Houston, we have....a pump!!

Pump in our experimental/demonstration garden

We have a well in our experimental/demonstration garden (hole on the left in the above picture...the other 2 holes on the right are "reservoirs" where rain water can be collected and where water can be collected from the well for easier access.) The well is used, during dry season, to water the garden. It is also used to quench the thirst of many people. You can see the boy in the picture above drinking from the yellow bucket.

This is not the water the people drink, this is the water in the reservoir, but the water directly from the well is not a whole lot cleaner than this, as it is an open well without a cover on the top that can prevent the dirt, dust and bacteria from coming in.

Rog and I have been interested in introducing pumps to local families in order to help them start family gardens and to have access to cleaner drinking water. We are using EMAS technology (a Spanish acronym for Mobile School for Water and Sanitation, for more information click here: EMAS pump) and modifying it a bit in order to use locally available material to make water pumps with appropriate technology. It has been fun to learn to make these pumps and yesterday, with the help of a couple of friends, we got to finally put our pump into the well!

We had to first measure out the casing pipe. This is the pipe that would hold our pump. See that shiny pink material by my feet? It is the locally available synthetic fabric that we used as a sleeve around the casing...to filter out the sand and dirt. The pipe underneath the sleeve has slits cut into it to allow water to seep through.

I just wanted to add this picture of Rog. His hat was so big that a lot of the pictures hid his face. And you can't see it in the pictures, but there is a LOT of sweat happening!! Though it has been cooler due to the rainy season, it was still 35C yesterday without a lot of wind.

There was a lot of gluing and preparing that needed to be done on site, as the well is 6.5m deep and the pump and casing ended up being about 8m in length. We did not want to transport that kind of length on our truck.

We were waiting for the glue to dry on a joint...it was a bit nerve racking to sit on this cement slab and hold this casing pipe, because if I had dropped it, I am not sure any of us was willing to go down into the well to get it!

Once the casing was in place, we put the pump into it.

Here is a picture of the inside of the well. We put metal bars across the inside of the well to help stabilize the grey casing pipe.

And we are in business!!

Apparently, Rog believes this water is clean enough now to drink...but we may need to treat the water in the well and close the top of the well completely before we would actually drink it!

There were a bunch of kids watching and they asked for some water. We were happy to share.

We were so grateful to have our friends come along, as the 2 hour process did require all of us at various times...and thanks to our teammate Lisa, we got some great photos so we could capture this momentous occasion!