Wrenches, Duct tape and then there was water

The morning started with John saying that the borehole was broken again. It was fixed only a month ago. The constant need for attention is kind of shaping our feelings about them. The borehole breaking changed the morning's plans a bit, but we still got everything done that needed to get done.

After breakfast, we did laundry. The soil here is really red, and gets everywhere. After washing everything, our water looked like the pond water. We had one bucket for washing and one for rinsing. Our water was the rainwater, and Susan gave us some amazing soap that got almost all of the red dirt out. After, we headed down to Naalongo, the name of the pond. We were going to collect another round of samples from the three sources by the clinic, but when we got down, we saw that the pump wasn't giving any water. We tried pumping it to see what it felt like, and it felt like the chain was loose. The pond was now crowded with people getting water from it, which wasn't good since we just learned that the pond has E.coli in it. We went up to get John and the tools and proceeded to take the pump apart. We had also asked John to tell people to use the water from the pond in the bamboo forest, but he said that people thought that they couldn't get enough water from it, so they kept using Naalongo.



While we were taking the pump apart, we acquired a huge crowd of kids watching. It was interesting to see how the pump worked and was put together. It stops working because pieces down at the bottom of the tube come unscrewed. The gaskets that help pull the water up had just come unscrewed. It is good that it is a relatively simple fix, but the fact that something that simple can cause the pump to stop working.

We discovered that there is a lot of the red clay in the soil that has clogged the borehole before, and to try and prevent this, during the last fix, they put a mosquito net around the bottom of the pump to act as a strainer, and it seems to be working. We are going to go take apart another borehole that is making a lot of noise and not pumping as well as it could and see if we can improve it.

We measured the depth of the borehole before putting it back together and discovered it is not very deep. The water is only 1.2 meters deep, and the hole itself is 3 meters to the bottom of the water. Many of the boreholes in the area were drilled by the government in the rainy season and stopped working very quickly. In the lower valleys, the soil is more sandy and other parts are a gray clay which discolors the water and makes it very murky. The water from the working boreholes in this type of soil is less clean.

By that time there was a huge crowd of people waiting for us to fix the borehole (42 jerry cans and their respective owners), and when we finished putting it back together, there was a lot of competition and jostling for who could fill their jerry cans first. We also noticed that they wash their jerry cans with mud on the outside, but the insides are very dirty.

Lunch was the usual, with spaghetti instead of rice. After lunch, we split up again with Helen and Becca going to do more surveys with John, and Pauravi, Peter and Monica going to finish collecting the samples.

We visited 5 more houses this afternoon. The first house had a very large cow/bull (a cow with horns?) in a very small pen situated above where we were sitting. It was kind of intimidating. We started asking today about the fertility of the soil, and many of the responses were that the soil was getting older, and not producing yields as good as it used to. We also started using Quick Swabs on their drinking water jerry cans to test for surface contamination. A positive is that many of these looked much cleaner, and people would only put water in there that had been boiled. It was kind of weird doing these tests at people's houses, because we also plated them on Petrifilm there because it is recommended to plate them quickly. We'll let you know of the results tomorrow.

At another house, there was a very cute little girl who apparently wanted to come over to us, but was too scared/shy of the mzungus. At one point I (Becca) was sitting on a stool and moved to look at a picture Helen had taken and kind of fell over, and she started laughing. We have a great picture of it. There was also an interesting discussion about whether you can lose toenails in the US because everyone wears shoes. Only when we mentioned that you can drop something on your toes did they believe us.

On the way to collect samples, Monica pointed out an avocado tree that Tom likes to climb.

We plated seven groups of samples, and have 8 different sources. We have to go get samples from another pond tomorrow. Our incubator is working out well, and we are very grateful to have a powerless incubator. D-Lab definitely has some cool technology.

At dusk today we noticed the bats flying out from under the roofs of the clinic buildings. Also, the sky tonight was really clear (the first time we've really been able to see stars), and we went out and looked at the Milky Way and some of the constellations.

Sula bulungi.