Blog

Day 3: Household Visits, Lab Training and Full Implementation Review

Day 3 of the Fellowship was a very full day for the teams. The first half of the day was spent visiting existing CWS villages. Each team visited a different CWS village. Half of each team monitored sales at the treatment center while the other half did household water storage monitoring with their translator. Both team halves took water samples along the way.

Why yes, that is a big ant hill towering above us!
I tagged along with Team 3 (Kathryn, Lauren, Jim and Elsie) for the day.
Lauren couldn't resist trying to climb the ant hill 🙂
Team 3 chillin' by the Cheko dugout.

In Cheko, Team 3 encountered an example of the difficulties that can arise in development work. For the first time, we found in Cheko that households didn’t have clean water in their homes and some had dirty water in their containers. The center wasn’t running and it had obviously not been for at least a week. The CWS staff immediately looked into this and discovered that the women running the center had left the village (for various reasons) without leaving properly trained women behind to keep the center running. Shak met with the chief and elders to solve the problem and held an emergency community meeting to reiterate the significance of clean drinking water and the need to use household containers properly. The next day, he spent going household to household to repeat this message and the treatment center was cleaned and new women were selected to be trained to run the center. Team 3 was disappointed to not see the Cheko center up and running that day but appreciated the realistic experience they were getting. Personally, though we realize that we are here to monitor and problem solve, it’s never enjoyable to see such rare problems. Teams 1, 2, and 4 all visited villages with busily running centers and every household visit showed properly stored clean drinking water.

Lauren tried to blend with the village by making goat noises...there was minimal success.
...but the children loved the goat-sounding girl 🙂
And for lunch? Ta da!! Chicken & Rice! Yum!
Sometimes it's best to get in out of the sun after a while.
As there are no bunnies in northern Ghana, these are called giraffe ears...
Lunch out was a nice break, even if the menu was pretty familiar.

The second half of the day, the teams rotated through the CWS office, where they spent an hour and a half reviewing with me in detail the step by step CWS implementation process, focusing especially on the very important initial meeting with the chief and elders. Following this, each team moved over to the lab to learn how to properly conduct water tests and performed tests on the samples they had taken that morning. They were also taught to clean the lab equipment; we had to buy distilled water for the process, to ensure that all the testing equipment was clean and safe to use.

Mira carefully drawing a sample to test.
Chris preparing the pipettor.
Heather skillfully testing the water while Allie holds the sample for her.
Jim draws from the sample Lauren holding open for him.
Hannah and Nate preparing the samples.
Cam water testing with surgeon-like hands
Nate watches in awe as Sarah tests their water sample.
Elsie takes her turn with the pipettor while Jim holds out the sample.
The hard part is done. Now it's time to incubate!! 🙂

 

To treat ourselves for our full day, we ate out. Sarah enjoyed spaghetti with vegetables.
Cam enjoyed red red (a traditional been stew) with plantains and chicken.)
Lauren played it a little safer with good 'ol vegetable pizza.
Kathryn did the same. 🙂

One thought on “Day 3: Household Visits, Lab Training and Full Implementation Review

  1. Keep the blogs coming. It’s great to read and see what you all are doing each day. Thanks for sharing with us back home. Keep up the good work and have some chicken and rice for me!

Comments are closed.