To understand the challenges of working in Estero de Plátano, you must first understand
something about small towns. The following two paragraphs come from Steinbeck’s The
Pearl:
A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns, so that there are no two towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved. News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences.
It
is wonderful the way a little town keeps track of itself and of all its units.
If every single man and woman, child and baby, acts and conducts itself in a
known pattern and breaks no walls and differs with no one and experiments in no
way and is not sick and does not endanger the ease and peace of mind or steady
unbroken flow of the town, then that unit can disappear and never be heard of.
But let one man step out of the regular thought or the known and trusted
pattern, and the nerves of the townspeople ring with nervousness and
communication travels over the nerve lines of the town. Then every unit
communicates to the whole.
Small towns, resistant to change, must commit to and believe
in a project before it begins, or else they may resist it forever. With any
introduced change, rumors and gossip run amok. At best, misinformation can be
explained; at worst, reputations are destroyed and lives are seriously damaged.
Building a water treatment system is one thing. Convincing
people to actually use it is a whole different animal.
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