Blog Post Day 1
Our second first day in Puerto Rico was a resounding success. Maybe it was because we landed in San Juan at 19:30 instead of 04:00 and were better rested, or maybe it was because we were able to be much more focused in our questions and goals, or maybe it was that we already knew and felt familiar with our contacts, but it feels like we did a LOT more today than our first first day in Combate.
A couple things are different this time around. Most importantly, we're down two team members, as neither Mika nor Becca were able to come on this trip. Secondly, we're staying in a different apartment. Finally, and least (most?) importantly, we have the Swaggon - our rental minivan swag wagon, which lets the whole team ride together everywhere we need to go. It has been great for team health and cohesiveness!
Our morning started out with a trip to our favorite breakfast location at 08:00, where we saw Jenny and Walter. Refreshed by the coffee and sandwiches, we buckled down and got organized for the day. At 10:00, Cesar, Paulina and I headed over to the Villa Pesquera to meet with Guillermo. Before he showed up we had the opportunity to talk with Tio Negro, one of the mechanics we spoke with last trip. We asked him about his motor’s repair and maintenance history in an attempt to get a sense of the economic impact of motors on our users’ lives. Guillermo arrived and joined in the conversation, contributing his own numbers to the database. Negro drifted away as Mickey, freshly shaved and smiling, came over and provided his knowledge on the subject of motor costs and lifetimes. We were able to get a better picture of how often motors need to be taken to a mechanic for service over and above the preventative maintenance that most fishermen do on their own.
The preparation we had done for the trip must have paid off since we were getting nugget after nugget of precious information, filling in the blanks in the picture we had begun to paint of life as a subsistence fisherman in Puerto Rico. 
At some point, Oscar, Jamey and Anna showed up, and after a short time talking as a full group - and drinking some delicious fish soup made by Mickey's mother - we split up, with three of us talking with Guillermo, and the other three working with Mickey. In these subgroups, we performed several card sorting activities, to try to obliquely get sensitive information about the fishermen's priorities, finances, and values. These were incredibly successful, as the process of sorting and ranking values and priorities surrounding finances and time created a feeling of safety. This enabled our users to open up about their finances a bit more. and the information they provided us helped us to determine the effect that a few extra dollars a day could have on their lives. Around 12:30 we left the Villa, thanking our friends and making plans to see them the next day.
The day being far from over, we refilled water bottles and jumped in the Swaggon to meet Andy at his house. We attempted a card sort with Andy, but he wasn't having it, despite Anna's best efforts. The linear, organized thinking pattern that is so common at Olin didn’t fit with Andy’s narrative-based and experiential thought processes. Instead of sorting cards, he used their contents as jumping blocks for stories that the words on the card inspired within him, telling us about why teaching is so important to him and talking about the relationship between fishermen and government agencies. This was all valuable information that allowed us to get to know Andy a bit more - it was simply delivered in a way that was less organized than anticipated. While we were talking, the most powerful sun-shower I had ever seen passed through. It poured for a solid half hour, although there didn’t seem to be a single cloud overhead.
Always a wealth of information, the time with Andy quickly passed, and before we knew it nearly two hours had gone by. As we visited our slower friend named Andy, Andy Sr. invited us to his house the next day for a dinner of carrucho, or conch - a shellfish that is newly in season and ridiculously abundant for the first time in three years.
Before we left, Andy told us about a pig roast that was happening at a restaurant on our way back to town, so of course we stopped in to experience traditional cuisine. Oscar ordered lechon (pig on a stick), cuajito (pig esophagus), and morcilla (pig's blood sausage in pig intestine), of which all of us had the first, but only Jamey and Anna were brave enough to try the last two. The rain, which had let up as we left Andy's, began in full force as we were eating. The sky split and dumped its contents, but eventually the rain slowed and as we were leaving, we noticed that a rainbow had taken the place of the rain - a good omen for the rest of our trip.
We headed back to the apartment to debrief and crunch the numbers we had received by putting everything in terms of dollars per day. From these calculations, we were able to determine that our vibration monitoring technology could save $2-3 dollars a day for our users, before considering the avoided expense of costly motor repair. Satisfied with our day’s work, we went to bed in order to be well rested for Day 2.
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