The Session 2 fellows started off their third day in Tamale with a great presentation by Foster Soley from unicef, who spoke about the work his organization is doing both here in Ghana and around the world. Foster is a WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) officer at unicef, who we have been working with in our unicef-cws partner villages in Central Gonja. His presentation was interesting and relevant, and the fellows asked some great questions!
Unicef presentation
After lunch, the teams headed out on their first trip to the field to visits some CWS sites! Team 5 went to went to Zanzugu and Gilanzegu; Team 6 checked out Chani and Nymaliga, while Team 7 when to Yipela and Nyanguripe. The fellows had a great time seeing our water treatment centers in person for the first time, and (as the pictures below show) seemed to assimilate with the villagers quite well!
Fabiola, TJ, Eleanor and Rachel on the bridge by Yipela - we have been experiencing the Hamattan this past week (sand blows down from the Sahara causing a dusty haze)Annie with her new friends in the village
Lina in the villageSarah peeling some cassavaMost of the fellows enjoyed playing with the children in the village, Fabiola, however, had fun hanging out with a different kind of "kid"
The next day, the teams hit the the road bright and early so they could be at the villages in time to see people buying water. After an hour or so at the water treatment centers, they then performed random household visits where they could see how the water we provide is actually stored and used in the home. They took water samples at each house, which they brought back and tested in the lab to make sure the water wasn’t being re-contaminated.
Catherine (ses. 1) and Karla with some Fulani women at Kpallibisi's water treatment centerCatherine , Hannah and Nate (ses. 1) monitoring water sales in KpallibisiPranav getting a taste of water from polytank at GilanzeguSam and Barihama, our great taxi driver, after a long day in the field!Eleanor and some new friends in Yipela!Rachel taking a break from household visits to pound some FuFuPranav and Shak at the the Gilzengu water treatment center
After a long day in the field, the fellows and I were definitely ready for a good meal. Annie’s family friend invited all 17 of us (12 Session 2 fellows, 4 Session 1 fellows and me!) over to their house for dinner and dancing. The meal was delicious (and of course the dancing was a blast!) It was an amazing experience that none of us will forget!
2011 Winter Fellows, their taxi drivers and translators, with two of CWS co-founders, Kate and Vanessa at Swad!
On Wednesday night, the entire 2011 Winter Fellowship Program headed to our favorite restaurant in Tamale, Swad, for a little goodbye party for the Session 1 Fellows. 28 Fellows + 4 translators, + 4 taxi drivers + Kate and Vanessa = one large dinner party! It was so great to relax together as one big group – of course the night ended with a big dance party! Our friends at Swad kept the restaurant open late for our group, and we were so appreciative of the extra time to spend together!
Lauren, Heather, Luke, Mira, Jim, Cam, Marlene, Kathryn, Allie, Catherine, Nate, Kevin, Elsie, Hannah, Chris, and Sarah – we have all been so impressed with your positive attitudes and incredible work ethics. It was a joy to have you in Ghana these past three weeks and we are lucky to have you all as a part of our CWS family. Not only have you provided safe drinking water to over 3,000 people who were in desperate need, you also brightened the days of almost everyone that you encountered during your time here. We can’t wait to see the amazing impact that you all will undoubtedly have on the world!
While we are sad to see the session 1 fellows leave Tamale in a couple days, we are excited for our fellowship adventure to continue with our 3 Session 2 teams! Their program officially began on Monday morning with their first day of orientation. We spent the morning reviewing our schedule or the next few weeks, getting to know each other through some fun team-building games and discussing the Global Water Crisis, Waterbourne Disease, and the different kinds of water treatment interventions that are used around the world. We then sent the teams off on the now-traditional CWS scavenger hunt through Tamale! The fellows had a blast learning the city, but unfortunately, they still haven’t found any Coke Lite for me (Kate)! It remains on the top of the list of most difficult items to find in Northern Ghana!
The Winners! Lina, Sarah, Shalyn, and PranavThe first team to finish Sanita, Eleanor, Rachel and Fabiola. Unfortunately, they weren't as good as bargaining as Team #5!Team #6, last but certainly not least (and definitely most stylish!)
The Fellows started off Day two with a quick lesson on how to roll balls of alum, which is one of the products that CWS uses to treat water in the communities we work in. They spent the rest of the morning learning more details about the history of Community Water Solutions and going over the village implementation process. The teams then practiced using the alum that they had rolled that morning in a sample of dugout water and finished off the day in the CWS lab. Its been a great couple of days and we can’t wait for the first day in the field tomorrow!
Team #5 Rolling Alum ballsTeam #7 Team #5: Lina, Sarah, Pranav, and Shalyn rolling alum during alum
Adelina getting ready to take a sample of dugout waterSarah practicing using alum in dugout waterRachel trying out the alumSam learning how to use alumFabiola and Sanita performing their first water tests in the CWS labEleanor and Sanita in the CWS lab
Teaching team #6 about water testing in the field
Pranav micropipetting a 1 ml of the water sample on the 3M petrifilm test
On Saturday, Team 4 opened the new water treatment center at the village of Zanzugu. The team was led by its trusty translator, Shak, and was prepared for hectic day after hearing the tale of Team 1’s opening day. Upon arriving at Zanzugu after their daily 45-minute ride in Shak’s trusty Nissan Suzuki, the team had their daily meeting with the chief. The chief promptly expressed his excitement over opening and quickly mobilized the community to meet the treatment center. The team was assured that once the drums sounded, the village would flock to the shiny new Rambo 100 Polytank to fill their safe storage buckets and to quench their thirst.
The Zanzugu chief
Upon the team’s arrival at the treatment center, the two women chosen to run the center were already scooping the alum-treated dugout water from the glistening blue drums into the polytank. Three Aquatabs completed the simple but powerful recipe for clean water and the tap started flowing. Bucket after bucket arrived. The chief and the elders of the village overlooked as family after family approached the tap, paid their 10 pesawas and collected their clean drinking water. All of a sudden, a band of drummers gathered villagers by the central tree and organically a dance circle came to fruition. Even a few leaky buckets could disrupt the rhythm of the line as the team efficiently monitored the opening sales and fixed any minor mishaps. A controlled chaos swarmed the polytank as about 58 families fetched their water.
The crowd at opening Day in Zanzugu
Buckets lined up ready to be filled with clean drinking water
Though unforeseen circumstances kept a handful of families from receiving clean water, the women were more than happy to reopen the treatment center the following day, excited to fully own and run the sustainable clean water business. The team would like to thank their excellent translator Shak, who skillfully led them through each step of the process and made implementation in Zanzugu a success. Additionally, the team is grateful for all those donors who made this treatment center possible through their support and generosity.
Team 4, Marlene, Kevin, Chris and Allie with our trusty translator Shak!
Chani is a small and quiet village. The chief, supposedly 150 years old, has been sick for a few days so we had been unable to meet with him until yesterday afternoon. He gave us a short blessing and thanked us for working there. The other villagers were extremely receptive and helpful as we built the center and distributed buckets. Selamatu and Muneera, the women running our center, are diligent workers; they learned quickly and are proud of their role managing the center. Everything pretty much went off without a hitch as we prepared for the big morning.
Muneera and Selamatu hard at work.
Immediately upon our arrival a few men approached asking to purchase additional buckets. There was also a fancy-schmancy educated man who had been in town the day we distributed so he was eager to get his safe-storage container. As we waited for Selamatu and Muneera, children and women crowded around with their buckets; everyone was clearly super pumped for the “pure wata.” Down at the center we were quickly surrounded by blue buckets and people, more of a mob than a queue. The children and a few fellows were clapping and making music which added to the festive mood.
Buckets all lined up, ready for the center to open!
Once the water started flowing it became apparent that many of the buckets were leaking at the tap. This caused a slight delay – which could have been debilitating at a larger village – as we retightened all the taps with pliers provided by the villagers themselves. Along with the inordinate number of people who wanted to buy additional buckets, the tap tightening was our largest hiccup. The villagers, of course, were chiller than FanMilk – they couldn’t have cared less about the pause. Patience and a constant willingness to lend a hand seem to be the pervading Ghanaian virtues.
Muneera doles out the first flow of pure water at Chani!!!
Wahab, our awesome-sauce all-star translator extraordinaire, was equal parts assistant and leader. He was darting back and forth between problems, often translating two different conversations simultaneously. What a baller. The concrete stand he built is enormous and crafted to perfection, fully blowing those of other villages out of the water (pun intended). Wahab takes an obvious pride in his work.
Wahab working on our ridiculously large stand a few days before.
We thought the stand was perhaps a wee bit too gigantic but it ended up coming in handy when the women decided to put the tubs on top of it as well (right next to the Polytank) to avoid the swarming hordes of ants discovered beneath them.
Swarming hordes is an understatement, there was a ridiculous number of ants.
To exterminate them, a nearby dude instantly lit some grass on fire and started brushing it over the former colony. We were a little thrown off guard by the flames but not a Chanian batted an eye; it was as though fire was the instinctual solution to the problem. Ghanaians are so bad-ass.
Happy children dancing on opening day.AWESOME SITE!!!
Walking back to the taxi, reflecting on our efforts of the past few days, we all felt an overwhelming sense of fulfillment. The work has been, without a doubt, one of the most gratifying of all possible experiences. Like Mike said, the world seems to smile on days like today. Awesomeness abounds for Team C.L.E.A.N.
Day 3 of Implementation: Building Stand in Yipela/Distributing Storage Containers
Today was amazing. It is hard to believe we could top the past week of awesome events and yet we have. The people of Team 2 and the village of Yipela, especially the women, made it super special. In the morning we built the stand for our polytank. Our village really took ownership of the project. We traced and retraced the design in the sand where the men had chosen to build the center. Nearly 15 men came down to assemble the stand’s walls, cutting the cement bricks as needed. Then came the cement. The men said that Sarah and Hannah did not need to help because they were women and visitors, but Hanna would not take “no” for an answer. As Hannah used her hands to cement the bricks together, Sarah and a woman from the village jumped in, too. This woman was superwoman #1 of the day. She did the work just like the village men even though she was the only woman and she is going to help run the center.
Our surprise of the morning was receiving the household list we’d requested in our chief meeting the previous day. We did not have 30 or 40 families, but 128 – a number nearly double what CWS had thought was most likely the village size! So, we returned in the afternoon with Wahab, a second translator, over 100 safe storage containers, and Cam’s brilliant plan for mass distribution. Nearly 300 people – men, women and children – gathered around the tree to hear Cam and TJ’s initial speech about how to use the “special containers for drinking water.” Then we moved right into phase two: distribution. TJ called out names and handed out buckets before sending people in groups of 10 to Cam. Then Cam and Wahab reiterated the rules before people brought the buckets home. It was so exciting to watch children running into the distance carrying a bright blue bucket. Meanwhile, Nate, Sarah and Hannah had an extremely efficient assembly line going. Nate cut the buckets open, Hannah taped the taps, and Sarah screwed the taps into the buckets. In the middle of this process, we met superwoman #2. This awesome woman danced her way from the crowd to TJ and continued dancing all the way to Cam. She was probably around 55 years old and got the whole village cheering!
By the end of the day, Cam’s voice was hoarse and Nate, Sarah, and Hannah had extremely sore hands. But it was well worth it. We had handed out nearly 70 buckets! We probably did the last 15 by flashlight before calling it a night. We drove home giddy with excitement, listening to the only song that plays without skipping of the truck’s cds on repeat. Team 2 has now heard the same Don Carlos song for 6 hours and the only line we can decipher is, “I woke up this morning.” Who could have predicted the day we would have when we woke up this morning?! We cannot wait for tomorrow! 🙂
– Team 2: Cam, Hannah, Nate & Sarah
Village volunteer takes ownership
Figuring out the bricks
Everyone building with cement
Hannah and Sarah with cementTruck filled with buckets
Day 2 of Implementation: Community Meeting/Building Stand in Kpallabisi
Today we met with our whole community for the first time. Our village, called Kpallabisi, has about 150 households, so over 100 people turned out to hear us discuss our project. Our translator, Peter, got to make use of the village megaphone to help Lauren explain the basics about the treatment center purification process and safe storage system. We fielded a lot of thoughtful questions about the business model and potential problems. It was really great to see how excited and invested everyone seemed to be even at this early stage! We asked everyone to carefully consider our proposal and let us know if they were interested in working with us. We must have said something right because the announcement that we would be back later in the afternoon to start work if they were interested was met with a round of applause!
That afternoon, with the approval of the chief (such a boss with a great sense of humor and future husband of team member, Kathryn) the elders and the rest of the village, we started work constructing Kpallabisi’s polytank stand. Some men, including the village mason, and our now daily entourage of children gathered around the current village water source, a silty dugout, and chose the site for the center. In a classic MacGyver move, one man fashioned a make-shift compass from 2 sticks and string and outlined the stand with a perfect circle. The mason, with some help from everyone else, threw together an impressive stand skeleton from some bricks and concrete. Everyone was laughing and joking. The girls got some marriage proposals and arranged a suitor dance-off for the next day to help ease their weighty decision. 🙂 Even Jim got an offer from a 10-year old boy to be “married as friends”. Moms and Dads, if we never come home, don’t worry. It just means we’ve settled into Kpallabisi more thoroughly than we ever expected!!
For the next week or so, the teams all went off to implement what they had spent the last week learning. They met with their chiefs and elders, built and assembled their treatment centers, trained the village women to run the centers, and distributed safe storage containers to all the households in their communities. In the end, it turned out that Chani had 28 households in their village, Yipela had 171 households, Kpallabisi had about 170, and Zamzugu had 71. At the end of a week’s time, the fellows had helped bring clean water to 440 households, or ~3,520 individuals! Since I couldn’t be in all the villages to report their progress, and the teams were working independently on their implementations, I thought it would be nice to have each team report on different aspects of their projects from the week. The following blogs will be their words. Enjoy! 🙂
After not nearly as much excitement as the session 1 snow-storm, the last of the twelve Session 2 fellows arrived safely in Accra today! A small group that had arrived early headed to the beach for the day take in the Ghanaian coast and relax before their busy fellowship session officially begins. The rest of the group is relaxing in the nice, air conditioned guest house, enjoying the wireless internet.
We head to Tamale on our long bus ride early tomorrow morning. We’ll all very excited to get up north and will be posting pictures as soon as we can!
Day 4 began with Catherine finally arriving in Tamale after three flight delays due to the bad weather across the U.S. She wasn’t given much time to settle in as the teams all departed that morning for their first visit to the villages in which they would hopefully be working. Catherine met her team, Team 1, and was off. For the first half of the day, the teams all took water samples from their village dugouts and attempted to schedule the first meeting with the village chief and elders for the next day.
Welcome, Catherine! The Winter Fellowship Session 1 is now complete! Team 1 loads into their cab with their translator, Wahab, to go meet their village, Chani!Team 2 loads into their taxi with their translator, TJ, and head out to meet their new village, Yipela!Team 3 was paired up with the CWS pickup truck and Peter as their translator! They head out to meet their village, Kpallabisi!Team 4 got the posh jeep with Shak as their translator. Heading out to meet their village, Zamzugu!
The teams all returned successful. Many had informal meetings with the chief while they were in their villages that morning. All of the teams scheduled an official meeting for the next morning. The fellows returned from their village visits in great spirits and proceeded to test the samples they had taken from their village dugouts. The next day they would bring the results with them to their chief meetings.
Heather helped explain the water testing to her newly arrived teammate. Catherine caught on quickly and did her team's water tests from that morning.
Luke and Heather reading the results of the tests they'd performed yesterday.Lauren had some trouble reading the lab results...
For the last part of the day, the teams went off with their translators to rehearse their upcoming chief meetings. (Each team had selected one member to lead the meeting so as not to confuse the translator or intimidate the chief. ) We ended the day’s training with each team giving me one final run through of the meeting.
Team 2 working with TJ on their chief meeting the next morning. The team nominated Hanna to lead the meeting.
Team 3 working with Peter on their chief meeting. Lauren was nominated to lead the meeting.
Team 4 works with Shak on their chief meeting the next morning. The team decided that Kevin would lead the meeting.
Luke and Wahab simulate the full chief meeting with their team in the CWS office. Obviously, I played the role of the chief. 😉
After the initial bows, Luke, with the help of Wahab, introduced himself and summarized his reason for requesting the meeting.
Luke and Wahab then settled in for the full discussion and Q&A that occurs in these meetings. They did a great job and, after just a little feedback, were ready for the real meeting the next morning.
To celebrate the beginning of the teams' projects and Luke's birthday, we went out to eat!
