6:15 Alarm goes off although I'd been awake for a while because the crows were having a party on the roof (metal roof = amplified noise!). I woke up to find I'd fallen asleep reading last night (wasting a lot of battery in my head torch!). I'm reading "The secret room" which is about Corrie Ten Boom. It's really good.
6:30 Electricity is working but unfortunately our kettle isn't. I fill a bucket with some hot water from the 2 ring gas stove and then water from the tap and have a "shower". Breakfast is a bread roll with peanut butter.
7:00 I continue to translate/ work out a table for identifying the cause of problems with Afridev hand pumps. Tomorrow I'm going up to the lake shore and will be looking at 5 or 6 pumps which aren't working but obviously it's no good them needing someone like me to always fix them. I found a good diagnosis table in a manual on the internet in English so Rebecca translated most of it but we've been struggling with technical terms. "rising main pipe", "cup seal", "pump rods" etc!
7:30 The little girl who lives opposite knocked on the door just to give me a good morning hug!
8:00 Rebecca goes to morning prayer (which happens every Mon and Friday here at KuchiJingi, the Diocean site). I am supposed to go to Estamos with Mario but there's a delay finding a car. Estamos are a local company who were set up to work with WaterAid. They still do a lot of water and sanitation work but also do some public health stuff too. Very useful contacts.
8:45 We finally leave and speak to someone at Estamos who told us on Thursday that today would be a good day to go and see one of the Afridev pumps that they've put in so that we can take it apart a bit. Turns out they're all pretty busy and we go with a lady who doesn't really know anything about pumps. It also turns out that they hadn't warned anyone we were coming so when we arrive at the village the chief is not around and neither is the person who has the keys to the pump and well. This also happened at the second village.
9:30 After learning how NOT to go about working with communities we arrive back at Estamos and learn that there is someone going to Chimbonila to do some work with latrines but that he could first look at a pump that there's a problem with. Chimbonila was where I was for a few days last week and it was nice to go this time in a car and not by chapas (public transport).
10:30 We arrived at Chimbonila and I finally got a chance to consolidate everything I'd read about the Afridev pumps and see how to dismantle one and what the most likely problems were. I also learnt the Portuguese names for the parts and my pump chat is now a lot more sophisticated than my everyday chat about the weather etc! O well! I left Chimbonila feeling nicely confident about the work this week.
12.30 We arrived back at the office and did some more on the diagnosis table.
1:30 Lunch at Marios. Rebecca and I go there every day for lunch and it's always great. Today was rice with a sort of bean and vegetable tomatoey thing! It was good! His two kids are very sweet and the eldest, Shirley, who's just 3, has just begun to trust me and so she came to give me a hug and have a chat! Sammy, who's 1 I think, still isn't sure what to make of me!
2:15 Back at the office and I do some more reading of the pump manual and read about how to work out what type of soil you're working with! I also went and checked the warehouse at Kuchijingi to see if we had the tools that you need to take Afridev pumps apart. The warehouse was a bit of a mess so we left the man in charge of it to sort it out a bit but we never found anything useful.
3:00 We have a call from Estamos to say we can borrow their tools for the week so Mario and I drove down to pick them up. We then went to a hardware store that Rebecca and I had discovered sold spare parts for the pumps and picked up some of the pieces that are most likely to break to take with us. The communities should have been given spare parts and in the interest of ownership will have to pay to replace parts. It's a bit of a difficult and unknown situation with the pumps that we're visiting. The follow up and recording of the installations and training was not really done at all so we're not sure how much the communities know about how to maintain the pumps or whether they will have the tools and manuals that are supposed to be left with anyone who has one built. Highlights a lot of interesting thoughts about the way development is done.
4:30 Back at the office. I scanned one of the simple Portuguese manuals that the communities should have and which Estamos had lent us so I can take copies with us tomorrow. I also scanned useful pages from my textbooks so that I don't have to take them with me.
5:30 We lock up and head home (about a 1 minute walk). The photo in this blog is Rebecca's house. I scan the Africa guidebook for ideas for a Christmas trip whilst Rebecca skpes home and then I start cooking. I fried up some potatoes, with onion and garlic then added a load of shredded cabbage and grated carrot and some herbs. We had that with some beans. I've been experimenting quite a lot with cooking but this was a sucessful experiment - it was yummy!
That pretty much brings me to sitting down and writing this. I will now go and pack for the next week (and Rebecca has just reminded me not to forget my swimming costume because bathing for the next week is in Lake Niassa!) and then go to bed. It's been really hot today and I'm exhausted. I won't be in touch for the next week but will still have my phone. Very sad to be missing Andy's birthday this week, and Rebecca who's American, is sad that her family are all together for thanksgiving. Technology is amazing though and it's great to be in touch as much as I am.
Hello love,
ReplyDeleteReally interesting post, looks like you had a busy (but successful in the end) day, and nice to see the house you're in! It's really cool you can do things like this blog, as you say, technology is amazing! I know you'll get this after coming back from the village but just to say I hope that the village visit goes/went well. I can't wait to chat about all the big topics you said in the email, and to hear about the village. I'm also sad that you can't be at my birthday, but you'll be there in my head and we can have lots more in the future :-).
Lots of love, xxx
Joanne
ReplyDeleteGreat to read your Blog, and great to see how well you have settled. I was most intrigued by your 'day in the life' page which did bring it home to me what my little girl is doing. when you read the stats about sanitation I feel even more proud opf the help you are trying to bring to those people.
Lots of love
Dad XXX