Travel to Ancobamba is early and long and I always arrive very tired. Because it was going to be an all-day job, I decided to go up a day early so as to have time to rest. And it was a good thing too - the driver slept through his alarm and we left Abancay and hour and a half late!
Dina taught her usual class in the preschool on Thursday, and then, because we had the day free, we offered to help Rosa (another lady from the church who always invites us in) in her fields. So I learned to dig round potato plants to get rid of the weeds. There were a lot and it was hard work! Both Rosa (about 55) and the teenager she had helping were racing ahead - I was left far behind. But it was another great opportunity to share in people's lives and work, and well worth the blisters and aching back...
The next day we were up early to start the disinfection - it's not actually a lot of hard work but takes a long time. We had managed to get 2 people up from Abancay to help - one from the district government and the other from the region.
First find your spring... This was great for me as I had never been up here before - my training sessions take place in the evening as people are busy in the fields during the day. The spring is halfway down a steep ravine, with amazing views. It was originally fairly well-protected but a landslide damaged the structure so it's no longer covered, and an earth tremor earlier this year caused some of the water to flow out underneath the wall.
Here's the collection tank - our task of cleaning it was made rather more difficult by the fact that the drainage pipe was blocked by some unidentified object about 10 inches in. So I (being the only one of this group with wellies) got in and shovelled out lots of stones, sand, concrete and the occasional bit of cowpat - using the lid of a bucket in absence of a better tool. This being the first time I've seen it and the first time they have attempted to clean it, I imagine we might be a bit better prepared next time!
The next challenge - how to block the outlet pipe so that we could fill up the collection tank with chlorinated water for a reasonable length of time - and meanwhile how to divert the water coming in so that we didn't do more damage to the already vulnerable structure. This is one of the times where people's littering habits come in handy - even in such a remote place we found a plastic bag to fill with leaves and use as a plug (poking it out again afterwards with a broom handle) and a coke bottle to put upside down in the overflow... and years of bailing out sailing boats gave me the solution for the still-flowing spring.
Having accomplished a lot more than nothing, and get some good ideas for how to do better next time... we headed down to the reservoir. I love these walks and am so glad that my tendonitis is mostly gone so I can enjoy them again.
Down at the reservoir the other half of the team had been hard at work scrubbing the inside of the structure, and were now filling it up again. When it got half-full we had to add a LOT of chlorine.
Finally, breakfast arrived!
This is one of my favourite juxtapositions... little girls in princess dresses covered in food and mud. She's got her priorities right though - the charki (dried meat) that we had with our soup was delicious.
The rest of the day was mostly waiting. Waiting for the reservoir to fill up (about 3 hours). Waiting 2 hours for the chlorine to attack whatever might be in the walls. Sending a message to the village to open their taps, then waiting for the chlorinated water to arrive. Getting them to close their taps and keep the water in the pipes to do its work. Waiting for the tank to empty (2 hours). Waiting for it to fill again with fresh water. Waiting 4 hours while the chlorinated water stayed in the pipes in the distribution system. opening the taps again and waiting til the chlorine reduced to acceptable levels for consumption. No wonder it took all day...
Our visitors from Abancay had brought an accessory to improve the regular chlorine dosing system, so while we were waiting they got on with the installation.
The water board are keen to work but don't necessarily know the
processes they ought to follow - or perhaps don't understand why they
are necessary. And in a life that's full of hard physical
time-consuming work, that often means things that are not
well-understood don't get prioritised. Thanks to last year's diploma
studies and doing similar work on other villages, I could help the water
board understand the necessary steps (and why all the waiting!) so that
we could follow the requirements and get the benefit from all the
chlorine they were using (at significant cost). Not everything went
smoothly... but we learned a lot about the system and will be repeating
the exercise, hopefully in April - it should be done twice a year.
Today was really good as well for developing my friendship with the village nurse - so all that waiting was good for something!
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District water rep, regional water rep, village nurse,
village plumber, acting president of the water board, me! |
