Dr. Steve reflects, plus a couple pix!

We’re doing it.  On Monday, we officially hand over the water system to the community. There will be a big shebang, for sure. The town officials are tense and keep asking us if the reservoir will be full on Monday when everybody arrives (the answer is yes).  Tomorrow, all FOUR water committees will be out in force, cleaning up the neighborhoods in expectation of all the government officials who will be here.  Banners will be hung across the roads and the school may even get a coat of paint.  Our system is gaining recognition as a crucial resource in the dry seasons, when it’s the only open source of potable water for many miles, remarkable for villages that aren’t even on the electrical grid.  We’re told it’s being looked at as a potential model for other areas in Cameroon. We’ve done something special, and you, our members, alumni, parents, and financial supporters, should be very proud.

As planned, we’re putting the finishing touches on the system.  Ramsey has already given you the details.  Just a couple pix here, ‘cuz the internet is pretty non-existent.

Here’s a cool thing Ramsey brought, being demonstrated by Erica and Mike. Ramsey is down the hill in Balatsit with an AM exciter attached to the wire comes up the hill to a float switch in the tank, to tell the pump when to shut off. To tell if it’s connected, and even where there might be a disconnection underground, Erica listens to a beep – beep-beep sound with a little AM radio. Mike is talking to Ramsey, telling him yes, we have a good connection. Bravo! On the Bakang side though, we found a place we have to dig up to reconnect.  But hey, we would have to dig up the whole thing without this gizmo!

Mike and Erica using the wire exciter and AM radio

This other picture is the inside of our 20,000 liter water reservoir at the school. There is a LOT of water pouring in, because all three wells are busy sending it up.  We re-did the float switch setup inside the tank to make maintenance easier, as also shown.  This tank supplies water for lots of folks!

The inside of the ferrocement tank.

So that’s where we are. Friday is a big work day for everybody and we will try to relay news to you asap!

As Julie says - Peace, Love, and EWB  !

- Dr. Steve

Today We Fixed More Things Than We Broke

What a great day we had today!  We fixed some things.  But most crucially Felix the driver and I figured out that his car MP3 player could play the music on my phone's microSD card.  We spent all day jamming out to Fela Kuti, Michael Franti, James Taylor, and probably about 20 CDs worth of live Phish.  Everyone had a certain spring in their step today.  I think the rest of the team was down with the tunes.  Maybe they liked them.  But more than likely they were just happy to listen to anything besides 10 or so American pop songs that we had been hearing on repeat for the last three days.  I will definitely be leaving some music with Felix before we leave Bamendjou.

First thing this morning we stopped at the metal man's shop and drove him, his generator, and his welding gear out to the ferrocement tank to install a new bracket for holding the float switches.  His welding set up was pretty amazing, and he made quick work on the job.

Once the welder was finished, Felix (the driver) and Dr Steve took him back to town and met with some local officials, while the rest of us got to work on diagnosing the pump issues at the Balatsit wet well.  Based on controller errors from the day before we suspected an issue with the connection to the pump and began the process of draining the wet well so we could pull the pump and check connections.  The disconnecting of the poly pipe into the wet well led to a pretty significant amount of water spraying everywhere.  I imagine it looked pretty hilarious to anyone watching.  Erica and Mike went to make sure that there was no water flowing from other wet wells or the ferrocement tank back to Balatsit (there shouldn't have been).  However, eventually the water drained completely, and Felix and I were able to completely remove the pump.

I was overjoyed to find the problem was not a bad pump.  As suspected there was an issue with poorly waterproofed connections in the wet well.  Most of them had been soaked all the way down to the wire and up the insulation, leading to significant corrosion.  In fact when I was removing electrical tape one of the connections just fell apart in my hands.  I stripped back some wire, but ended up replacing almost all the wire that had been submerged.  Connections were waterproofed using waterproof butt splices, waterproof heatshrink, and finally waterproof electrical tape.  By this time the whole team was back at the well site, and the pump was reinstalled in the wet well and we performed a test successfully.  For the first time in a very long time, possibly ever, all 6 pumps are now functioning correctly.

Ramsey making test connections which were later redone with waterproof crimps, heat shrink, and tape

We also found out that Felix (the plumber) knows more English than originally thought.  He was able to yell, "STOP IT!", when he realized one of the connections was loose and spraying water everywhere again.

Once we had sorted out the pump, we directed our attention to testing the float switches.  As best we could tell some or all of the float switches were not functioning properly.  This hadn't really been a problem since not all of the wet wells were always running, and the ferrocement tank had never been full.  But with all pumps working, it looks like it will be a matter of days before the tank completely fills, and the float switches will be essential in preventing any overflow.

We were able to quickly determine that the float switches themselves were functioning correctly.  This left the connections and wiring running down the hill to all the wet wells.  Very quickly we realized that all the connections at the ferrocement tank were suspect, and much like before, some were corroded or physically fell apart.  Dr Steve and Mike used the wire exciter and bush whacked their way down the line to locate a single break in the wire to Bakang I.  This will be dug up and repaired tomorrow.  We also found that the conduit running to Bakang II had never been completely buried, and some of it had been melted due to the slash and burn agriculture used in the area.  As best we can tell the line to Balatsit is intact and will just need to be reconnected at the ferrocement tank.  This work will probably take up at least the first half of tomorrow.  While some of the team addresses these issues, the rest of the team will be checking all the tap stands in the community to insure they are functioning.

The local villages have called a special work day tomorrow in preparation for the hand off ceremony on Monday.  Significant cosmetic work will be performed around the wells, school, and ferrocement tanks.  This is a good thing since I leaned on a rickety fence today and broke part of it.  Everyone is really excited for the ceremony on Monday, and I can't wait to see all the work the community is going to be doing.

One thing that has been very concerning is that Dr Steve forgot to bring his gold and silver stars on this trip.  We've had to resort to intangible "credibility points".  While my credibility is pretty high these days, I'd trade it all for a single gold star.

Wire Exciters Are Awesome

This morning I woke up feeling like a million bucks.  I set up my hammock outside to escape Mike's snoring, and even though I was woken up by a squawking peahen it was probably one of the best nights of sleep I've ever had in Africa.  Not one mosquito bite, either!

Sleeping Easy

We discovered that our generator had been broken while we were out of country.  This was mildly frustrating, but considering our drill is locked away where we can't reach it, the generator wouldn't be much use anyway.  We put these issues aside, and dived headlong into addressing the electrical system issues we had diagnosed yesterday.

One of the biggest problems I anticipated was that we only had a foggy idea of where the wires running from the ferrocement tank float switches back to the wet well controllers were located.  I had spent many hours helping my dad locate breaks in the invisible dog fence around my parents' yard, and it was never fun.  With roughly 4km of underground wire in Cameroon, I was even more apprehensive.  I recently picked up an underground wire exciter for $50 from Brackmann Engineering.  While something much fancier would have been nice, we have a limited budget, and I was fairly confident it would do the trick.  It basically works by sending an AM radio signal down the wire, and then you can use a portable AM radio to locate the wire to within a 5 feet or so.  It's not super precise, but it's good enough for wire finding, and great for determining if there are breaks in the line.  It was pretty fantastic Christmas present for my dad which I immediately confiscated and took to Cameroon.  Dad, if you're reading this, I promise to bring it home and help you fix the dog fence again.  It should be easy this time.

While Felix the plumber, repaired a leak in some of the plumbing at the top of hill, I repaired a break in one of the float switch lines.  Most wires, are not designed to be exposed to the elements, and unfortunately, this wire had not been properly sealed/waterproofed in conduit and buried.  Because it wasn't buried, it was a fairly straight-forward repair.  Before completely sealing the lines, I also used the wire exciter to determine if there were any other breaks in float switch wires, and was very happy to find that they were functioning as expected.  With the help of Mike and Erica, we have already GPS mapped the path of one of the wires, and given time and a machete we hope to map the other two lines.

After completing the repairs to the float switch wires, we turned our attention to repairing the faulty controllers.  At Bakang 2 wet well we swapped in a brand new controller and determined that the pump was functioning perfectly and that the controller was indeed faulty.  Since the old controller seemed to have limited functionality we decided we put it back in place and took the new controller to Balatsit 2 to replace the controller that was seemed to be completely non-functioning.  After making the replacement though, the CU-200 presented an F3 error, indicating no connection to the pump.  Some diagnosis using both the wire exciter and a wire toner indicated that there were connections all the way to the bottom of the pump (where the wire enters the pump housing).  Measurements of the resistance through the pump indicated that there was still a connection through a motor coil in the pump.  It's a perplexing problem that may require us to pull the pump from the wet well to check all connections.

While we did this work Dr Steve and Felix went around installing the new push taps at all the tap stands.  The new taps are wonderfully simple, and should prevent water waste, while also preventing the spread of germs from the tap to the water.  Almost every tap stand we visited on Tuesday had dripping, leaking, or left-open taps.  The new taps should really prevent this.  Even the youngest kids were quickly able to understand and use the taps.

We ended up heading back to the Mayor's house relatively early at 4PM, so that we could test a broken pump.  I had done this previously back in the DE so the process was fairly straight-forward, but as always some in-country ingenuity was required so that we could plug in the pump directly to mains power and submerge it in a make-shift wet well.  Resistance measurements of the pump indicated an open circuit, and it wasn't much of a surprise that when we did hook up the pump it didn't work.  Little Guy (one of the little boys who lives at the Mayor's house) seemed somewhat disappointed we were unable to soak him with water.

Using local materials to make a VERY leaky testing wet well.

Dr. Steve left us to test the pump while he tried to use the local internet cafe (again).  We have some exciting guests expected for the hand-off ceremony on Monday, and Dr Steve is busy orchestrating things as best as possible with limited internet.

As I write this post, Mike and Erica are busy cutting aluminum to replace some parts of a couple racks, and Dr Steve is reviewing video and photos we've been taking.

Tomorrow the metal man (welder) will be helping us remount the float switches while most of the team plans to attack the Balatsit wet well.  Assuming the pump is not completely broken and we can get it pumping again, the entire 6 pump system will be working and we will be leaving the system to the community in working condition.  It will be no small feat, and has taken 10 trips, 6 years, and a lot of hard work by many dedicated people to make it happen.  Crossing our fingers!

Making Up For Lost Time

We arrived in Bafoussam Monday night, after a 4 hour very uncomfortable bus ride.  Erica ended up sitting in a Economy Minus (a wooden box in the aisle with an armrest in each kidney).  I have never been so close (physically) with one of my advisers   Needless to say this was a great sacrifice for Dr. Steve since there was no water at our hotel and I hadn't showered in a couple days.  We were picked up by George Takam, a local chief, who helped us find some much needed dinner before taking us back to Bakang.  Upon arrival in Bamendjou we found out there was also no running water there, so showers had to wait another day.

Despite the delayed start for this trip, things are moving along nicely.  Today was our first day on site, and we spent much of the day taking stock of all the borehole and wet well pumping systems.  We were very pleased to see that the all of the borehole systems were functioning as expected, with all tanks filling each day, despite the dry season.

Unfortunately only one of the wet well/lift systems was working, which meant that the ferrocement tank was not filling fast enough to keep pace with demand from the gravity fed distribution system.  This problem has become more pronounced recently.  Due to the dry season and municipal water shortages in Bamendjou, many people had been travelling to the edge of Bakang to get water from the system we had installed.  On one hand, it was encouraging that the system was so well known and trusted for safe drinking water.  The downside is that there has been additional demand from a userbase that has little invested in the system.

We also inspected the 20000L ferrocement tank, plumbing, and various tap-stands.  The ferrocement tank is in great condition, and will only require a minor modification which will allow for easy changing of the float switches, without draining the tank so somebody can climb in it.

Based on some initial evaluations we determined that the wet well at the Balatsit crossroads was completely non-functioning due to a faulty controller which had been exposed to direct sunlight and has been suspect since the last implementation trip.  At Bakang 2 the wet well was functioning sporadically, but apparently correctly.  However there was no read out or status information on the CU-200 controller and internal diagnostics indicate the controller is at least partially faulty.  The wet well at the Bakang 1 crossroads was functioning exactly as expected.  Tomorrow we will attempt to confirm that the controllers are the faulty component by substituting in working controllers

Testing electrical connections in the pump controller

One observation we made, which has been made before, is that the controllers are very popular nests for insects.  We removed bee/hornet nests from every controller we opened.  I also spent an hour in the afternoon attempting to clean "insect glue" off the circuit boards of old controllers using alcohol.  While we may not get a complete working controller, hopefully there will be some spare parts.  Quarterly cleaning of the controllers will need to be part of the recommended quarterly maintenance.

While I was cleaning the rest of the team went to Baffoussam to pick up some supplies.  Wire was purchased, along with some reducers for the specially selected push taps that Dr Steve found.  Felix, the plumber, and Felix the driver, have both been very helpful through all of this.  Dr Steve picked up an overpriced Union Jack towel to use in the now working shower.  Mike and Erica grabbed some local fabric which we later delivered to the local seamstress.  Later in Bamendjou attempted to send an email to my roommates, but was foiled by a power cut right as I was signing my email.  Going forward, all correspondence will be prepared ahead of time on a laptop.

Arrived in Yaounde!

Last night we officially reached Yaounde!  The team made it through the airport fairly quickly with all of our baggage and got to the hotel.  Today we are trying to do a few things in Yaounde, and then we will be taking a bus to Bafoussam, so we will be in Bamendjou by tonight!

Ramsey Vents and Eats Waffles

Due to the snafu with our flight from Dulles, we were unable to get any of our clothes last night in DC.  But we were assured that during our 26 hour unplanned stopover in Brussels we would be able retrieve our bags, so that we could get showered and put on some clean clothes.  United did not want to guarantee us accommodations in Brussels but after some belligerence we were given an assurance that we'll probably have a room when we get to Brussels.

This morning I logged into United's site and reserved aisle seats towards the front of economy class for myself and Erica.  When I got on the plane though, I realized that our seats had been changed to the back row of the plane, with me sitting in a window seat.  Despite having plenty of open seats on the plane, it took a certain amount of conflict to convince the stewardesses to find me an aisle seat.  I have to say they were really friendly, but it was a bit off putting that they were worried about being disciplined for giving me a replacement seat (that was empty) for the one I had reserved that morning.

We arrived safely in Brussels this morning around 6:30AM.  We spent the next 5 hours waiting at the airport for our bags to come out.  Which was just as well since the hotel did not have any open rooms because they were all filled with United passengers who had missed connections the night before.  Best we can tell the watches and clocks used by the folks at Brussels airport do not operate on a linear time scale.  Five minutes is apparently longer than an hour but sometimes shorter than 15 minutes which ranges from half an hour to 2 hours.  After hours of waiting we did retrieve some of our bags.  But unfortunately for Mike, his bag is still MIA.  As well as our med kit which is a pretty serious issue.  We have been assured that they know where the bags are (somewhere in Brussels airport).  The baggage attendants have told us that our bags will make it to Yaounde because they know exactly where they are.  Unfortunately in the 18 hours since we arrived they have not been able to bring them to us at the luggage desk, or our hotel that is literally across the street from the baggage claim.  At this point I've stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt, and I'm getting nervous about our tool bag, which we agreed to leave checked for the flight to Yaounde.

Honestly, this might be the worst air travel experience I've ever had.  United Airlines has failed on just about every front.  Missed flight, missed connections, missing bags, last minute changes to our seat reservations, etc.  All along the way the employees have been very nice, but somewhat clueless.  Thanks to the US and EU passenger rights laws, they were forced to put us up in a hotel and give us food vouchers.  Unfortunately the food vouchers didn't cover one meal at the hotel in DC.

So as it stands we have already lost two days of project time.  And without our med kit we stand to lose more days waiting for it in Yaounde.  I'm not sure United could pay me to fly on their airline again.  Luckily for them I'll be eating my words when I have to fly home on United.

Mannekin Pis

So in the mean time we've been trying to make the best of our time.  We did get to spend some time in central Brussels which was really beautiful.  We did a rapid speed tour of Brussels, and managed to visit three churches, Mannekin Pis, Brussels Town Hall and some parks along the way.  We also had a delicious Belgian waffle for lunch out of a waffle truck (a great idea for back home!).  I had been hoping to get some Belgian fries, but Dr. Steve had a bit of a scare when he couldn't find his passport.  Luckily for all of us, it was back in his room.

La Fontaine Egmont et de Hornes

We also had some constructive conversations over breakfast about future EWB-UD projects.  With the Cameroon and Guatemala projects coming to an end, the chapter has been discussing a lot of great project ideas.  It should be exciting to see what the new project(s) end up happening.

So tomorrow morning we expect to leave for Yaounde, arriving that night.  We are all excited to get to Bamendjou and finish the project.  I'm personally excited to get back to Bakang and see all the work the team has done since I was last there and also to see how my work has held up.  We're also excited to reconnect with all the community members who have helped make this project happen.

I imagine our internet access will be getting scarcer in the near future, but we will do our best to keep the blog posts coming.

- Ramsey

Status update

Hey Everyone,

Unexpectedly, we have traveled 126mi (maps.google.com) in a little over 15 hours.  This is pretty good mileage, for horseback.... Fortunately, we are not traveling by horseback.  Planes should be a little faster, but faulty engines do slow them down.  After our flight out of Dulles being delayed by 2.5 hours and then aborting a take off attempt, the flight was eventually cancelled.  We ended up at a nearby resort for the night and will have a new flight tomorrow afternoon at 4:50.  The new flight is as follows:
UA 1763 to Brussels, at which point we will spend 26 hours in Brussels.  After that we are on BA 371 into Yaounde.  We will still be letting Amy know when we touch down in Yaounde, at which point everyone will be updated.  As for right now, we have utilized local in country contacts to find a local eatery for a late night dinner as Ramsey and Dr. Steve missed it.  Hopefully the rest of our trip goes smoother.  Will post at the next available location (Brussels?).

-Cameroon Team