January 23, 2010 - Ddegeya

After breakfast, the Albany people went away for a safari trip, together with Mike. This left Dave, Monica, and I in Engeye---we had some overdue quiet time.

This morning we got out the EasyLid cooker that Kevin built yesterday. Unfortunately, it was very cloudy for most of the morning, and the cooker got nothing beyond lukewarm. In the afternoon, we got a stretch of sunshine. The water in the kettle became too hot to touch, but the WAPI only melted a little. We started to suspect that this is because the WAPI was not completely submerged in the water---the WAPI is such that it floats and the wax end stands on the top; the water level in the kettle is such that the wax is barely touching the water. We later tried to invert the WAPI and the wax appears to melt a little more. But at this time, we cannot be sure. It would be worthwhile tomorrow to do a test on boiling water to see what happens with inverted WAPI.

We loaded some water into the bucket, but there was a leak. Dave then applied some more silicon glue and we loaded more water into the bucket. Until the afternoon, no leakage appeared, and the bucket/pipe system appears ready.

Dave and Monica went on a round-the-world trip to collect samples of all the water sources from Ddegeya. In the meanwhile, Kevin washed the last batch of sand, and started washing the bucketful of sand (about 15 cm) a second (and final) time. Unfortunately, due to the laundry activities and an attempt to construct the concrete base for the second rainwater collection tank, all the large jerry cans were being used. This left Kevin with a 5 L jerry can and a bucket, and many trips were required to Nalongo.

Kevin also tried the cloth filtration technique, using some of his cotton gauze, on the 500-NTU water from the ponds beside BH1. This did not seem to work well, even with 12 layers of cotton gauze, probably because the individual pore sizes of the cotton are too large, thus allowing most of the turbid stuff (except the mosquito larvae) to pass through. Dave has some more cloth tomorrow, which we will possibly test.

In the afternoon, Dave started sorting the gravel, and then we proceeded to wash those. We still had a hard time getting all the mud/clay stones out from the gravel, and even so, the wash efflux at the end was still somewhat cloudy. We spent about 2 hours washing through all these, certain that we were doing something bad with our backs and/or knees. In the evening, Dave got together some larger gravel to fill the base below the pipe, and the small gravel filled up to about 10 cm. We got some BH4 water to fill up the space, and left the sand-filling until tomorrow.

Kevin got a strange idea and began building a reflective open box (ROB) of a solar cooker. Dave was very sceptical about this configuration, as it employs no insulation whatsoever (it is an open-box panel cooker). He then proceeded to call this endeavour a disgrace of MIT engineering, while Kevin thought that it is a good way to clean up the extremely messy balcony by rounding up most of the scrap cardboard pieces, and can be considered a piece of (abstract) art. Monica stayed quite neutral in this debate.

We were planning to visit Ronald with Joseph today. Kevin went over the concept of ceramic filters with Joseph in the morning, together with some cartoon drawings using whatever artistic skills that could be mustered. However, Joseph became unexpectedly unavailable in the afternoon (he went to Kinoni), so we just have to leave this until tomorrow. We also plan to visit the households tomorrow, before Joseph becomes caught up with the clinic/medical mission stuff next week. We are also hoping to hold a debriefing community meeting on Monday, probably at 5 p.m. after the clinic operation ends.