Pictures of Bakang

Above are folks getting water from the water tanks we installed last time. The system works great! The tanks are behind the inner fence you see. The Water Committee had the fences built to protect everything.

Above on the left you see Taylor taking a water sample from the location I mentioned last post (he's also apparently walking on water). This is close to where we hope to have a well drilled, far up the road from our solar panel location in rest of these pictures.

Above, you see our filter team with the mold for our next water filter. The mason mixes the concrete in the standard way, and the mold is filled already. This was two days ago and we have now removed the exterior mold section. The filter team is having problems separating the interior mold and were interrupted by the necessity of putting out a fire (not metaphorically!) in the grass by the school. After that we were distracted by a party breaking out as students finished school and the drums and ballaphone appeared - pictures next time. So we hope to get the mold apart, somehow, tomorrow, when we can concentrate.

ok, here's the solar panel installation - also protected now by an attractive barrier. Not visible in the lower right is a small opening that Andrew could barely crawl through (missed a good picture there) but he was able to remove the solar logger so we have now offloaded all the solar data since last June. Also note Nura, the fantastic Peace Corps volunteer of Bamendjou, standing next to Alyssa. The locals get the two of them mixed up, quite understandably.

Below is a better view of the panels. We need to make sure they get dusted off during nthe dry season, but even with a good layer of dust and dirt they put out enough power to keep the tanks filled (2000 liters).
Here are the filter guys surrounded by excited kids. Andrew, Tyler, Taylor, and Steve had just finished rinsing out their filter sand....obviously, school had let out! After this pic there was a rousing game of soccer in the village intersection.


And finally, here's Tyler's photo of me after taking the above picture. Everybody wants a look at themselves!

Today we are also busy with the geohydrology study - DC resistivity combined with Tony's map - we have confirmed a very nice fault along the road in upper Bakang, where the chief also agrees that a productive borehole well could serve a lot of people who are far from clean water (see picture #1 above).
We're far from done here. I'm posting this from the Piarist mission computer but we have more on today's to-do list. We'll post again soon (some of the students, j'espère). Thanks for all your support!
Dr. Steve