My first pipeline design

It has been a long week, so this may be a long blog. Last time I uploaded a blog, I was writing from a church in the foothills of the Rwensoris. We returned to Kaswa the next day, and while I spent the time mapping the entire parish, Wesley and Aseph went off to look at the new sources the parish leader had found. At the end of the day we had a file of GPS points that included all of the cells in the parish, and had found a new source producing a respectable 0.45 L/s of water.

Thursday afternoon returned to Kasese and celebrated Uganda’s independence day by having a beer and a stoney, a ginger ale/root beer that has to be my favorite beverage in Uganda. However, that might be a biased view as I’ve only really had four beers in the country since I’ve gotten here. The perils of working under the umbrella of the Church of Uganda (COU), (the upside is that we’re staying in a COU guesthouse with an awesome cook. Friday morning we were supposed to meet with the district water officer for Kasese, but that meeting was postponed. While we were driving to his office. Twice. Just another thing to get used to in Africa. People you meet with are rarely on time. Finally met up with him and he was able to give us some good prospects that we should check out. Ended the week on a high note.

Saturday and Sunday I spent working on the design for the Kaswa project, and finally came up with a cost estimate Sunday night. Problem was, it was far too low for a CIDA sized grant, we need to come up with something like $250,000 and this one will likely cost less than $100,000. Which means we need to find more sources in the area and try to feed the entire parish. So we’re going back next week.

Took a break from the design work on Saturday night and headed out for a real night on the town in Kasese in my new dress shoes I’d paid $12 for (well the final tally was $25, but that’s another story).

Walked into a bar and of course, being Muzungus, were greeted by everyone there. Our neighbor at the bar turned out to be a very happy go-lucky sergeant in the Ugandan army who very quickly bought us a beer. So of course we bought him some beer and some goat on a stick from a street vendor outside (which I highly recommend, delicious). We became fast friends after that to the point that we were all dancing at a neighboring “club” (the quote mean it was actually just a bar with the music cranked so loud that some felt obligated to dance). Very cultural immersed night to the point that the only song I recognized was “Ever-blazing” by Sean Paul, and I was invited to dance repeatedly by our soldier friend who also insisted on holding Wesley’ hand at various points through the night. That’s one thing I’m still going to take some getting used. Still had a really good time, even if the only ones dancing were guys, and I had to spend half my time avoiding their groping hands.

Monday morning, headed out to a GFS project commissioned by the district water board. The system takes water directly from a larger river and was originally designed to supply 70,000 people and was augmented last year to supply 140,000. The system goes through four filtration steps. Unfortunately, the new intake gets clogged every time there’s a large rain storm. Which means the operators bypass the filtration. Which means 140,000 people get muddy river water. We didn’t see the system at it’s finest.

And today. Where to start. Today was the very apex of the Ugandan experience. We wanted to follow up on one of the prospects given to us by the Kasese water district office. The proposed GFS is in a sub-county called Kitswamba, and we met the chairman of the sub-county. Of course he was an hour late, but that’s how things work here. No big deal. We told him how we wanted to see this source and possibly put in a GFS in his sub-county. Considering how hard it is to get water here, he was very happy and was delighted to guide us. But he informed us we couldn’t take the shorter road because it was in a very bad condition. So we took the longer road. One of the issues with this project was that the source originates in another sub-county. So we stopped by the offices of that sub-county and picked up another high level official, the secretary of social services. Once we had our entourage, we drove a little further and reached the start of the trail. We then started hiking. At the 1.5hr mark we reached the crest of the ridge, and a saw a very nice road, likely only 5 minutes from the source. The chairman had wanted to talk to the “leadership” of the neighboring sub-county to make sure no feathers were ruffled once we started to walk around there looking for water. That little detour added approximately 4hrs of walking, and 1hr of driving to our day. The worst part was that the source was dry when we’d arrived. Not a productive day. We’re going to another source tomorrow, hopefully we’ll have more luck then. Because we now have to come up with three CIDA sized proposals before we leave and we’re currently at 1/3. At this rate we’ll leave in 16 weeks. Unfortunately I’ve only got 11 weeks. So hopefully the rate starts to pick up...