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Fall Fellows in the Field

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The 2012 Fall Fellows
The 2012 Fall Fellows

The first day of orientation consisted of a crash course of information about Ghana, the global water crisis, waterbourne disease, different water technologies, and finally the nitty gritty details of how we do it! It was a great day with lots of great discussions.

Presentations were broken up by a midday Scavenger Hunt– a great way to get our fellows out there and comfortable in the hustle and bustle of the Tamale Market. Both teams came back with only three missing items (Obama paraphernalia and a Diet Coke posed to be the hardest to find) but because Wahab’s team made it back first they took the crown!

2012-10-13 10.10.51After some orientation the fellows were off with Sam, Shak and Wahab to get a look into the village lifestyle while also getting to see the water treatment centers working within a community. First stop was Kurugu Vohoyili! Kurugu Vohoyili is one of the smaller villages that we work in, with about 30 households, but the personality of this village is huge! The men, women and kids welcomed the new fellows with smiles and were so excited to hear that they would be implementing into a new village. Fusiena, one of the women that helps run the water center was especially excited and wanted to take a picture with each individual fellow!

2012-10-13 09.49.06Next stop Kaplung! Kaplung is a great example of how the project is one that can be tailored to what’s going to work best in the community. The women who run the center wanted their center in the middle of the village, as opposed to being next to the dugout. As we can explain why most villages put it near their dugout, in the end it is always the communities decision. With the help of donkey carts to transport the water, having the center in the village has turned out to work just fine for Kaplung!

2012-10-13 09.46.41At this point in the day the sun was coming down hard and we were all starting to run low on fuel, it was time to head back into town to grab some grub! After lunch, it was off to the lab for training on water quality testing.

-Sam

The 2012 Fall Fellowship Has Begun!

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Today was the official start of the 2012 Fall Fellowship Program! After a day of traveling from the States to Ghana, and then another full day riding the bus from Accra up to CWS’ headquarters in Tamale, Tiffany, Brittany, Steven, Lauren, Lubna, Nicole, Joe, and Jessie arrived at their home for the next three weeks: GILBT guest house! Stay tuned for more updates as our Fellows complete orientation and then start work in their villages!

The 2012 Fell Fellows
The 2012 Fell Fellows

The CWS Staff Goes Back to School

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In September, CWS field staffers decided to bring their knowledge about water, sanitation and waterborne disease to the classroom. The CWS field staff team, which includes Peter, Shak, Wahab, Amin and me, Brianan, (you can read our bios here) met every week in August to prep. During household visits, we usually only talk to the older members of the families, especially the women who are in charge of collecting drinking water. So we were all excited to talk to students in some of our partnership communities. Peter and Wahab presented in a primary school classroom in the village of Gidanturu. Shak and Amin are planning to present at the primary school in Kpalung.

Peter presenting to students in Gidanturu
Peter presenting to students in Gidanturu

For our presentation in Gidanturu, we went the week before to schedule a day that would work for Yussef and Fuseini, the head teachers at the school. Seeing what life was like in the classroom was an experience in itself. “School in the village is different from school in Tamale”, says Peter.  And I could tell what he meant the second I stepped foot inside the classroom. When we arrived early on Monday morning, the children, who ranged from 3 years old to 10 years old, were scattered about and playing inside and outside the school. Fuseini had just arrived from Salaga (it was about 10:30 am by this point) and was still in his travel clothes.  He told us that he comes to teach in Gidanturu during the week but lives in Salaga on the weekends. So the students were occupying themselves in anticipation of his arrival.

Clear water is not always clean water!
Clear water is not always clean water!

Fuseini walked us into the classroom and gave us some chalk to write on the board. He gathered the children who were outside and brought them in to sit at their desks. Despite his tardiness, he had exceptional command over his students. I wrote “Community Water Solutions: Healthy Habits” on the chalk board and Peter and Wahab started the presentation, while I sat on the sidelines and let them steal the show. Peter and Wahab kicked off the class with a demonstration on clean water vs. clear water. They used 3 water bottles: 1 filled with treated polytank water, 1 filled with a salt-water solution and 1 filed with dugout water. Then they invited students to select and taste which ones they thought were clean and which ones they thought were contaminated.

A student pics which bottle she thinks has "clean" drinking water
A student in Gidanturu getting ready to taste water in the bottle – hope its not salty!

The students immediately decided that the dugout water was contaminated, which was obvious to the naked eye because the water was dark brown (nobody tasted this sample). They brought up several students to distinguish between the salt-water solution and the polytank water (they were both clear solutions in water bottles so it was impossible to tell the difference just by looking).

Wahab reviewing the lessons learned from the water taste test!
Wahab reviewing the lessons learned from the water taste test!

The salty water surprised the students. Peter and Wahab then talked about water contamination, the spread of waterborne diseases, rainwater collection and proper drinking water storage.

Healthy Habits vs Waterbourne Diseases

The newly empowered instructors concluded the lesson with a “healthy habits tag game” outside. Two students volunteered to be “it” and took on the roles of the waterborne diseases, Diarrhea and Cholera. Five students volunteered to be 5 different healthy habits such as: washing your hands with soap and water and drinking safe water collected from the polytank. These “healthy habits” each got 3 lives, whereas the rest of the students were not given any lives. If you were tagged aka contracted Cholera or Diarrhea, you were to sit by the tree that was designated as the hospital. After five minutes, the students who practiced healthy habits were the only ones not in the hospital since they were living healthier lifestyles and were less likely to contract these waterborne diseases. The game was complete mayhem but the students liked it and understood its message, which was what we were going for.

Healthy habits tag!
Healthy habits tag!

After our presentation, Fuseini dismissed the children for lunch. Their day of school had so far consisted of sitting and listening to our presentation for an hour. While I was discouraged by the inefficiencies of the village school system, Wahab, Peter and I felt like our presentation had made an impression on the students. You could tell by their participation and enthusiasm that some of these children were stimulated and interested by what we were telling them. There will be no way for us to know if they actually wash their hands with soap and water before eating and after going to the bathroom. We don’t have the monitoring capacity to be observing their habits 24/7. Maybe they will put what we taught them about healthy habits into practice, maybe they won’t. But at least they learned something new that school day.

-Brianán

 

The People Behind the Numbers: A Look into the Partnership Villages of CWS

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When looking at statistics or numbers in development, it’s so easy to forget that there are people behind those numbers. And the villages in which CWS has implemented are no different. They are inevitably made up of people.  They have their own personalities, stories, families, livelihoods, conflicts, drama, laughter, hopes and dreams…. The same goes for the women (and man – shout out to the infamous Alhassan, the man who runs the water treatment center in Jerigu) of the CWS water enterprises. They have their own ways of doing business, staying organized, dealing with set backs and choosing how they spend their profits. These water treatment centers are businesses after all. So there’s no reason to think that they’d operate any differently than let’s say a food stand in the market or even a small business back in Boston. Business is business no matter where you are or what you’re selling in the world: acquire capital, acquire goods, sell goods, make a profit and buy more capital…Most importantly modify the business based on your situation and work habits to make it the most efficient it can be.

Blog Post 6 Pic 1The CWS business method is pretty straightforward and uniform throughout the villages in which we implement in and around the Tamale Metropolis. To give you a very brief overview for those of you that are not overly familiar with our approach: CWS finds a village that drinks fecally contaminated surface water (aka dugout water), fellows fundraise and come to Ghana to provide the hardware and to implement the water treatment center in the village, fellows train two women to treat the water with low-cost chemicals and to sell the water back to the community at an affordable price. Then, the CWS field staff monitor and supply the women with aquatabs for five years post-implementation. Every CWS partnership community is given the capital to start their water business, which includes a polytank, polytank stand, at least 3 blue drums, alum, aquatabs and finally every household in these villages is given a safe storage container to store the water that they buy. So if implementation is the same throughout, then what, might you ask, could really make every CWS enterprise unique? The answer is quite simply the people.

Blog Post 6 Pic 2This past week, in the village of Jagberin, Aisha closed the water treatment because the lock to the polytank broke. She was leaving treated water stored in the polytank overnight and would wake up to find that water was missing! The water level was significantly lower than she had left it the night before. After some investigation, she discovered that farmers from Jagberin had realized the polytank was unlocked and came early in the morning to fill their garrawas with stolen water. Aisha decided to close her business until she could buy a new lock because she did not want to risk losing money. Wahab and I went to Jagberin this Tuesday to do household visits and realized what was going on. This is a sticky situation because while these water treatment centers are businesses, their main function is provide people with clean water. After talking to Aisha, she agreed to fill the polytank with one blue drum at a time until she bought a new lock. She is going to make announcements for when she is going to sell with the hopes of selling all of the water at once so that none is left in the polytank for people to steal. As of today, she has a new lock!

BLog Post 6 Pic 5Kadula is a village that got off to a rocky start. At first there was one woman, Abiba, who was running the water treatment center; however, business did not go well. Apparently there was widespread belief in the community that this woman was a witch. So no one would buy water from her. CWS intervened and held a meeting with the elders to elect new women to run the water business. Kadula is one of the bigger CWS communities with over 100 households. The elders of Kadula decided to elect 15 women (5 women from the 3 “neighborhoods” of Kadula) to work in a rotation of filling the blue drums. They elected Azaratu as the leader of these women, to oversee and run the business. Azaratu collects the money, buys aquatabs and makes all major decisions for the water treatment center.

Blog Post 6 Pic 7In Kpalung, the polytank stand was initially built next to the dugout, which a very far walk from the village center. There were many complaints that the center was too far. Also, during the rainy season, the dugout becomes obsolete because everyone harvests rainwater to avoid the long trek to fetch water. Solution? After much discussion with Azaratu and the elders, they decided to move their water treatment center to town. During the dry season, Azaratu pays a donkey businessman to cart water from the dugout to the water treatment center and in the rainy season, she harvests rainwater with the blue drums to treat. While this seemed to be working, there were a few complications. The donkey businessman was charging Azaratu 60 pesawas, the equivalent of two aquatabs or the equivalent of selling 6 20 L buckets of water, to fill every blue drum. She was no longer making a substantial return to her investment. CWS field staff decided to hold a village meeting between Azaratu, the chairman and the donkey businessman to agree upon a fair price. For now, the donkey businessman is no longer charging Azaratu for his services and in exchange gets to fill his safe storage container for free at the water treatment center!

Blog Post 6 Pic 4The last story that took place in Kpalung was one of the first village meetings that I oversaw as Ghana Country Director of CWS. I realized early on that the problems I would encounter with the CWS water businesses were not as black and white as I thought they would be when I was a fellow. People will always be people and sometimes life gets in the way but that just makes it all the more interesting for us in Tamale.

-Brianan

Blog Post 6 Pic 3 Blog Post 6 Pic 6

CWS on the Road: USA Edition

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Its that time of year again, CWS is hitting the road to recruit for our Fellowship Program! Our Fall Recruitment schedule is starting to come together, so check it out, see if we’ll be at a school or city near you, and then come on out to an info session to learn more about the Fellowship! Don’t see your school/city on the list? Send us a note and request presentation. We’d be happy to come to your area!

Current Schedule

Georgia Tech: Wednesday, September 13th at 11am in the College of Computing Room 16

St. Lawrence University: Monday, September 17th at 7pm in the Student Center Room 336

George Washington University: Tuesday, September 18th at 3pm in Ross Hall Lobby C.

Boston College: Tuesday, September 18th at 6:45pm in McGuinn Room 223

University of Virginia: Wednesday, September 19th at 6:30pm in the Newcomb South Meeting Room

Georgetown University: Wednesday, September 19th at 8pm in ICC Rm 113

Tufts University:  Wednesday, September 19th at 8pm in Anderson Hall room 313

University of Maryland: Wednesday, September 19th from 12pm-5pm at the Comcast Center (Career Fair)

John Hopkins: Thursday, September 20th from 11am-3pm at the Ralph O’Connor Recreation Center (Career Fair)

Colby College: Thursday, September 20th at 7:30 in Lovejoy Rm 308

Columbia University: Friday, September 21st from 11am – 4pm in Lerner Hall (Career Fair)

Virginia Tech: Monday, September 24th at 6:15 pm in the Johnston Student Center room 100

University of South Carolina: Monday, September 24th at 7pm in HESC Rm 103

Princeton University: Tuesday, September 25th at 5:30pm in the First Campus Center room 309

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Wednesday, September 26th at 7pm in Rm. 2-131

Yale University: Thursday, September 27th at 7pm in the Dwight Hall Common Room

Boston University: Thursday, September 27th, from 4-5:45pm at Hiebert Lounge (Fellowship Fair Fair)

Smith College: Friday, September 28th from 3:30-6pm at Chapin Auditorium (Smith, Mt Holyoke, Amherst, UMASS, and Hampshire College Career Fair)

Harvard School of Public Health: Thursday, November 8th, from 12-2pm at Kresge Cafeteria, 677 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA (Career Fair)

A Small Small Intro to Ghanaian Government

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Map Time!With the recent tragic passing of President John Atta Mills and the December elections approaching, the Ghanaian government has been making international news headlines. What you don’t hear as much about are the local government institutions that keep the country running. This blog post is about those officials, plauges (?*!? Keep reading…) and offices that help Community Water Solutions do its work in the Northern Region.

motos
NDC supporters turn out to welcome the new President. This is a sneak preview of the support for the National Parliamentary and Presidential elections coming up in December!

Wait, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself already. Northern Region is a region, like an American state or a Canadian province, in (you guessed it!) the north of Ghana. Actually, its not Ghana’s nortmost region; that distinction is held jointly by Upper East and Upper West Regions, but more about them on a later day. Tamale is the largest city in Northern Region. It’s where our fellows sleep, where our office is located, and where we purchase many of our business supplies. Northern Region is further divided into districts, which are governed by elected District Assemblies. The signboards that fellows see around town, “Iddrisu Haruna, Lawyer, for Tamale North Constituency”, are campaign tools for the December District Assembly elections. Each district also has a building that houses the offices for public works. Environmental Health is the department that I am most interested in, as water comes into play here.  Most districts have a Water and Sanitation Team that deal with their constituency’s difficulties in these areas.

plaque
This plague marks the Municipal Assembly in Bawku, Upper East. On top of the challenges faced by district officials, public service can also be a hazardous occupation!

If each district has a team devoted to dealing with its local water problems, where and why does CWS come into play? The answer is complicated. Part of the answer has to do with boreholes. Many governments, NGOs and private citizens the world over think that boreholes are the silver bullet to the water crisis. It certainly is the standard approach to water access in communities here. Boreholes and other groundwater access can be a great solution – they can cut down on time hauling water and they don’t have most of the contamination problems that traditional surface water sources have. However, boreholes can be problematic in many places. In large areas of Northern Region, for example, groundwater is extremely difficult to access, and borehole success rates are as low as 20%[1]. Boreholes and pumps are neither cheap nor intuitive to fix and currently a huge proportion across sub-Saharan Africa are in disrepair. Lastly, they are comparatively expensive to drill. Which introduces the next challenge faced by the District Assemblies: funding. The majority of district funding for water projects does not come from Ghanaian tax dollars. It comes from national or regional donations from multinational organizations and NGOS like UNICEF or the EU. This means that yearly funding is tied to donor priorities, which can be tricky. For example, since Ghana is on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals for water, district budgets for water projects are getting axed. It also means that one-time expense projects, like boreholes, where you can cut a ribbon, snap pictures, check a box and drive home are more likely to get funded than longer-term needs (like monitoring). Between borehole mania and funding difficulties, it has been challenging for districts to come up with alternative solutions local water problems, but that’s where we come in!

The boxes are labeled “National Archives.” Wonder which folder is the borehole report I was looking for?

Of course, different district bureaucracies function at different levels of efficiencies. Some districts or teams are able to stay on top of their game even in the face of these challenges. Some, uh, aren’t. CWS is a lean, mean water-treating machine, and we are able to pick up the slack when local institutions just don’t have the capacity to meet all their constituency’s basic needs.

Challenges aside, without the help of district officials, CWS’ would not have been able to expand as quickly or effectively as we have.  In turn, we are able to compliment local government efforts with our unique and flexible approach to the water problem here. It’s a partnership we hope to continue well into our future!

For more information about the upcoming elections, check out Ghana Decides, a really cool local NGO that is using all sorts of social media to keep Ghanaians updated about the election!

-Kathryn

Annual Benefit Success

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The Community Water Solutions’ Second Annual Benefit was a huge success! Thanks to the support of our amazing event committee (Sarah, Mike, Sarah, Nick, Christine, Vanessa, and Marc), generous event sponsors, Foley Hoag, Goodwin Proctor & Wolf Greenfield, and, of course, everyone who attended the Benefit, we were able to raise a total of $21,791 – exceeding our goal of $20,000 and more than doubling the amount raised at last year’s event!

The night ran as smoothly as possible. The ambiance of the W Hotel combined with the music provided by jazz guitarist, Scott Free, resulted in a beautiful evening that was enjoyed by all! April Obey from April K Photography generously donated her time and talent by setting up a photobooth where attendees took picture with the CWS blue safe storage containers. Check out the photos below!

The night also included a celebration of the launch of our new website! Thanks to the talent and enthusiasm of the Cloud Construct Team— specifically Rebecca, Arra & Kate – we are so excited and proud to introduce our new site!

Cheers to our event sponsors, event committee, beverage sponsors and all who could join us in the evening! We cannot wait for next year!

photo1 photo2 photo3 photo4 photo5 photo6photo7 cofounders kiernans finalpic teamcws CloudConstruct

Clear Water Doesn’t Always Mean Clean

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In Kpanayili, this woman collects rainwater the right way! “She doesn’t joke with the clean water” – Peter

Two weeks ago while doing household visits with Wahab in Kpanayili, we entered the compound of a family that had a full safe storage container of clean looking water. We were delighted. “De viele, de viele” or “good, good”, Wahab and I said to Fati, the woman who showed us where her family keeps their drinking water. She smiled, shy but proud of what she had shown us. Upon further questioning, we found out; however, that while the rainwater this woman had collected in her safe storage container looked very clean, it was most likely contaminated and not suitable for drinking. Fati told us that she had used a clay pot to collect this rainwater from the tin roof above her husband’s bedroom, waiting five minutes for the rain to clear off the roof before collecting. She then told us that she had used her Guinea Worm filter, a mesh cloth that was distributed to her household by the Carter foundation to eradicate Guinea Worm (for more info on Guinea Worm click here or here), to filter water as she transferred it from her clay pot into her safe storage container. This clay pot had no lid and most likely stored dugout water (contaminated surface water) in it during the dry season, meaning that if tested in the lab, this water would come back positive for e-coli. Guinea Worm filters do not actually filter the water, they were used back in the day to make sure that these worms would not make it into the garrawas and buckets used for collecting water for household use. This mesh piece of cloth would remove some sediment at best, leaving all bacteria (the good and the bad) to multiply and stew. A water filtration system is the best and closest way to make clean water. If you are worried or concerned about the water you are drinking, it might be in your best interests to look for Best Water Filter Systems for maximum cleanliness.

It’s groundnut season in Zanzugu! Amin and I were given bags and bags full of groundnuts during household visits. We finally learned to say thank you but no thank you.

Wahab and I explained all of this to Fati, telling her that while her water looked clear, it was actually not clean for reasons X, Y and Z. “Awoomea”, Fati said or “I hear”. But would she actually get the message and follow through by properly collecting rainwater directly from the tin roof using her safe storage container? Wahab and I could only hope. We would not be there with her when the next rain hit. We would not be able to watch to see if she would use her clay pot again to store rainwater for drinking. The decision to make a behavioral change would have to come from Fati.

Amin uses salt-water solution to explain rainwater contamination to Wahab at a weekly office education meeting.

This is a common problem in many of the CWS villages that have tin roofs and collect rainwater during the rainy season. While we inform all of our communities on how to properly harvest rainwater, some people do not see a difference in using their clay pot versus using their safe storage container. After all, the clear rainwater looks so much cleaner than turbid dugout water. But how can we get them to intrinsically understand why this clear looking water is actually not clean? At our last staff meeting, this is a question that Peter, Shak, Amin, Wahab and I all pondered. We realized that we were going to need props if we were going to do this right.

Peter entertains a household in Kagburashe with some proper rainwater collection education! Which one would you choose?
Wahab uses a positive Total Coliform test to explain to a girl in Gariezegu how rainwater can get contaminated when collected in pots that once held dugout water.

 

 

 

 

 

Since then, we have been using water samples of contaminated rainwater that have tested positive for Total Coliform (a sign of contamination, shows up bright yellow in a test tube) and water samples taken from the polytank that have tested negative for e-coli and Total Coliform (shows up clear in a test tube). The CWS field staff has been using these two test tubes as a tangible demonstration given during household visits to show the difference between the clean and clear, the good and the bad. In order to get the children of these villages on board, we have also been conducting taste tests of a salt-water solution versus treated polytank water to show how clear water can have invisible germs inside and that you cannot always see what is in your drinking water. Almost every kid that tries the two spits out the salt-water solution in disgust! Clear does not always mean clean… or tasty.

-Brianan