Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to the Buzz, a podcast by Boone Electra Cooperative. The Buzz is a monthly message to our community celebrating what it means to be a member owner of your local electric cooperative, Boone Electric Cooperative, your co op, our community.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Buzz.
[00:00:28] Speaker C: Zach.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Zach Smith and today we're on yet another field trip. For almost a decade, Missouri's electric cooperatives have helped continue the mission of electrification beyond the farm scapes of rural America to other countries. And Boone Electric Cooperative has participated in many of these trips organized by Missouri's international program. Today we're going to hear about one of the most recent of these missions from Boone Electric journeyman lineman Clay Nolte. Clay, welcome to the program.
[00:00:52] Speaker C: Goodwise to be here.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: It's been a little over a month since you and your colleagues from the other cooperatives around the state returned. Where did you go and what were you doing?
[00:01:00] Speaker C: We went to Vallu Calvitz, Guatemala. We ran very simple power systems, built very simple power systems and wired about 100 homes and buildings up in the mountains while we were there.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: And it's, it's like a complete electrification project. I mean, you guys were going into a place that didn't have any electricity.
[00:01:20] Speaker C: Right. They've got absolutely nothing. When we get there, the locals set all the poles and we string primary and hang transformers and run secondary wire and put meters on all the homes and wire the insides as well.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: So it goes from zero to electrified by the time you guys are done.
[00:01:38] Speaker C: It does.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: And you were only there for two weeks?
[00:01:41] Speaker C: About. Yeah, 15, 16 days, actually being in the village.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Wow. So what made you want to do that? And I mean, I understand, you know, the guys who wanted to. Two weeks out of Missouri in the middle of August, although it is, it is the jungle, so maybe it isn't that much different or better, but two weeks out of, out of Missouri around Christmas time is a pretty big, is a pretty big project.
[00:02:01] Speaker C: I think it's a, it's a really neat trip. Probably more than anything the idea of not knowing really what to expect when you get there and also being able to help people that have never had electric, even though they weren't they, they're not poor, but to us they've got, that would be considered poor, being able to go down and help them. It was a great trip.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: By the time people are hearing this episode of the podcast, they've probably already gotten their copy of Rural Missouri in the mail if they're a co op member. And over the years, the magazines had many articles showing the Types of terrain, the tools, the weather that you all have to work with while you're in these other countries for a few weeks. How much different is it working in the jungle mountains of Guatemala compared to, you know, a few miles outside the door here outside Columbia?
[00:02:48] Speaker C: It's not even comparable.
And you can see all the pictures you want. And the whole time we were there, we talk about it. You take pictures. It doesn't. The pictures never make it look as steep and the terrain is rough as what it really is. I mean, literally, the only flat area in the whole country is their soccer fields. Everything else is straight up and down. If you get off the pass in the roads at all, they all carry machetes, and they cut their way through the woods, in the jungle, anywhere they go. The areas where we have trouble just walking, I mean, the locals, it's incredible. 20 of them will get under a power pole and carry it up and down a hill, and we struggle just walking up and down the hills.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: If I remember a factoid from the article correctly, this was one of the more difficult sets of terrain that you guys have had to work with because of how steep it was. I think there was something in there about the elevation change from one pole to the end of the line being something like. Like 3,500ft.
[00:03:41] Speaker C: Yeah, and a lot of that was. The group that went in August built about five miles a line from the previous village to the village we were in. And that was the very. There was a huge elevation change in that line. We wired a few houses in that area. We didn't actually have to build it like they did in August, but, yeah, we definitely saw the area they were in, and kudos to them, because that was. It was. Like I said, it was hard to walk through there, let alone think about drag a wire and all the material it takes to build a power line.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: So, I mean, how often are you out there having to climb the poles versus, you know, how often are you able to use a bucket truck to be able to get around the work that you're doing?
[00:04:21] Speaker C: Yeah, it's definitely slower going. And you have to. The first day or two, you look at a project and you think, okay, we can do that by lunch. And sometimes you can, but sometimes you've got to realize that when you got to climb every pole and sometimes every pole multiple times, it definitely slows everything down, you know, and it's like you said, it's not like here where you just pull a bucket truck up to the pole and you can go up and down in two or three minutes. And it's no big deal. You know, when you got to carry climbing gear and material from spot to spot, it's a lot slower going. But we still, we had a very good group of guys and hard working people that helped a lot. We got a lot done.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: And you mentioned that the locals in the village help you guys a lot with setting the poles and moving things from place to place. How did you all communicate with them?
[00:05:06] Speaker C: So there's two guys from Guatemala, Jimmy and Eric, that oversee the project and they're somewhat of considered engineers and kind of go there beforehand and lay out where to. Where to put the poles and who's getting power and who's not. Willie is another guy from Guatemala. He is strictly just a translator. So there was three people along that knew English and Spanish both. So if we needed anything at all, we'd holler at Willie and Willie would get ahold of someone and then talk right back to us. So if we needed anything at all, we told Willie and Willie would tell a local and they would run. Whatever needed done, they would run. They could not get it done fast enough. It was incredible.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: They were excited to get power church.
[00:05:45] Speaker C: They were very eager to help. Very eager to help.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: And you also were working with seven or eight other guys from around the state. And I know you guys sometimes do trainings and like the rodeo events and stuff like that together. So probably a little bit of familiarity, but it's also probably a little different for you because you're used to working with the guys that you work with here every day.
[00:06:05] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it was a really great group of guys. I knew Isaac that went along. I wish he went to line school with him years ago. And then the other guy I knew, Alex boos just a little bit from just various trainings and schools and whatnot. But everybody else was essentially strangers. We all made great friends and got along great.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: I was going to say in that situation, you probably get to know each other pretty quick.
[00:06:26] Speaker C: You do. There's plenty of time.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: And you got me. What seems like maybe the best part of the job because you actually got to wire up the houses, right?
[00:06:34] Speaker C: It's. It's very personable. You get to go in the houses and with the language barrier, it's hard to have a real good conversation with. With anyone. But it is really neat to be in their homes. And Willie spent a lot of time with the group I was with. And we worked Willie really hard. He was the translator. And everywhere we went it was Willie, come here. We've got a question, a lot of questions, just about how they lived and what stuff was in their homes and what they were making because they were always sewing or making some sort of materials. And we, we worked really hard.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: And wiring houses is not something that you do a lot of in your regular job.
[00:07:12] Speaker C: Not at all. Not at all. Each house gets about two or three outlets and two or three lights and two switches. So it's very simple.
But no, it is not what we do on a day to day, by any means.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: What is it about this kind of work compared to what you do in your everyday role back here at home? How does it make you, does it make you see anything differently? I mean, it has to, right? You guys were gone for first half of December and I saw that you got to see them getting ready for Navidad in one of the villages in Guatemala. But you come home in the middle of all the spectacle and electric lights that are involved with Christmas back here.
How does that feel? I guess coming back it was different.
[00:07:59] Speaker C: Because we honestly forgot that it was Christmas time for a lot of it because it was warm down there, that there's nobody really decorating for Christmas. And then we landed Houston in St. Louis and we step outside, it's cold in St. Louis. We're like, wow, it's Christmas time. Christmas lights are up and it's a week before Christmas. But down there, we didn't think about Christmas a ton because like I said, you kind of forget about it. They were very content with what they had, and they had, like I said, what we considered almost nothing. So it was, it was very humbling to see how happy and how hard they worked with the little they had. And a lot of them, their only goal was to survive until tomorrow and see what they were going to do tomorrow. But they were, they were happy. They were the absolute happiest and hardest working people you'll ever meet.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Probably a life lesson in there for everybody somewhere.
[00:08:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: You mentioned working Willie pretty hard when you guys were doing the work on the houses. And the photos are as close as someone like me is probably ever going to get to see that moment. But you were actually there. What was it like seeing the people that you're helping, the look on their faces when they turn on the lights for the first time.
[00:08:59] Speaker C: It was satisfying. And one thing I did at almost every house, there was a kid or something around and I would make a little kid screw in a light bulb. It was fun even before the power was on. It was just neat to see them screw the bulb in and get ready for when the power was going to be on and later that day or whenever. But it was cool. And there's a video out there of one of the little boys flipping a light switch on back and forth. And it's something that a lot of. A lot of the people in the village had never, never done. A few of them have. A lot of them have seen lights in some way, but most of them had never, never done before. So that was. It was. It was neat. It was neat. And it's going to be really cool to see how much the village changes over the next few years once they start getting even. If the whole village goes in on one particular power tool or one appliance, what that'll do for them over the course of the next couple years.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: There's a couple great pictures of you specifically working in a couple houses, and there's no language barrier in those photos. It's like all joy, and it's pretty amazing to see. I'm sure you co workers, the guys here had a lot of questions. What was the number one thing that they wanted to know when you got back?
[00:10:05] Speaker C: Everybody wants to know about the food. Everybody wants to know what you ate and whether it was authentic or whether it was good and who got sick. Because anytime you travel with a group, especially as a group to a different area like that, oh, sure, here's the horror stories about everybody getting sick. So definitely the food.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Of course, the lineman asked about the food.
[00:10:23] Speaker C: Yeah. And we were super fortunate. Nobody ever got sick from the water or anything else the whole trip. We had two cooks from Guatemala City that went along and made food for us the whole way, and it was incredible. We didn't lose any weight, that was for sure. They did great. And the locals, they made us every morning and every day at lunch, they would drop off some, like, corn tortillas that they had made. So, yeah, there was definitely no complaints. No complaints on the food.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: I know in Bolivia, they had to deal with altitude difference, and some of that obviously can cause some sickness and things like that. And I don't know know what the altitude was like where you guys were at was that was the environment other than just how steep it was. Was there any.
[00:11:06] Speaker C: So it was around 8,000ft.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:11:09] Speaker C: And sometimes we would be way higher than that. Sometimes we drop down a lot lower than that. But nobody ever got had any trouble as far as sickness. We could definitely tell the first day or two when you're walking up a hill that the hills were steep, but you could Tell that you were a little more tired than you maybe should be.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:11:24] Speaker C: But it seemed like we got used to that quick, whether we actually got in a little bit better shape or just got used to slowing down, but it didn't. Didn't affect us a ton.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: I know. And you mentioned some of the other guys here have been on trips before. Did they have any advice for you or thing, you know, tips before you left?
[00:11:43] Speaker C: Yeah, a lot of it was a lot of things on what to pack and how to pack was a lot of the advice.
Trying to stay underway, going through the airport is there's always a challenge. We get two 50 pound bags and the first, my tool bag, when I weighed it the first time, it was over £70. So that was just what I wanted to take. So we had to, had to adjust that.
But otherwise, as far as advice, when you're going, there's not a ton of big tips because it is what we do every day. It's just a different way of doing it with different people.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: Sure. And you guys are each going into a different situation sort of depending on where it's at and.
[00:12:20] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure, for sure. And everybody offers, you know, if you need anything here, whether it's with family or your house or anything here, there's plenty of people willing to help out with that while you're gone. So that's always. That makes it easier to leave. Also, one piece of advice I got was to take a jar of peanut butter because I've kind of got a reputation of eating a lot anyway. I took a jar of peanut butter along in my bag and I never touched it because we were. There was never a scenario where we were starving.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:12:46] Speaker C: There was plenty to eat and it was always very good.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: I have to ask number one.
So it was just one jar. So that wasn't the reason that the bag was £70?
[00:12:56] Speaker C: No, that was not it.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Who knows you well enough that they were like, you better just take a whole jar of peanut butter.
[00:13:01] Speaker C: That was Jason Tolson.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:03] Speaker C: Jason Tolson. That was his input.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Do you think that the work that you guys did down there changed anything about how you see the job here at home differently or change how you feel about what it is that you guys do?
[00:13:16] Speaker C: The biggest thing, you know, what we, what we use here day to day and what we use down there was even everything from trucks and big equipment to like, even your hand tools and power tools. We didn't have any battery operated crimpers down there, so everything was an older style hand crimper that we're not. None of us were completely used to using. So just small things like that is takes more time and more physical exertion on a pole. The safety practices we have here kind of can take them for granted sometimes or just that that's normal. And even when you get out of the village in Guatemala and throughout the rest of the country, driving through all the cities, you see a lot of things there that absolutely would not go over safety wise. In the United States. Everything from where there was supposed to be meters, they just pull meters and have blank meter sockets on the side of the buildings. The wires and some of the primary high voltage lines that were. You'd be on like a. See a second story building and they would be built right up. I mean almost within reaching distance of some of the buildings and things here that you just wouldn't even consider being an option. And down there, I mean it was the normal. It's a very different system and if anything you can tell they don't do a ton of regular maintenance. If things are working, they're going to let them be until they quit working until something breaks. The only thing, one thing that was a lot different too, they used all concrete poles through their cities like Guatemala City and Antigua and Chichi Cast and one of the city, some of the cities that we drove through, they used almost all concrete poles on anything new.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: I don't think I've ever even seen one of those.
[00:14:53] Speaker C: Yeah, they've got up hundreds of thousands of them. Wow. Yeah. Tons of them. Yeah. Everything in the village and that was all wood. But yeah. Anything in the more popular dated cities was concrete.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: You mentioned maintenance and it makes me curious what a. What a right of way program would look like in the jungle.
[00:15:10] Speaker C: It's a couple guys with a machete. We saw it a few times while we were working. If we. There was a tree or something that needed to come down, they would bail off in these holes and hollers and you couldn't even see them. You'd just see little tops of trees and twigs and stuff moving around and you'd hear a bunch of wax and next thing you know a tree would be falling down. It was. It was wild.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: They went out and took care of it.
[00:15:30] Speaker C: They did.
[00:15:31] Speaker A: Would you go back?
[00:15:32] Speaker C: Absolutely. I'd go back tomorrow.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Really?
[00:15:35] Speaker C: I would absolutely go back tomorrow.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: What is it you liked so much about it?
[00:15:39] Speaker C: Just seeing something new every day and the aspect of helping out a group of people that we would see as less fortunate then the adventure to really is neat. Seeing a new Country, a new culture, new people. And being that it's not like you're just going to Guatemala to the. You know, you're going to the most isolated areas of Guatemala and seeing how those people are very realistic version of how they live and how they. How they survive, it was awesome. It was a great trip.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: You make a great point. The place where you guys were working was like a full day's ride from where you flew into, Right. And not a full day's ride out on, you know, paved interstate, right?
[00:16:29] Speaker C: No. So it was.
We landed in Guatemala City and then we drove to Chichi Castanega, which was about eight hours. And if you look on a map, it's not that far. But there is no way to get anywhere quickly in Guatemala. There's no interstates.
Everything is windy, switchbacks up and down a mountain, up and down mountains and around a few volcanoes and straight through. We probably never went more than 50 miles in a day, but it would take six, seven, eight hours to drive that distance. It was just. Everything is slow going. And then once we got to Naba, which was the last city before we headed off into the mountains to the village we worked at. It was about two hours from Naba to that village. And it was a gravel. What we would maybe call a gravel path at best, or something you'd find in a farm road through the woods. It was not.
Not super well maintained. The whole thing was hilly and rough, and you could tell every mile or two that it had caved off on a little bit of an avalanche or something at some point. And they'd shoved it back open and reopened it until it did it again. I think we looked. It was about 35 miles, but it took us every bit of two hours. And that was driving like you stole something. That was not. That was not a smooth cruise like we would typically drive around here. It was. Driving was interesting.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: What were you guys riding in together?
[00:17:58] Speaker C: So we had four Toyota Hilux pickups that we picked up at the airport and we ran them the entire trip.
That was our. Our work trucks. When we got to the village, that was our way of getting around. We did everything out of them.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Those things are indestructible. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: They.
They were. They got worked hard. I bet they were. Yeah. I would assume nobody got their deposit back from the rentals when they got turned back in, because they were. They were not in as good a shape as we found.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: You guys are there to work, obviously, but you get some time to. To see you know, the country where you're at, what was. What were some of the things that you guys did? And what was. What was, you know, one of the coolest things that you saw out there?
[00:18:39] Speaker C: So one of the Sundays, we went to. Back to Nabal, which was the city about two hours away.
We walked around some. Some shops in the town square there. They were setting up some kind of, like, Christmas concert gathering they were going to have that evening. We didn't stick around late enough to see it, but they were. There's definitely. You could tell a big gathering was going to happen while we were there. We bought some soccer balls and some more candy and stuff to give out to the kids there in the village. We walked around a few hardware stores just to see what they had. We actually recognized a few brands of tools that they had, so that was neat. And then went back to the village. And then on the way back, we stayed in one night a town called Antigua. So Antigua is the city at the base of the volcano. It's a very big, like, historically a Catholic city. So it's kind of neat seeing some of the big churches and stuff around. It's a very busy. Probably one of the more touristy areas we were at. And then we also. One of the nights we stayed at Lake Adelan, which is. We stayed in, like, this actual kind of nice resort right on the edge of the lake. And you could see a big volcano across it. It was. It was really pretty the evening we were there looking at that. But actually, though, the volcano on the outskirts of Lake Antigua, one of them coughed smoke, like every 15 minutes. It's actually still considered kind of active. And apparently it actually erupted six, eight years ago. And when you first see it, it's kind of wild that all of a sudden it blows a big smoke cloud every 10, 15 minutes. And everybody lives there like it's normal. And I guess it is normal, but it was. It was neat to see the first few times it did that. As far as the driving, those volcanoes. We spent two days still within sight of these volcanoes, and they didn't look that huge, but you would literally spend eight hours driving around these volcanoes, around the bases of them, and you were literally just getting around them. It was incredible how big they were and how slow travel is down there, because, like I said, there's no. There's no straight lines and there's no interstates. It's winding, winding roads everywhere you go.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: I know when you guys finish a project, there's usually a sort of a celebration of kinds when you get ready to leave. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What, what you guys.
[00:20:46] Speaker C: Yeah, so they had a big going away ceremony for us. And the way it started, actually about the night or two days beforehand, they tied a cow up in the soccer field and we made a couple jokes that, wow, that's going to be our dinner for our going away party. And turns out we were right. It never cooled off. They hung it right up in a pavilion type area and stripped the whole entire beef up into strips and hung it up on these racks. They made a fire on the ground under it and they cooked it from about 9 o'clock that morning until noon the next day. They kept a fire under it the whole time. While that was cooking, there was a bunch of women that were making different vegetables. They were cooking in some hot water, and that was what everybody ate for the gathering the next day. But as far as the gathering, it was. It was kind of nuts because there was a whole bunch of guys there that we didn't realize we were working with the whole week somehow. They cleaned up really well. They all had really nice suits on. They got, they shaved, they had haircuts. And finally somebody said, those are the guys that a fan like pointed them out that we had been working with all week. And we didn't recognize them because they went from wearing machetes on their sides and crawling through the hills with us to. I mean, they cleaned up well. It was. It was strange, but they had a few different speakers at this ceremony. They said a lot of, A lot of thank yous and a lot of kind of talked about what the electric was going to do for them and the schools and the churches. And once they had a. We had a ribbon cutting ceremony. At the end of it, we all cut a piece of a ribbon off. They all gave us a gift. It was one of the colorful, what we would call a purse, but a big colorful bag that they all wear down there. So that was. That was really neat to get one of those. And once that was over, they. Everyone spent the rest of the day kind of hanging out and eating the, the beef and vegetable concoction that they had made. We actually left and went to Trapachitos, which is a village about a half hour away in the afternoon just to go see a project that the guys had done a few years ago. But then they had a dance that evening that was really neat. The. The mayor said a few words and they had a band that played the whole time. It was really neat to. To see all the the locals kind of just enjoying themselves and a different. A very different activity than what we'd been used to as far as just working and hanging out in the village and to see they actually have a party, it was. It was neat. It was really cool to be a part of that.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: Well, Clay, I think I speak for everybody here, employees, directors, members of Boone Electric on this. Thank you for volunteering for the international program. Obviously, it gave you a lot of personal experiences that have had a big impact on your life. And it's a very important reminder for the rest of us, particularly this time of year. The holidays are over. We're in the middle of the dark, cold days of winter, and I'll say it's a little harder to find gratitude for what we do have at times. And I appreciate you taking some time to tell us about your experience because I think that changes my perspective. Certainly. Thank you for joining us, sir.
[00:23:42] Speaker C: Absolutely. Absolutely. I've enjoyed it.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: And thank you for joining us on the Buzz. Be sure to stop by next month, and until then, we'll see you somewhere down the line.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: Thank you for tuning in to the Buzz, a podcast by Boone Electric Cooperative. To subscribe or for more information, you can find us on Facebook, Instagram X and LinkedIn. And of course, you can always visit us 247 at Boonelectric Co op. Boone Electric Cooperative, your co op, our community.
