Engineer Byemerwa met me at 7:30 this morning with a plumber and driver to go to Image and inspect the well site to determine what we need for installation. The bore hole is right in the middle of the Image Secondary School campus. Image secondary school has 850 students, almost half girls, and 36 teachers. Their water now has to come from a town supply about 1 km away. This means that many students spend what should be class time carrying water.
The bore hole was partially open with just a plastic covering and a few bags of gravel pack around the top. We were told the well was 100 meters and decided to try to collect a water sample with a plastic water bottle with a rock to weigh it down.
We hit water at about 25 meters and it came up looking clear and clean. The headmaster was eager to taste it because he was worried it might be salty. We discouraged this because the well had not been treated with chlorine and could be contaminated but he tested the water for both salt and bacteria by taking a taste. We are still waiting for the bacteria test results.
The cord pulled up from the bottom measures 33 meters doubled over so the well depth is 66 meters or twice as long as the distance you see in this picture. Since we hit water at 25 meters, that means we have a 41 meter water column. The 66 meter depth does not mesh with the 100 meters reported and we still do not know what the replenish rate will be when we start pumping.
Image school has 10 water storage containers, 2 2000 liter tanks at the admin block, a 5000 liter tank near the football field, 6 2000 liter tanks at each of 6 dorms, and one 3000 liter tank at the kitchen. Right now all are empty. The tanks by the dorms are piped to each bathroom stall for wash water. All the tanks are connected with plumbing so we only have to connect our well to a couple connection points and add valving to control which tanks get filled.
It takes a lot of water to feed 850 students. The kitchen has huge cooking bowls on a fire hearth for making wali (cooked rice), ugali (maize flour paste) and porridge.
Image school runs a generator from 7 PM to 11 PM so students can study with the lit classrooms. This will also be the source of power for the submersible pump. The generator consumes 8-10 liters/night for 4 hours, 7 nights per week. They pick up diesel in 60 liter drums and a nights consumption costs about $12.
While I was touring the campus to check on the storage tanks Byemerwa went to look at a potential spring source in the mountains nearby. They also are thinking of bringing water down from this source (like the water in the town) for additional volume for things like washing and irrigation. The mountains above Image are beautiful.
I also toured the computer and science labs. I brought DVDs and a flash drive with educational materials but the computers are older with only CD drives. They do have one good laptop and I demonstrated the 8 GB flash drive that had a collation of Wikipedia articles for the UK syllabus (150,000 files), a medical encyclopedia, several digital science texts, and a collection of audio books including classic short stories, the entire new testament, and Hurlbut's bible stories. I thought these could be used to practice listening to English as well as being interesting for the students.
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