And the Water Flowed!

Okay, technically not clean water yet, but we're really, really close! As Chuck noted, my impression of yesterday was that we made incremental progress. We got a lot done. We put the new pump in the well, got a lot of the board put together and had exciting interactions with the students. But we still had a few potential show-stoppers ahead of us. The biggest of which was that we still hadn't gotten a drop of water out of the hole in the ground. Many of the parts that we picked up for the well, eg. electrical connectors and big PVC pipe, turned out to be incorrect. Despite my earlier comment about the Belizean Home Depot, in practice when we discover that we need a different part out on the job site it's a two hour proposition to get a replacement.

Things seemed to come together much better on Friday morning. Dan and Aki began figuring out the electrical part and developed a good plan for the well. While they made a dash to the hardware and electric stores I spent the morning putting together lots of PVC. By lunchtime I had accomplished a lot but was beginning to stagger a bit from PVC cement fumes. The picture shows my handiwork on the board as Dan and Aki put the finishing touches to the electrical.

Outside the well connections were also coming together. As the final pipe was laid and glued, I scrambled back on the roof to make sure that all of the connections on the raw (dirty) water side were in place so that we wouldn't dump water all over the floor or ground when (if?) the pump worked.

At 4 pm we still weren't quite there. We were running out of necessary parts (a PVC elbow is cheap and simple but hard to work around if you don't have one). Complicating things is a country-wide shortage of the size pipe that we need. We're substituting the next larger size where possible but in some places we need a specific size. We're down to counting the inches we need to complete the job. At 5 pm we got today's payoff. Dan threw the switch, the pump started to churn and several minutes later raw water started to pour into the cistern!

We need to complete the final pieces before "operator training" at 1 pm tomorrow. By then, by God's grace, Let the Clean Water Flow!

Peace,

Dave