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.