Pella and Hong Yesterday Office Day Today

I have an office day today and have had continuous electricity since around 8 this morning. I woke up at 6 am and saw that we had power so I decided to get up. The power had been going out at around 8 the last few days so I thought I would get a little work done before it went out. I stopped at the bathroom and when I walked out to the office/living room the power was out. So I lit the propane burner and put the tea pot on to boil some water for tea, oatmeal and to mix with the bath water to take the chill off. By 7 the power came on and off again by 7:30. Then on again at 8. It is now after 3PM and except for momentary outages the power is still going.  This is probably because the Cathedral is having a Women's program all day today and they needed to have electricity. This is great compared to previous years when I were happy getting up at 2AM when the power came on to do work and by 6 AM it would be off. In the evenings if the Cathedral next door has a program running they would turn on their big generator and I would get power. That was the routine 2 years ago. Then last year I bought a small generator so I could work while the power was off. This year I have not yet bought gas for the generator. I have to go out and buy a new gas can. That was the only item  disappeared while I was back in Minnesota.

At 10AM I drove to the Adamawa State Water, Environment and Sanitation office with Adams out on Numan Road. We are reviewing the site as a potential training site. They have an India Mark III installed and in use at their office and close by are a Mark II and an AfriDev. These are the three pumps you most often see here. The Mark III is not working very will. It probably has a bad foot valve. It is also possible that the riser pipes have holes in them. I am hoping that it is just the foot valve. For the class next month we will have the students fix the foot valve. The Mark III is a Village Level Operation and Maintenance (VLOM) pump. the foot valve and the plunger assembly can be removed without pulling the riser pipe. If I had my way, every time we find an India Mark II that needs the riser pipe replaced that we will convert it to a Mark III so that future repairs will take 30 minutes instead of 2 or 3 hours. They also have an open shed area that is mostly vacant which we can use for instructions. Since Yakubu needed the truck back Adams and I did not get to see the other two pumps and see if they needed repair. We will have to do that in the next week or two.

I have spent most of the day writing up my notes from out Trip to Pella and Hong on Wednesday. I finished the Hong notes yesterday evening. Pella I have a little more information and I am doing some preliminary design work for their water system. Hong, we need more information from the school and community before we are able to do any credible design.  I am not finished with Pella but needed a break.


Hong:  Hong Government Secondary School is a unique project. Gary Sande from Minnesota who is the Nigeria Coordinator for Global Health Ministries was the first Principal of the Hong Lutheran Secondary School. Yakubu Bulama was a student at the school and lived in the Sande House Boys Residence. Since the Government took over the school the water supply system that was installed has decayed into a state of disrepair. No one actually knows where the pipes or valves for the school are buried. At this time some people are assuming that they are going to have to replace all the pipes. I am not sure there is a consensus on the plan of action.  The Upper Benue River Development Authority had said they could help with the project and Yakubu had heard that they were finished. As it turns out they have installed a small solar powered water pump in the one working borehole and a water tank with four water taps. This might provide enough water for the but four water taps is not even close to enough for the number or residential students and staff living on the compound. The Vice Principal for Administration told us that the system has been working but never fills the tank. We will need to check with the installer to find out the size of the pump and solar panel specifications. If they over-sized pump in relations to the solar panels we may be able to add more panels and increase the water flow.

He also took us over to show us the dry borehole that is was paid for by a politician but never produced a drop of water. I am working on the possibility of deepening small boreholes like this one. It would be a good candidate to experiment with if it turns out that the driller just drilled to the top of the bedrock. In this area the water is in the weathered bedrock and further down it is in fractures. He could have drilled into a sections of bedrock with little or no fractures. Not far from the dry borehole we saw students pumping from another borehole paid for by a politician. The flow was low and when they stopped pumping the water emptied out of the riser pipe. This indicates one of two things. The foot valve is bad or the riser pipes have holes in them. Either way it will get worse and soon not pump at all. The riser pipe available in the market is does not met the specifications for riser pipe from the manufactures. When you buy a 3 meter pipe they take a 5.8 meter thin-walled steel pipe and cut it in half and thread the ends. The threading almost goes all the way through the thin pipe and they only put on half as many threads as is needed to hold the pipes together. They rust through fairly quickly. I did not put my ear to the pump and listen. Sometimes you can hear the water splashing when there are large holes in the riser pipes. I just thought of a good Android App. Create a stethoscope with your smart phone and record the sounds. The Apps I see on Play Store are just recorded heart sounds. If you can connect a microphone to a smart phone you should be able to record and amplify the sound from the borehole. Of course for less money I could get a real stethoscope.

If the PTA agrees to pay us for the work we could come back to Hong repair the pump and at the same time perform a pump test to see if the borehole is adequate to be used with a solar pump.

Pella: Pella is one of my favorite places to visit. It is higher up than Jimeta and the LCCN area is at the edge of town. Some kind of tree or bush always seem to be blooming. The temperature is lower and the pace of life is slower. Wednesday there was a tree filled with pick blossoms and no leaves. The early variety of Mangos were just starting to ripen. The children had picked all the ripe fruit.

We were there to talk to members of the Water Committee about their project that they had collected enough money for to receive matching funds from Global Health Ministries. The project will clean, deepen, and cover the old hand dug well near the Maternity Clinic. A solar powered pump would be installed into the well. The storage and distribution system would consist of a main storage tank and a smaller Clinic tank, two taps at the main tanks for the people living on the compound, a 6 tap battery about 1,000 feet down the road in the community and another 3 tap battery over by the Church. Part of this trip was to determine where the pipes and tanks will be located so the people of the community can dig trenches before the ground complete dries out and becomes as hard as a rock.

When we got to the Church site I was pleased to see that the roof was being installed. I first visited the construction site in 2006.The walls were partially built. I took pictures through the doors framing the mountains behind the Church. Over the last six years as the money became available they have added to the walls and now have a roof. The roofing contractor was showing a Church representative a problem with the design. The back roof extended out and the roofing plan did not have the underside of the extended roof covered. In the rainy season with wind coming the right direction the pastor will be able to baptize most of the congregation.