a time, so Meghan, Jeremy and Kris and I sat around the hole, and Rob pumped.
"Feels sort of anticlimactic."
Such was Jeremy's observation, one offered soon after he tossed a dirt clod into the mud of the settling pit. The situation seemed like the end of a bad independent film. Cut to mud, fade, roll credits.
That particular well also felt a bit surreal. A dozen yards from us, with charred palm trees behind him, Allan played guitar and belted out improvised lyrics about water wells, and my dad accompanied him on the fiddle.
All in all, our job was not, is not, sexy. We have no sleek machinery, no push-button operations. We pull on a rope and get soaked in mud. And at the end of the day, another family has water of its own, clean water that is not from the river, and water where it is needed on their fields.
Don Fernando
Earlier that day I had mentioned to Carlos that I would like to interview the founder, Don Fernando. Carlos was well acquainted with everyone in the village. He had taught them to drill during the day, hunted with them on the river at night and entertained the children that constantly followed him, so much so that Meghan dubbed him "defender of children" one evening while he let a few little girls braid his long, black hair.
Thus Carlos set up the interview with Don Fernando on my behalf, and Jeremy and Meghan sat in on it. We entered his home, a thatch-roof house like everyone else's, and he greeted us from his hammock, swinging softly. I sat on the ground nearest to him so that his stories would register clearly on my hand-held recorder. His granddaughters brought seats for Jeremy and Meghan.
Dim candle light cast a shadow over his eyes, but it couldn't hide their twinkling. He smiled throughout the hour-long talk, proud that his village was growing and proud that his sons had defended their land.
Don Fernando was a peon about 30 years ago, part of the Bolivan patronage system, a feudal-like arrangement officially discontinued in the 1950s which gave the landowner (the patron) ownership over all of the families living on his land. One evening, Don Fernando and his patron had an argument about Don Fernando's drinking habits, and Don Fernando punched his patron in the face.
He promptly left the patron and moved near present-day San Juan de la Cruz. However, another patron claimed hold over Don Fernando and his family, so Don Fernando said to his father-in-law, "Let's move out, far away, where no one will ever bother us."
Thus he left to where San Juan de la Cruz is now, and with the help of a Catholic priest whom he befriended, he officially secured the land.
He invited friends and family members to his land, and the village began to grow. In 1993, the village was officially named.
Don Fernando is also renowed for his stories about snakes. One of them was believable, and the other, you decide.
He killed a 30-foot snake while it was asleep, cut its head off with two swings of his machete. He swung his hands around the room to describe how the snake coiled and writhed in its death throes. It hissed even without a head, he said, like a pinched tire. And he was adamant about how got a bad deal selling the snake skin.
He told of another story about two brothers who went to a marsh to kill a seven-headed snake. The Bolivian hydra chased the boys up a tree, and they shot it from the branches. The snake got so mad that it caused a terrible storm that flooded the area. (Anacondas always cause rain when they're mad).
The snake was mortally wounded, and was later found washed up on a ranch, dead. Don Fernando went to sell tobacco to the ranch owner and he described their exchange like this:
"I went to visit the rancher and he said, 'Hello,' and I said, 'Hello,' and he said, 'What can I do for you?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing.' And he said, 'What are you selling?' And I said, 'Tobacco.' And he said, 'How much?' And I said, '20 Bolivianos for the kilo.' And he said, 'Come out back. I want to show you something.'"
The rancher showed him his new chicken coop, made from the seven-headed snake's rib cage.
I thought the story was ridiculous. There is no way you would sell a kilo of tobacco for 20 Bolivianos.
I gave Meghan and Jeremy brief translations of the stories after the interview since neither of them understood Spanish very well. Yet all of us agree that the night was especially meaningful, sitting at the feet of a true homesteader, among the last of a generation.
Thursday's Service
Thursday night we had a church service. There is no church as of yet in San Juan de la Cruz, although several families had been regular attenders in their towns of origin. Some small villages hold church services every night of the week and then all day Saturday and Sunday. There is simply nothing else to do.
So we sang songs, Matt McGee gave his testimony, my dad gave a devotional, and we gave everyone marshmellows to roast over our campfire at the end of the service. Almost everyone came.
The kids had been there already. They had gathered around earlier when several of us began an impromptu drum circle around the fire. Rob was especially excited about the drum circle. The old iron pan he brought just for such an occasion did not go to waste.
The people of San Juan de la Cruz were just as excited about the service. As one might suspect, people asked to have a church service every night. And many requested "just one more song" as we ended.
Week Numero Dos
A few wells remained to be dug when the week was finished, but we returned to San Julian for the weekend and Monday. Monday was the 24 of September holiday, the department of Santa Cruz's foundation day.
So the following Tuesday we returned and finished the last well. Then we dug around the two community wells at the school and one out a club member's field and sealed them off with bentonite, a fine clay available world-wide and commonly used for well-drilling. That would assure the purity of the water in the well, even though the aquafer we drilled into is contained, meaning that it is fed from the mountains and not from rainwater.
We also celebrated my birthday that following week, on the 26th, with chocolate cupcakes and trick candles.
That night, fires burned in the forest across the river. It looked like the glow from a small city on the horizon, and exploding trees kept many of us awake. A dense fog of smoke greeted us the next morning, and bits of ash fell from the sky.
The haze was especially thick after that, and it would be a while before we saw any stars or blue sky. Even before the giant fire came we had only seen one or two specks, except for one night.
It was about 2 a.m., and I was on my way to the outhouse beside the school. I saw a large tarantula walking beside me, and I didn't bother it. It may have been out on the same business. I stopped for a moment to let the tarantula walk a safe distance away from me, and I looked up while I waited. There was the southern sky.
I hadn't seen those stars in long time. They reminded me of the people one sees regularly on street corners or in coffee shops or at grocery stores, the unknown acquaintences whose appearances serve as a comforting testimony that amid chaos, something is going as it should.
THE TWO-WEEK WELL
We stayed in Santa Cruz after San Juan de la Cruz for a bit of r&r.
Carlos, at the recommendation of one of his Peace Corp friends, found us a six-dollar-per-night hotel room. The eight of us fit into the habitation: one room with five beds, some extra mattresses and a bathroom.
Saturday we visited the zoo. We witnessed the jaguars' feeding and gave soda to monkeys that had escaped their cages and stayed in the area. Beyond that, we ate out and walked around the central plaza.
All in all, the trip was a welcome respite from drilling, something we would need for our next well.
The Situation
We've drilled in the rocky hills of Rabondo in western Kenya, beside the Langano lakes in central Ethiopia, in the clay and silt of Asosa in western Ethiopia, and in the caliche rock of West Texas, and nothing compares with the well we drilled just outside of San Julian.
Doña Tomasa, a woman whose husband left her with five kids, had paid someone to drill a well, and that person never showed. So we drilled her a well for free.
She volunteered to cook us lunch everyday: a heaping plate of rice, chicken or beef, rice, more rice, potatoes and rice. The food was good, although at times it was too much, and we discretely recruited her piglets to help us clean our plates.
Don Teofilo came with us on this well. He lives adjacent to us in San Julian, and my dad contracts him for moments such as these, to help with the WFA program. Sergio also came with us, a long-time aquaintance of Don Teofilo. Besides being an excellent welder and shop worker, Sergio too has drilled dozens of wells.
We used a motorized rig since there weren't enough of us to pull. A full crew uses about 10 people. Two people stay at the front of the well, one to push down the rig once the pullers give slack, and another to pour water into the hole as the rig advances. Four people pull, and another four stand by to replace the pullers and to switch out drill stem, that is, adding one pieces of PVC to go deeper.
The motorized pulls the rope for us, so the drilling takes the same amount of time, but one needs only the aforementioned rig pushers and pipe changers. And every day a few of us went to a leech-filled pond on the side of the road to scoop up several barrels of water for drilling.
With Don Teofilo, Sergio and the motorized rig on our side, we hoped to finish within a few days. That was not to be.
Re-Learning to Drill
It took a while for us to adjust to the motorized rig, and then we learned not to screw on our drill stem too tightly, and then we learned when we needed to thin the water, and then we learned how to use our wrentches properly, so forth and so on. We learned much and our drilling advanced slowly. We pounded for about 10 hours one day and went through about eight meters of clay. But at least we were advancing.
In the evenings we returned to our place in San Julian, 10 minutes away, and watched the Band of Brothers mini-series on DVD during the evenings, or simply used email and Skype at the office. The routine persisted until Thursday.
Due to poor threading on one of the pipes, 52 meters (166 feet) of PVC and metal were stuck in the ground that Thursday.
We 'fished' for the pipe with a tool, which didn't seem like much of a problem - we had easily performed that operation earlier in the day. But we lost the fishing tool to hole. So we made another fishing tool to get out the first fishing tool, and after dark, we finally recovered the entire rig. We were ecstatic. We posed for group pictures that reveal us drenched in mud, laughingly and smiling. Our hole was intact, our drilling rig safe and our spirits lifted.
The next day we lost the hole and our rig. Surging sands from beneath the clay shot up and collapsed around the pipe at 65 meters. So we started another hole.
We worked ten-hour days for six days the next week. We watched nothing in the evenings. By Wednesday we reached 51 meters, and Thursday we lost 30 meters to a mud cave-in. So we re-drilled through that for two more days.
If we were superstitious we might've abandoned the hole. A small puppy fell into Dona Tomasa's fire and burned to death during the first week. And the second week, Jeremy threw a stick at some pigs to shoo them awayand the stick broke a pig's back, paralyzing its hind legs. We offered to pay for the pig, but Doña Tomasa wouldn't hear of it. The pig was soft, she said.
In the Meantime
In the meantime, a church group from Santa Cruz came out Friday through Sunday to do "campana" (revival) in the evenings with our church. They performed skits and played music at night and went lot to lot in our neighborhood, evangelizing during the afternoons.
I did not witness much of the revival. Saturday night Meghan's foot swelled from a small, infected cut she got earlier that day. She hadn't been wearing shoes because of found a tarantula in her footwear. We're wearing shoes at all times now.
Rob and I went with my mom and Meghan to Santa Cruz where the doctors put her on antibiotics and drained pus from her foot every day for five days. Now is the forth day.
Rob and I returned to San Julian Sunday afternoon and my mom and Meghan stayed in Santa Cruz. The infection has stopped spreading but recovery is slow. Please pray for her.
Monday we finished drilling. We cased the well. That same day the sun came with a deep blue sky. We had seen bits of blue sky since then, and one evening last week we even saw our first sunset, three weeks into our trip. Usually the sun disappears into the smoke at about 5 p.m.
On Monday, however, the sun set fire to clearly distinguishable clouds. Yellows, reds and oranges burned, and they burned without smoke. The sky is clear even now.
That evening we celebrated by falling asleep to Kris' favorite movie (Kris fell asleep too): Jingle All the Way, the 1990s Christmas comedy starring Schwarzenager and Sinbad.
We missed Meghan that evening, but when we went to Santa Cruz the following day, we let her know her swollen foot was not in vain. The well was done, cased at a little deeper than 66.5 meters. May the record stand that we cased our seemingly diabolic well outside San Julian at 213 feet, 66.6 meters.
