The End of the Beginning

We woke up to a rainy oddly quiet morning in Ddegeya -which certainly met my sad mood of leaving- got some soil samples, did some soil testing, collected bricks, gathered our things, and headed out.

Phew, what a trip. Coming into this trip I was nervous and as the week went on I got significantly more nervous. Things have gone up and down throughout this trip, but we pulled through and I’m really excited for the next stages of the project.

So to recap. The main goals of this trip were to work with Ddegeya and the water board to: develop a plan for increasing access to water, decide on rainwater catchment and on what scale, set up a system of project management within the community, decide on the design parameters of the system, and understand the cultural and social parameters that may affect the project. Surprisingly, I think we actually accomplished most of this and have good stepping stones to move forward on.

Going into our last meeting with the board last night-Daphne and I were neeerrvous. Well, Daphne was scared because she had to do most of the talking and my palms were certainly sweaty. We finished modeling various rainwater systems the night before, revised our rainwater model that morning, and spent the day, I’d say, banging our heads against a wall to piece together a coherent solid story for EWB. We decided how to present the prices, went over our agenda like a 100 times, woke Tess up at 5am to discuss the plan, and Daphne went out to meet with a few people beforehand to explain the goals.

Anyways, the meeting ended up going very smoothly. Turns out the modeling we did proved to be very useful in conveying a more concrete, no pun intended, image of what the various options would look like. Concerns about how some in the community viewed us as donors were discussed and the board decided to use our models to help further establish the partnership idea. Looking at prices and scale models of the individual versus community options, the board decided that communal systems made much more sense. Some questions were raised about whether people could afford individual tanks etc..it was interesting to see how the board worked through some of this. We decided on a cost effective communal tanks for 6 families each. The board members will be meeting with each cluster to set up the collection of resources and funds. We conveyed the need to do more R&D on the cost effective model and that the August trip will likely be a lot of prototyping and potential start of construction. They understood this completely and the need for Ddegeya to offer its ideas in making things cheaper. They were totally cool with the need for construction to continue until January. We agreed on a set of assignments for us and them (us –technical, them-setting up the clusters). I do believe we now have a contract with Ddegeya.

After they left, man were we all on a high-grins ear to ear etc. So to celebrate we hung out playing chess, checkers, and went out for roll eggs and sodas. I could let them off the hook completely, so we met that night to debrief and discuss the next steps moving forward. Mostly, the engineering challenge begins now that we have the design parameters set. Fun times!

Michael and I fly out tonight (him back to NYC and me to Switzerland). Thank you to Daphne and Michael for making this such a fun and successful trip. Daphne did an amazing job taking these complicated concepts, breaking them down, and communicating them to Ddegeya in a language that’s not even her native one. Michael was a phenomenal mentor, taught us both a lot, and really helped guide us in the right direction. It’s been a great week and I’ve really enjoyed working with you both and hanging out.

Now, let the real fun begin!

Numbers

Numbers can be a very useful thing and we’ve been crunching and munching on a lot of them lately. They make you face reality, reveal hidden trends, and put things into perspective. I haven’t blogged lately because well, we’ve been busy busy!

Since the last meeting I blogged about, a lot has been revealed. After the meeting on Tuesday, we decided it would be good to have some better price information to discuss with the board. So we spent half of Wed at Masaka checking out prices and printing out tank sheets, in the hopes that we’d get to meet with all the different clusters. On Thursday, we headed out with Eddie to meet some households/clusters. The owner of the first house, Tofa, revealed that people wouldn’t want to contribute to a tank at someone else’s house, even if they got water from it. Getting water from someone else’s house would also be pretty taboo. Eddie quickly confirmed that the idea of a shared tank wouldn’t be so good. The water board meeting that evening confirmed this. They were all too thrilled to get rid of the cluster system and move to individual tanks. They still wanted something durable and basically said, “Don’t give us tarp.” After looking at some tank images, the board was pretty interested in the ferrocement jar and a hybrid option (a partly below and partly above ground tank). We agreed to consider the individual tank option as long as a system could still be designed in which the households had to contribute time, resources, and labor.

And that’s when the number crunching began. We quickly realized during that meeting that without hard price estimates of tanks and EWB’s contribution, it was impossible to make further progress in deciding a plan with Ddegeya. So we set a great tank price calculator that really breaks down the material costs, allowing us to compare tank prices at different sizes, and tank utility based on rainwater data we have for the area. This revealed a lot of trends such as the exponential decrease in price/liter of water as tank size increases but only small gains in increased number of water days with increased tank size for a given roof area. So there’s lots of optimization to be done.

But it hasn’t been all work and no fun. We did forget to eat grasshoppers..maybe we’ll grab some in Kampala on our way out. The moon has been playing lots of tricks on me lately. It was huge as it was rising on Wednesday night. Then, several hours later, as Michael and I were working on the back porch, I see what I thought was a cloud slowing inching across the moon. A few minutes later, we realized there was a total lunar eclipse in the making. Laptops were quickly shut, pencils went down, and lights were switched off, so we could enjoy it in all its glory. Picture this-a total lunar eclipse against the backdrop of 1000s of stars, a band of the milky way (that’s right-the sky is so clear here you can see a dense band of stars), and some shooting stars. The moon did become totally eclipsed. We just lay in the grass and watched the eclipse and the sky for about 1-2 hours. Most beautiful night ever. Then tonight-the moon was this bloodshot red as it was rising into the sky-weird..and it rose like 2 hours late..weirder.

So tomorrow is the big day-our last one in Ddegeya for this trip L We’ll have to do a little soil testing, get some roof area data, and prep for our last water board meeting. This last few days have confirmed a lot of our hunches that communal based efforts in Ddegeya might not work. It’s just not how this community works. You can’t ask people to change how they do things completely. I mean, when was the last time you met with your neighbors to discuss how to set up your joint water system. I’d hazard to guess all you’ve ever done is turn on the tap. Individual options are possible but may have some serious ethical, financial, and logistical issues. There are some tough decisions to be made on everyone’s part. Here’s to a successful tomorrow.

Beautiful

Uganda is absolutely beautiful. I mean we could start a separate tourism industry out here to fund our projects. We were on a water source hike today and took a lot of breaks to take photos. It was just acres of untouched beauty, cornfields taller than me, tons of wildflowers, and hundreds of butterflys (and a couple eagles) darting around. This morning we headed over to the other side of Ddegeya (by St. Gertrude’s) to scope out the water situation over there. We ran into Eddie, who was on his way to get coffee to trade, and he pointed us to the boreholes in the area. I’m amazed at how many jobs people here juggle. The clinic cook is out in her field with her 2 year old in between meals etc.. The bore next to his house had a broken chain. We tried to find the other bores on our map, but to no avail. A couple of farmers along the way directed us to a bore down in the valley (the large one behind Engeye) where a lot of people in that region get water. We ran into a few women and kids (getting water for the school). The bore has a really good flow rate (1L/3.3 sec) but has to be primed a little. It’s also a 25-30 min walk from the school (the nearest building to the bore) to the bore. We went to St. Gertrude’s on the way back and talked to some of the teachers. Word had already spread about the project and water board. After watching a school performance, we talked more about water in the area. She said that tanks would be really helpful since that bore is the only source for a long way. One teacher brought up a good point that some people might be uncomfortable going to someone else’s house to get water. But she also said that the water board was well respected. We decided to enjoy a few sodas and passion fruit in the shade before heading back to the clinic for lunch.

Lunch was followed by a large storm and of course we seized the chance to get some rainfall data. The storm lasted about an hour-this produced about 1.5 inches of rain and filled about 3/5 of a 240L rainwater tank. During that hour, I talked to the Hope Academy, working with U Minnesota, and we’re planning to go meet them on Friday since they’re just a 2000 shilling taxi ride down the road. We were just about to head out again to check out water sources when water board members began showing up-so we met.

The discussion actually started with Eddie bring up boreholes-which many members thought was more valuable than rainwater. We let them discuss this for a while and pointed out that bores are very expensive and still will be pretty far away for most people. One member also realized that most bores break and it is so hard to fix them. The board automatically switched back to rainwater after he mentioned this-interesting. Daphne was doing a phenomenal job translating but then we needed John to help us reiterate the community ownership concept. They were like yeah we know and remember (in a good way) and went back to talking about brick donations. At that point, we brought up the point that there can be other options besides brick and that’s what we want to figure out with them. They were like, eh sure, ya’ll are the technical experts-come up with something durable. That’s when we start whipping out images-they were super interested in the images and diagrams. Many of them can English and started reading case studies-which happened to be in the same folder, which they just started digging through. They thought the ideas were cool and would like us to think about these options more. We thought it would be most useful to focus the rest of the discussion on the community ownership model since we couldn’t make a technical decision at that point. The board said they already had 5 clusters picked as sites based on level of respect in the community (important for mobilizing resources), distance to water, and quality of roof. Sweeettt! They mentioned that they would have the clusters discuss details such as amount of water needed for different purposes, how much water each household could use, maintenance of the tank, and based on the tank option-what materials and resources given by each. Eddie will be taking us around to the clusters to discuss the tank options with them on Thursday-which is why those images, water team, are important! We spent the rest of the day planning out the options, calculating needed materials etc. Michael’s genius friend talked online with us about cost cutting options-he’s about to start testing alternates to cement –maybe. Anyone know how the Romans made concrete? We also decided to make the community plans this week with already available tank options. The team should still be working on cost cutting options- we just don’t think it’s a good idea to make promises about that right now.

We’re headed to Masaka tomorrow. On the menu is grasshopper! Daphne has persuaded Michael and I to try them because “they’re delicious and a big part of the reason Daphne looks forward to coming home.” If she’s lying to us……..well, honestly, it can’t be worse than this d@mn doxy which is currently making me nauseous again :P

Options...

Alright, I knew going into this whole project that it might be the hardest thing I do as an undergrad. It is. I mentioned last time that we planned to have daily meetings with the water board. Well, of course, they didn’t show up today. In truth, these kinds of delays are to be expected. We ran into Eddy later this evening and he mentioned that every day was just hard. He said most people were busy but he also realized we were here for a short time and suggested meetings on Wednesday and Friday, which we agreed to. I’ll come back to this discussion after I describe the rest of our day.

We spent the morning really hashing out the rainwater system options that we have. We went through brick, plastic metal, pits, above ground mud, bamboo, rammed earth, stabilized soil, interlocking soil stabilized bricks (ISSB), hybrid brick/underground pit, large cisterns and ferrocement. Yeah, we were busy! We came up with a set of categories to evaluate each system option: technical aspects, community ownership models, financing options, and straight-up pricing. I had pulled a ton of case studies and research articles on the various tank types before coming and set everyone to reading for an hour or so. We quickly eliminated ISSB-the cost of the press doesn’t really offset the saved cost of less cement; also this community just isn’t ready to own such an expensive piece of equipment. We eliminated soil stabilized because most of the work done with it is experimental. Large/centralized cisterns were eliminated because we’re pretty sure a large community infrastructure will not work. Our last discussion with the water board revealed that they were concerned about price-as to be expected. We suspect they still don’t fully grasp the notion of a fully community owned rainwater model, thus we need to present a strong story of why we’re here. I can see why this is confusing to them because as EWB we’ve changed our attitude so to speak in working here several times. We don’t want a system that has a lot of reliance on our subsidy because well that’s not (as much as this word is overused) sustainable. That also makes future projects difficult. I know our original plan was to build 10 systems in August and somehow split the costs of those. This could work but we don’t think that too much reliance should be on our subsidy then too. It would be good if the August trip could be chance to see these community models in action. Based on this, we decided to really present ourselves as technical experts. Our main contribution will be ensuring the tanks and system are durable (something they were concerned about), providing them with starting capital, and any connections for setting up financial or business models. Now, we realize that it seems crazy that we are not willing to fund anything. We will ensure people are trained in the construction and maintenance and have the necessary connections to make it all happen. That’s not entirely true..we just don’t want our financial contribution to be the center of the discussion right now. In fact, if we can devise a system that is independent of external donors in the long run, that would be groundbreaking for the field of household rainwater, where most projects are simply too expensive. OK cool. However, the issue with presenting the community with all these cost cutting options is they will think EWB is backing out of its partnership with the community. Ddegeya needs to see the value in cost cutting-they need to see incentives as well. The biggest incentive of course is a model which they can replicate for years to come. Will they find this incentive as attractive as we do…who knows. The other options are using a sort of business model (similar to our Showergy options), increased time (filling water at boreholes takes foorreva), and possibly targeting women (using their technical expertise in tanks based on weaving).

OK, back to tank designs. The three of us are favoring mud pits, some sort of reinforced above ground mud, a pit in a hill, and bamboo. We went back through the pricing options and the expenses from last year’s system. The most expensive component last year was labor, ringing in at 552,800-nearly 1/3 of the cost. Cement is a common huge expense as is transportation of materials (ringing in at 268,000 last year). If we can eliminate these big expenses, then we can bring this into the range of something the community can afford. Cement could be eliminated through using other reinforcing mechanisms-metal bars around bricks, an earth pit, and a bamboo weave. Essentially, breakdown cement into its component functions and see how we can replace those. The other option is if EWB paid for core rainwater materials to be transported and stored in Ddegeya, where someone can be in charge of selling them locally. The bamboo weave is tricky-turns out basket weaving is not such a useless class after all. Weaving is something the women already do, thus tapping into their skills as opposed to traditional male dominated construction skills. Obviously all of these options have to be rigorously tested back home, but if we can get the community thinking along these lines, I think we’ll be in good shape for this trip. Oh, we found out metal tanks corrode quickly-so out of the picture. So some sort of reinforced mud pits can be good with wood treated to protect it from termites (with engine oil, yum). Most importantly, we want them to devise a community contribution model for a low-cost system-which is dependent on testing. We want have a sort of go/no-go checklist for the remaining options to discuss with the community and board.

In terms of financing options: A savings fund, where households or groups contribute x amount each month to accumulate for a tank. This can also be adapted into a rotating community fund. Microfinance as an option for tanks designed in a business model (or for sale, as may be the case for woven tanks). Various subsidy options-maybe a temporary subsidy to cover the cost of initial risks.

Just because we’re not meeting with the board tomorrow, doesn’t mean we won’t be busy! We will probably more rigorously figure out pricing, with a potential trip to Masaka. Also, Elliot fixed a whopping 6 boreholes!!! (paid a borehole technician $400 to do it in 6 weeks). With these new sources available, traffic to Nalongo (the main well) has significantly decreased. Nalongo’s quality has also deteriorated. We checked out one of the bores today, the line was pretty long. Turns out the area around St. Gertrude’s and Eddy’s house has the least access to water and may be a good site for RWH. We plan on doing some update water source mapping tomorrow and household density mapping to determine the target areas needed water access. We then want to meet with those households in those areas.

I’ll end on a slightly less technical and boring note. While at the trading center this morning, someone pick pocketed Daphne’s phone. She realized it was missing and went back. Turns out other people had seen the guy (someone they knew apparently) pick pocketing her phone, chased him down, and got the phone back. Lucky day!

Bye Mzungu!

We headed to Ddegeya this morning, picked up a few groceries en route, and got to the clinic in the afternoon. The clinic is pretty quiet right now as it’s just John and us. Also, the kids haven’t quite discovered that we are here yet..so it has been exceptionally quiet. We checked out the solar system, which has been functioning pretty well. They now have a series of netbooks used to track patient records in various clinic rooms. There’s also a new vaccine refrigerator- from Sundancer, which is pretty big. John had already organized a meeting with the water board for us this afternoon. They all showed up early! Overall it was a pretty productive meeting. They started out by saying they really liked the existing system and definitely want to expand rainwater harvesting. At first they just said they wanted more tanks . We worked to convey our goals for the trip and expansion-design a system and dissemination model-and they seemed to catch on to the idea. So they started discussing cost cutting methods and ways for the community to contribute. John was really into the community contribution idea. However, the board quickly became fixated on brick tanks. They raised issues of durability with other design options. They spent a lot of time thinking about how to get people to donate bricks. We decided to go visit the tank from last summer and check it out and so the “Bye Mzungus” began. I love walking through Ddegeya, it’s gorgeous. Anyways, the tank is certainly very hefty. It’s used by about 6 families who are supposed to get 10L of water each per day for just drinking. They weren’t sure if this was the case and were discussing what to do with people who used the tanks more often. The only problems were that the gutters were sometimes crooked and also caught leaves. We decided to focus our efforts on developing a plan that they could own. It is interesting that some of our project manager’s predictions did come true-the community initially did want to just replicate the old model. However, we decided that last year’s system still makes sense. The community clearly trusts us more and is more willing to work with us on revising the plan. Shared tanks are definitely an option right now. We have daily meetings with the water board set up. Tomorrow morning the three of us will be working on really outlining rainwater options for the community. We’ll start with options for the tanks since the water board wants to sort that out before working on financing and ownership, issues they are very aware of now. Also, we realized that Michael is the most experienced member of MIT-EWB, traveling to Ddegeya for a record three times now.

There’s nothing quite like brushing your teeth outside under a starry sky with nothing but moonlight. Good night! (I love the early bedtimes here). Also-comment on blogs! It’s nice way to get feedback on the trip and know people are reading them!

Back in Uganda!

Oli otya once again from Uganda. It’s been a year since EWB has been here and we’re excited to be back. Michael Thornton and I met up in Amsterdam for what ended up being a rather eventful flight. Our flight was supposed to stop in Kigali before heading over to Entebbe. Well, that didn’t happen…the weather in Kigali was awful. The pilots made several attempts at landing and all were go arounds (a luxury us glider pilots lack). For those aviation people out there, there were heavy thunderstorms and low lying clouds (I believe the ceiling was 1000ft AGL.) This made for one of the most turbulent commercial flights I’ve ever experienced..leave your seat turbulence. On one attempt the tailwinds were too high on approach so we came in way too high over the runway (better high than low though). Lots of people got sick and (as a pilot myself) I’m embarrassed to say I did too. BUT in my defense, I had just taken my malaria meds which make me pretty nauseous to begin with. Anyways, we gave up on landing (props to the pilots for making that call) to the applause of the whole plane and headed to Entebbe, where everyone again applauded upon landing (first time, I’ve been on a plane where everyone applauded). Daphne and her sister came to pick us up and we headed to her house, which is gorgeous! We met her family and really cute dog, Vuvu, who is still suspicious of Michael and me. After a delicious dinner (chapattis, chicken, rice, and Matooke!) we headed to bed. We’ll be heading to Ddegeya today (in like 2 hours) so stay tuned…the exciting work is about to begin! Just a quick summary of our goals for the trip. Over the past three years, MIT-EWB has been working in Ddegeya, Uganda. Last summer we installed a PV system to power the Engeye health clinic (we’re pumped to see it fully up and running for the first time today!) One of our big goals is to increase access to water in Ddegeya and after much debate and evaluation we’re focusing on smaller scale rainwater harvesting (RWH). Last summer, the team constructed a 10000L brick tank. This June, we’re working with Ddegeya to firmly establish a plan for moving forward on the project. We will be working with the community to design the system (including type of tanks, size of the tanks, and financing of the project). We’re also working to more clearly define the management within Ddegeya of the RWH system. This is all so the August Uganda team (Steven, Wolfkat, and Leticia) will have a concrete plan for construction and dissemination of the system. Wish us luck!