This is a village that is on reclaimed swampland. The residence dig up mud out of the waterways and then pile it up onto Islands to make their property. We have a project here to bring water to several distribution points in this community.
Getting this program started has been a great lesson on the African culture having a different perspective than the one I brought here. For a lot of reasons some of which are poverty and culture, things go much slower here. Before we start a project we have to have a legal contract to make sure that everyone is in agreement. It has been painful working with the attorneys in Ghana and the staff that supports them. What probably should have taken a few days took a month. Although, now we know. We'll just slow down our timetables on getting certain things done.
The man in the red shirt in the picture is standing in the place where one of the water tanks will go. We had to get a legal document from the landowner to donate their land for the tank.
This is a picture of the pathway to some of the houses. The problem is during the rainy season the dirt flows back into the waterways and so they have to dig it back out. The tires are used to help hold the dirt in place. The villagers spend their Saturdays reclaiming the land.
The villagers in the middle of the waterway dig the mud off of the bottom. They then put it in the hollowed out log canoe where the two other villagers transport it to the shore and offload it.
We do projects with a lot of the established charitable organizations in the country. One of them is an international organization called Catholic relief services. They are trying this promising new concept to bring water to villages. Instead of installing many individual wells they just install one big well and storage area and then pipe the water through the village to different distribution points. The great advantage is in maintenance. Individual Wells require a great deal of maintenance and many programs to keep them operating long-term. So rather than having many small individual pump and maintenance programs the concept here is just to have one big one.
They want us to co-fund with them the next village water system similar to this one, only larger. They brought us out here to convince us on the idea.
This is one of the water distribution points throughout the village. In return for having it on their land the nearby homeowner gets to have the water piped into their house for free. The villagers have to pay 10 Liberian dollars to fill up their 5 gallon water container. That's equal to about six cents in US dollars
The water pump and storage tanks are solar powered and use gel pack batteries to store the electricity. They are no maintenance batteries that hopefully will last for 10 years.
The rooftop solar panels were made with extra capacity so the Water District decided to supplement some of the cost by recharging electronic devices. There's no other power in the community. They are in the process of building some shelving so it's a little more organized.
At the end of the trip Catholic relief services treated us to lunch. We agreed to go to a Liberian restaurant. We probably will not do that again. I was eating ground up cassava leaves with beef over rice. Cheryl had the same thing only with fish. The fish had lots of bones and the meat was very tough. The cassava leaves weren't too bad. It was spicy but we could tolerate it.
We had a new big water project approved at the monthly approval meeting in Ghana. It is for about $100,000 and will bring water and sanitation into about 10 Villages and two schools. It'll take about a year. I will become a skilled four-wheel drive off-road driver by the time the project is done.
Today was fast Sunday and we witnessed our first baby blessing in Africa.
Cheryl drove for the first time today. It went well.
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