Last September the Bank-On-Rain team installed a Rainwater Harvesting system at the Barina Agricultural school.  Eric Silverman, a Peace Corp volunteer (left, below) who is still in Sierra Leone sent Mike Williamson (Bank-On-Rain founder) a very important follow up email this week. 

Eric teaches at the School and has given us invaluable assistance and support (considerable) right from the prior planning stage of our project. Without follow up we would never know if all our planning and hard work continues to be effective; in this case a project to supply clean drinking water to a school of 300. 

Eric is like the Pied Piper, everywhere he goes the kids follow just to "hang" with him. His entourage accompanies him to the market, village, and everywhere, and there's usually a group at his house. The image below is typical.

Hi Mike,

Good to hear from you, I hope all is well. Things are pretty good here, just getting into the heart of the dry season and there is still water in the tanks. We've saved one tank for March so we'll see what  happens. Everyone is happy with the project, except for the chief,  who thinks I snubbed him in some way.

So there are no problems with the large system, except we'd like to put little boxes on the valves so we can lock them after school and at night because some kids have played around and left them open a few times. Other than that, there are no problems with the main system, so a job well done. It should hopefully last a long time.

With the demonstration systems, we've moved the one fish (tote) tank at the teachers' latrines back inside to the boys' latrines after the teachers realized they never use those latrines and people were playing around with the spigots or faucets. We could use a few extra of those spigots as a couple have been broken.

As for the small business project, that hasn't really developed yet, I think because of the costs of the materials and the idea of using bamboo is not that appealing to people. However, I think there is still hope for it because a number of the teachers still want to have it done at their houses and one of the buildings we are putting up for the new teachers. That leads to this current project, the teachers' quarters, which we are working on now making blocks, cutting trees for boards, and clearing the area. The project still needs about $800 on the website so if you know anyone who would want to support the  project, even for $10 or $25, donations can be made online HERE  

Thanks in advance, hope all is well. Send my greetings to the rest of the Bank-On-Rain team. Best Eric. 

The news about the faucets was not at all surprising and not unanticipated. Mike Williamson & Ken Blair (Bank-On-Rain Directors) have been designing, fabricating, and testing a new faucet design, specifically for use in developing countries with our rainwater systems. We hope to have some exciting news about our FullStop™ water faucet very soon.

Below Mike and Eric plan a small system using the 50 gallon food containers easily obtainable in Freetown, only a days drive away.

We are very fortunate to have Eric at the school, sending us updates.

Note the "garden" tools above, a donation from Seattle University Maintenance who gave Bank-On-Rain their discarded tools to ship with the tank plumbing supplies last August. Yes, God is Watching. And of course so is Eric!

Eric was hands on during the installation of the rainwater collection and storage systems installed at the school. And not only hands on but excellent at motivating the kids to do their part. Below, one of the volunteers carrying sand for the concrete pad under the tanks.

Eric has a two year teaching contract at the Barina School. Communication is difficult and often he is unable to get a cell signal for text messaging or there is no electricity to charge phones and computers. He catches up on emails when he can get to the nearest town some 3 hours away, usually once a month or so.

Eric is doing a great job for the community. Although only 24, he is considered one of the respected voices in the village and is consulted by the elders on many issues. Eric’s success in standing up to the Paramount Chief on the issue of the water system speaks volumes.

Oh yes; the Chief felt he should have received preference over the school's rainwater collection installations! We’ll build his the next time around along with the individual systems for the teachers in the village. We are very pleased how the idea of collecting this abundant resource (remember, 120 inches a year in SL) is catching on with the kids and especially the teachers.

On top of all of that,  April Boles, founder of pedalsforafrica, will be doing a detour to the school this week and will report back to us on her return to Seattle. Thank you April for all the support you have given Bank-On-Rain, and more to come on April's visit in another post.

Can you suggest any other ways to follow-up, or track the progress of your project in a developing part of the world?  

Comments or suggestions below please ~ email us at  info@bank-on-rain.com  ~ and check us out on Google+  please like us on Facebook  and follow us on twitter @BANKONRAIN

I visited Sierra Leone last September with the Bank-On-Rain team and even though they have over 130" of rainfall each year, there is a severe shortage of water in Sierra Leone, especially clean drinking water!

Where I live near Seattle we have less than a quarter of the annual rainfall that Sierra Leone has, and I install professionally designed rain collection systems every day that supply families and commercial projects with more than enough clean water for drinking, living and working throughout the year.

The purpose of Bank-On-Rain’s visit to Africa was to install a rain harvesting system for the Barina Agricultural school in Makali (see above).However we also had the privilege of meeting Rajesh Shah founder of Peer Water Exchange (PWX) , a non-profit organization which consists of a conglomerate of over 80 smaller organizations.  PWX serves to fund and assess the impact of water and sanitation projects with the review process all implemented by their members.  

The founder of PWX, Rajesh, took us to a Barefoot College  about half a day from Freetown, which had a very expensive solar system donated by well known brand, with a large array of panels and battery bank( see below)

Looking around, I noticed a water tower near a building, but no gutters on the actual building. When I asked about this I was told that a water truck came regularly to pump water into the tank, which in itself was used to gravity feed the water to the facility. On further investigation I noticed there were no gutters on any of the metal roof buildings. Instead, there were cement ditches under the eve lines to divert the rainwater run off from the property.

Sometimes people just don’t connect the dots! The connection had not been made between the rainwater runoff and the storage tower a few feet away. An efficient sustainable water system could easily be implemented by installing gutters and plastic cisterns, available in Freetown several hours  away. This could have been a pretty sophisticated set up considering the electricity available through the solar system for pumping and filtering rainwater.

Sadly this opportunity has been missed so far, but I am hopeful in the future they will connect the dots and use Barefoot College as a teaching tool for rainwater harvesting as a sustainable water source. 

The principal of the Barina Agricultural school in Makali, where I supervised the installation of a 20,000 liter system for 300 students, also was unable to connect the dots. The principal, was extremely skeptical that their old rusty metal roofs would produce anything but rust colored undrinkable water too scant to fill their needs!

I had to think of something fast…….

…. a quick demonstration on how much water could be collected and how clean rainwater really can be. So I had my helpers drag the fish totes under the first gutter that local volunteers had installed on the building with the best roof.  We had a wonderful rain shower that night and in the morning the tote was full of the most pristine, pure water anyone had ever seen.

I filled my bottle and gulped down a whole liter. Big smiles came across the work group, while others filled bottles from the tote and drank as well.  A good demo has more worth than hours of lectures and government pamphlets. The principal of the school was now a true believer after only one night of rainwater collection!

My demo, and the installation of the system by the locals under Bank-On-Rain direction gives 300 students clean drinking water. While the students certainly learned valuable skills and information by seeing and helping to install the rainwater catchment system, these are three lessons I learned.

1.   When the locals build and contribute ~ they own the system. When the students create their own teaching materials they learn. Contribution = ownership.

2.   Sanitation education & practices  ~ without these in place first and being embraced continuously, the clean water supply can become contaminated.

3.   Small things, details, systems connect the dots ~ and we hope these dots stay connected in remote areas when students from the Barina Agricultural School return to their homes. We hope one of them will start a rain harvesting business using the 50gal plastic containers we saw for sale in Freetown. And yes, gutters made of bamboo. (see below) 

Below is the small demo we did, a usable demo which would we hope begin to connect the dots for the students & those from the village who helped us.

Bank on Rain continues to bring knowledge and acceptance of rainwater collection to developing areas, with the strong conviction that this practice of helping people help themselves, will supply clean drinking water to those who are in need.

Check out our posts Rainwater Harvesting Sierra Leone , When do students learn the fastest? and  Africa update 2 to find out more about the rainwater harvesting system we installed in Africa.

Comments or suggestions below please ~email us at  info@bank-on-rain.com  ~and check us out on Google+  please like us on Facebook  and follow us on twitter @BANKONRAIN

Ken Blair, Director of Bank-On-Rain

Building a Green planet one raindrop at a time.

KEN BLAIR is a professional rainwater systems designer and installer in the Northwest, United State. His successful company Rainbank evolved in 2006. He is a founding director of Bank-On-Rain and brings the “nuts & bolts” expertise to the Bank-On-Rain board. Ken can be reached at Ken@rainbank.info

The title of this post was inspired by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” which was written by  English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge    

The short answer is, when the students do the teaching J 

The students at the Barina Agricultural School in Sierra Leone loved showing their artistic skills and teaching themselves about healthy sanitation practices!

Wash your hands!

Last September Bank-On-Rain successfully installed a rain collection system for the 300 students at the school and along with this we wanted to educate everyone about the importance of hand washing.   

We created teaching aids before we left on our mission; however we had no idea how much the students would take to the idea of painting their own. What is more important the students followed their own instructions, and watched that their peers did the same There is no way a lecture or a government sanitation pamphlet would have had the same impact.

Sickness is everywhere………

Bank-On-rain wanted to get the message across that sickness most often came from poor sanitation…….not from bad magic.

Wash hands before eating… Sickness is everywhere

This message was painted on the door of the latrine…. For obvious reasons!

Wash sickness away……

Push button, put hands under water, shake hands in sun to dry, and do not leave the water running!

Seeing these students painting these instructions on the many buildings was definitely a highlight of my visit to Africa and of my summer internship with Bank-On-Rain.

Rub hands together……..

Shake hands in sun to dry………..

Wash hands, no sickness, long life!

I wish all the students and teachers at the Barina Agricultural School a long life……….and thank them for this fabulous opportunity of working with them.

 Emily Berg, Bank-On-Rain Researcher

Follow @Bankonrain on twitter, like us on facebook and check out on Google+

I cannot think of a better way to describe Bank-On-Rain’s adventures in Sierra Leone than a persistent ongoing learning experience.

We arrived at the Sierra Leone airport the afternoon of September 4 and made our way to Freetown from the airport via ferry. Mohamed Sesa and Mohamed A. Sanko—two Safer Future Youth Development staff—greeted us at the ferry landing and drove us to their farm where we spent the night. More on the Safer Future Youth Development Fund, in an upcoming post; they are an amazing organization and in my opinion they have a very workable “plan” we can all learn from.

We awoke bright and early the next day to meet with Rajesh, the founder of Peer Water Exchange. Rajesh had a tour planned of several Safer Future projects. The first thing we learned about was C.L.T.S., or Community Led Total Sanitation. This is perhaps the most important learning experience I brought back from Africa. Before installing a well,  Safer Future ensures that each family has and uses a latrine before assisting them in acquiring a well. If Safer Future installs a well before everyone in the village has and uses a latrine, the well water will quickly become contaminated as a result of open defecation! Shocking but true….and maybe not so surprising when you consider that SL is the poorest country in the world. 

Once C.L.T.S. is in place Safer Future trains a small team of “well doctors” to construct and fix the well whenever required and this insures continuing maintenance.

After spending a few days visiting the projects Safer Future has been working on, we travelled to Makali accompanied by Mohamed Sesa, Mohamed A. Sanko, and Shaku Sesay (of Safer Future) in order to get going on the Bank-On-Rain, rainwater harvesting project for which we had come to Africa in the first place! We were overwhelmed with community support and involvement. Under the expert guidance of Ken Blair and Mike Williamson, the school teachers and students performed nearly 100% of the construction; they very pleased to show off their skills and improve the Barina Agricultural Secondary School.

For me, the highlight was painting the ‘teaching tools’ images we had prepared prior to our trip…..onto the school building and latrines with the students.

The images resonated with the students and they understood the message conveyed. Not to mention, they were all very proud of their own artwork!

The overall project was a great success. Under the guidance of Bank-On-Rain the teachers constructed a beautiful system with gutters and tanks purchased locally in Freetown, with donations to Bank-On-Rain.  

In addition together we installed small systems on both the student and teacher latrines for hand washing, more like systems that could be replicated outside the school for a single family. We used split bamboo from the nearby river for gutters and fish totes (we sent ahead as the packing crates for supplies) or blue tanks purchased on the streets in Freetown, for holding the water.

Has anyone had a similar experiences bringing, a clean water source to a school or village in Africa, if so we would love to hear from you?  Please leave a comment or email us at info@bank-on-rain.com.

Emily Berg for Bank-On-Rain
Follow us on twitter @BANKONRAIN @EmilyBerg
Like us on facebook

Mike Williamson (extreme left), Emily Berg & Gail Williamson (in the middle) and Ken Blair (on the right). Mike,Gail and Ken are founding directors of Bank-On-Rain and Emily is our Bank-On-Rain very capable summer intern.

 

I particularly like this, as it shows Gail and Emily getting to know the women in the group. I cant wait to hear what they were taking about.

Check out some of our previous posts on our Posterous blog site to find out what Bank-on-Rain is doing in Sierra Leone this week......

 

Stay tuned for more updates soon...... Follow us on twitter @BANKONRAIN @EmilyBerg @CASUDI

Like us on facebook

Caroline Di Diego (CASUDI)

When we arrive at the Barina Agricultural School in Malaki, Sierra Leone in a couple of weeks, we will have ‘teaching tools’ that communicate the importance of drinking clean water and washing hands. Teachers may understand the importance of hand washing, but do not encourage the practice in students, we are told. There will be a total of 10 images with short messages that teachers can use during lessons….. perhaps the students will re-draw and color their favorite image….. or come up with their own to share with the class.

Do you have any ideas that we didn’t think of? Have you seen any effective methods of encouraging students to wash their hands? We would love to hear from you! Leave a comment or email us at info@bank-on-rain.com.

Emily Berg for Bank-On-Rain
Follow us on twitter @BANKONRAIN @EmilyBerg
Like us on facebook

The most important thing I have learned in my past few months with Bank-On-Rain is that the social engineering behind a project provides infinitely more obstacles than any of the mechanical or civil engineering challenges. Good data, planning, calculations, and material acquisition paired with experienced engineers like Ken Blair and Mike Williamson will ensure the success of a working rainwater catchment system, when we depart from the Barina Agricultural School in Malaki, Sierra Leone in Mid-September. 

Bank-On-Rain Directors Mike Williamson, Ken Blair and researcher Emily Berg (that’s me) making final plans for our trip to Africa next month. Note cats are excellent at social engineeering.

How do we know the students will not leave the water running? How do we know that kids will wash their hands after using the latrine? What happens when something breaks?

We do not know what will happen, but we can do a bit of social logistics planning….

Here is the set-up for the system at the Barina Agricultural School in Malaki, Sierra Leone.

Water will be collected from one building as just an inch of rain provides 3,000 liters of water (and Sierra Leone gets close to 10 feet—120 inches—of water each year!). This is amazing to me as Seattle only gets ~35 inches of water/year! The water will run through a series of PVC pipes to a drinking water station (also used for agriculture and cooking) and a hand washing station by the latrines.

We will be constructing the system with students and families at the school…… this is not an installation! It is a learning experience and community project! Teachers, students and the families will be involved in the construction or the rainwater catchment system, and we will show them and help them understand how it works. Our goal will be that when we leave they will be able to fix  & maintain with minimal help.

Caroline Di Diego (CASUDI) came up with the idea of SMS messaging for maintenance reminders. They all have cell phones in Malaki….. wouldn’t it be easy to send a scheduled message via SMS, “Report to the principal when you have cleaned the filter.” By the way, is anyone interested in working with us on this?

When you haven’t had a supply of water you don’t have the culture around hand washing that our schools in the US have. We will provide laminated signs for the classrooms and hand washing station. We plan to provide very short lesson tools for the teachers to educate students on the importance of hygiene. Will we have to educate the teachers first?

Note the absence of soap and towels here….

 When you have never had running water, you will probably not understand it is a limited resource. Maybe you will leave it running to see how long it runs? Mike is planning to install push button spigots and has another invention up his sleeve, to insure that students don’t forget or play with the water and are encouraged to conserve it.

We hope the students who will be involved in constructing the system will understand where their water comes from and that it is a limited resource.

Social engineering in this respect means the students need to be educated and influenced to make the necessary changes in their thought process to wash their hands, and turn off faucets!

We are confident we can combine education, some social engineering with a well engineered and workable 20,000-liter rain collection system for the Barina Agricultural School. Stay tuned for our updates.

Do you have any suggestions for us? Is there something that we didn’t think of? We would love to hear from you! Please leave a comment or email us at info@bank-on-rain.com!

Emily Berg for Bank-On-Rain
Follow us on twitter @EmilyBerg @BANKONRAIN
Like our facebook page

Foreign aid alliances have left a lot of “stuff” in Haiti and around the world, but can some of it actually be re-purposed and save lives? What about those big yellow waxed canvas water bladders that are nothing more than trash once the Oxfam relief water trucks no longer deliver water?

What If one bladder was used for catching the rain, as a rain basin or substitute roof and what if a second bladder were to be used to store the water collected? Would we have created a “grassroots” rain collection system, which would provide clean water and sustain a number of individuals currently without any access to water? If the recipients of the water had the incentive, would they trade their clean water for agricultural or other goods and expand their reach?

My next focus was to check with Patrick Cummings for “on the ground” intelligence, as Patrick is a Director of WWP and just returned from an extensive fact finding mission in Haiti. I also consulted with Ken Blair, our nuts and bolts guy and Director at Bank-On-Rain.

Patrick said it looked like a feasible idea but all the people in Haiti would need is the motivation—a leader on the ground, to put this plan into action as well as someone who is willing to maintain it. This is the tricky part, he said…. the people in Haiti have seen people come and go trying to offer ‘help’ and most often failing to do so. Has copious foreign aid destroyed any internal impetus to construct such a system? Would it take someone dedicated like Patrick; with an understanding of the people and culture in Haiti in various locations who were already trying to make a go of it, coupled with his engineering background to actually make the rain collection systems into a reality?

To get started use the sand bags (if you find them with a bladder) as the perimeter/wall or dig a depression in the ground to hold one of the two water bladders in place when full. This will become the storage for the water collected by a tarp or roof made from the second bladder. The bladder that collects rain (suspended above the storage bladder) should be supported with steaks as one would support a tent. It appears that just about all the connections that will be required to make a working system can be found on two water bladders; except for a screen to act as a filter for the incoming water to the storage bladder and possibly some rubber glue and material to plug any holes.

Note that if the logistics of moving a second bladder is too inefficient, an ordinary tarp could be used in a similar way to catch the water. 

Bank-On-Rain will be testing this and writing up a simple instruction sheet for use in the field.

In my opinion this shift in thinking of repurposing materials ‘dumped’ all over Haiti—turning ”trash” to “treasure” could save lives and bring about an empowering social movement. How can we encourage and nurture the thought process that moves toward sustainable solutions like this?  Would Oxfam help us find all the bladders in Haiti, and the rest of the world that they alone have used in relief situations like this? Do Oxfam have records with the GPS coordinates of all these “bladder” treasures so one by one we can track them down and work with the local people to solve a little bit of the global water crisis, one water bladder at a time!

If you have any questions for Patrick feel free to email him at Patrick@worldwaterpartners.org or any questions for Ken at ken@rainbank.info.

Have you ever seen people make “trash” useful? Please leave a comment below or email us at info@bank-on-rain.com. We would love to hear your stories or ideas! And don’t forget to check out my post Is there a recipe for SUCCESS in Haiti?

Special thanks to Caroline Di Diego (@CASUDI), Ken Blair, and Patrick Cummings for their help in this post!

Emily Berg for Bank-On-Rain
Follow us on twitter @EmilyBerg @BANKONRAIN

Haiti “is positively carpeted with well-meaning but clueless do-gooders. Haitians are pretty accustomed to this, so they have very low expectations.” This is a quote from an email I received from Sara, the mother of a good friend of mine, who lived and worked in Haiti in the mid 1980s with a health development group working primarily in tuberculosis control and vaccinations. 

“85% of all foreign aid projects I saw in Haiti failed after the NGO or Christian group left,” Patrick Cummings, the director of World Water Partners told me after his trip to Haiti.

I keep hearing this. In order to find out if it’s true I did some research and read Travesty In Haiti, Timothy T. Schwartz Ph.D.’s account of his 10 years in Haiti seeing the failures of Christian missions, NGOs, and food aid.

This is the first photo that Patrick Cummings took after getting off the plane in Port-Au-Prince.

The message is clear. What is going wrong here as Haiti has been receiving foreign aid since the 1950s?

After reading Travesty in Haiti, my understanding is that the American Plan lead to the quick downhill spiral of the entire country. “Until the 1980s, Haiti was almost entirely self-sufficient in rice consumption.” However, “food assistance to Haiti tripled during the 1980s reaching a yearly average of over $50 million in gratuitous U.S. surplus, beans, corn, rice, and cracked wheat… Enough to meet the calorific needs of over 15 percent of the Haitian population.” Why purchase food from a local farmer if you can get it from the U.S. for free? The U.S. managed to destroy rice, sugar, coffee, cacao, sisal, essential oils, and cotton industries and exports by the 1990s. Haitian government was brought into cooperation destroying the livelihoods of farmers and pushing them into urban factories supported by the U.S. (Travesty in Haiti, p. 109-113). I cannot help but wonder if Haiti would have gotten up on their feet if the U.S. had never intervened.

I have come to the conclusion that anything that does not help people help themselves is useless!

Sara told me, Haiti “looks the same now as it did then (26 years ago): countless uncoordinated agencies doing whatever feels good to them.” During Sara’s time in Haiti, her organization began looking towards getting clean water for a village in a town called Saltadere. It was clear that the community desired a road to the next town 8 miles away more than they desired water. Because “there was no source of clean water for miles and high levels of mortality and morbidity from water-bourne critters,” the organization decided water was what they needed most.

How can a village without any economic development—no source of agricultural income or trade—possibly maintain a clean water source that was given to them? The maintenance requires economic development and incentive!

As a relief effort after the earthquake in Port Au Prince, Oxfam delivered water bladders throughout the country and pumped them full of water via Oxfam delivery trucks. About a year and a half later, this is what most 10,000 liter bladders look like…….

As a result of copious misdirected foreign aid and lack of government involvement, the most sustainable business has become thievery. Would these solar powered panels have continued to function had they been rooted in the ground?

The foresight and reliance by the more affluent on these solar powered panels brings about an interesting point. What If foreign aid had been targeted in Haiti to create sustainable businesses (rather than handouts) to those in the middle or even upper economic ladder……. would the benefits have trickled down to those who need it most? Or would the more affluent class in Haiti, have still been inclined to keep it all for themselves?

Is Haiti so different to Cambodia where Eugene Nelson provides wells--see our post 1 Man, 26 Wells (and counting...)--to those who already have a bit of land, who have the incentive to start a sustainable business and are willing to share the water with neighboring less fortunate families. This incentive insures maintenance of the wells, so that those on different economic levels all can benefit.

I have been conversing with Olivia Jeanne, a Forest Resources student studying at Clemson University who is currently working in Ayiti, Haiti. In a message she said, “A LOT of times it just comes down to not really getting to know the people and their situation, it takes TIME to work with them through honest open communication and planning.” Is this the new direction? 

Olivia has been working in small gardens in Ayiti.

 Olivia told me something she learned from her boss, Gabrielle Vincent, at Sonje Ayiti: “Investing in finding out who and what resources a community already has is key, taking time to meet everyone and give people a chance to express themselves. Are there school students interested in engineering/science/technology? Unemployed college graduates? Their inclusion produces goodwill and as many educational opportunities as humanly possible...”

Olivia’s work brings Eugene Nelson to mind again. Here are single individuals who are committed to, love, and understand a culture and its people and have the capacity to create a large impact.

We can learn 3 important lessons from both of them:

1. Do not ‘dump’ your project in a random location. Invest time and energy into research of the people, culture, and prominent needs of a community.
2. Create something sustainable. Think grassroots! Before constructing anything, think about how it will be maintained by the people living there.
3. Changing a local economy instead of enhancing it is a recipe for failure. Support the desired life-style of a group of people; do not destroy it.

Please leave us any comments or personal stories you have to share or send us an email at info@bank-on-rain.com. We would love to hear from you and learn something new!

If you would like to contact Patrick Cummings with questions or ideas feel free to email him at Patrick@worldwaterpartners.org.

Emily Berg for Bank-On-Rain
Follow us on twitter @BANKONRAIN @EmilyBerg