Water Week

This is Justin's post and unashamedly has two themes for the week: water and food. Firstly I want to testify to my wife's amazing culinary skills (she won't like me writting this). She has risen to the many challenges presented by unfamiliar equipment and ingredients (OK this is Nairobi, so not quite Sudan yet) and amazed us as a family almost every mealtime. Unafraid to see what she can do with local ingredients we have enjoyed some amazing dishes, highlights have been: chapatis and beans, cottage pie better than I have ever tasted in the UK, onion baajis, carrot cake, passion fruit and mango meringues... tonight's relatively familiar sausage and mashed potatoe was punctuated by little cries of "Tank-oo Mummy" from the little people around the table! I am delighted that I will be taking her to Sudan with me.

This week has also seen various watery goings on. After spending time last week in various meetings with the water team, this week has been a bit more hands on. I joined Ryan and Thomas on Tuesday to go shopping for various bits of equipment required for the Abwong scheme, that need to be purchased in Nairobi and flown into Sudan. First stop was a specialist supplier where we purchased three 'Moneymaker' foot pumps - seemingly a low maintenance solution to pumping water out of the Nile river for treatment.


Next stop was a huge irrigation supplier on the edge of town where we bought all sorts of valves and other pipe fittings, and various lengths of plastic pipe (for the engineers out there we put together a neat kit from which to make a sedimentation-sand filtration-chlorination treatment system using two parallel streams of 2,000 litre plastic tanks). A good learning experience as it is something I will have to do repeatedly in the next year or two.

I have also had fun trying to get my head around the water supply system in the block of four flats that SIM-Sudan owns and in which we live. Every day there is a different problem and we seem to run out of water almost daily. Having inspected the ground tanks outside and been in the roof a couple of times I think I am now onto something... but whether my suggested improvements can fool-proof the system against people who think they might be helping by turning the pump off remains to be seen!

And as you can see, it wasn't only me that got to play with things watery...