SUMMARY

The village currently obtains its water from the Kwangayak River, approximately ¼- ½ mile from the village. During the beginning of the dry season they walk to the river to collect water. During the driest times of the season they often have to dig down into the river bed to obtain water. On this trip we dug only one well in one village. Due to the severe conditions of the soil, we ended up digging approximately 50+ feet deep, and dug for about 5 days. Much of the soil was very hard clay, hence the difficulty in digging. We did hit pockets of gravel, but a majority of the 50+ feet we dug was within hard clay. The clay was sticky enough the children began making figurines out of it. It took about 1½ – 2 hours to get each extension into the ground. While looking for supplies to build a pump, we were unable to find anything that could be used to build a valve; so we decided to build a rope pump. This particular trip had the least amount of resources available for making a pump. The bigger town had very few supplies or resources. We ended up using plastic coke bottles for reducers, weaving our own rope, using rubber tires for gaskets and caps, and bicycle parts for the pump wheel and handle. This trip truly tested our creativity, and taught us a lot on “making it work”. We had the children collect gravel for the filtering of the well. We also started making seals/caps for the well casing. The pvc did not have sealed caps, they had open top caps, so we used the rubber from the old tires to seal the pipes. We then started cutting the gaskets/washers that we used for the rope pump.

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