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

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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
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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

In a culture where things tend to disappear whenever you aren’t looking, how can you ensure that shipped items will make it safely to a small village in Africa? Bank-On-Rain is planning to install a rain collection system in August for the Barina Agricultural School in Makali and those items not being sourced in Sierra Leone, will be sent ahead. Will everything arrive in tact if God is Watching?

The Barina Agricultural School in Makali has no clean water; the well is broken and pumping dirty water. The school’s library books were burnt in the war in 1994 and never replaced! Though it is an agricultural school there is no funding for gardening tools to train the students, and the tool shed has been left partially destroyed from the war. When we heard their story Bank-On-Rain decided to build a rainwater collection system for the school, which will supply clean drinking water to 291 students and about 10 local families.

Building without any tools?

 Bank-On-Rain has engineered a system, which will be collecting rain from two adjacent buildings, with the overflow going to the garden. There will be a minimum of two 5000-liter tanks sourced locally (~100 miles away in Freetown, the capital) providing 4-5 liters of water per day for each student. The dry season is between November and May and the water will be used primarily for drinking and hand washing. Sourcing locally has its own problems—Mike Williamson, Bank-On-Rain founder, has been working hard to obtain information on size, cost, and delivery service of Milla-Tanks (a business in Freetown) to Malaki to insure that everything we need sourced locally will be there when the Bank-On-rain team arrives for the installation in August. The faucets, smaller fittings required and hand tools needed for the installation by our team will be shipped; hand tools because there is no available electricity for installation. How can we be sure the containers with all these items will not be held in customs…. stolen…. or mislaid….? God is Watching.

How did we find the Barina Agricultural School?  April Boles, founder of Pedals for Africa, and Eric Silverman, a Peace Corps volunteer and teacher at the Barina Agricultural School, who met while April was on a Pedals for Africa trip in Sierra Leone, both told us about this very dire situation.  Eric has helped us get our project off the ground, providing us with the local knowledge necessary to socially and mechanically engineer the rainwater harvesting system.  This included permission by the school and local authorities for Bank-On-Rain to contribute their expertise and to build the actual system. Permission like this is very important in insuring the ultimate success in developing areas.

Eric knows the history of the Barina Agricultural School, is well familiar with all teachers and students, and understands what the school needs in order to improve the quality of education they are providing. When we heard about the burned library and the lack of tools from Eric we decided to collect and ship books and garden tools (no handles) in a Fish tote along with what Bank-On-Rain needs for the installation. The fish tote shipping container can also be used for collecting rain!

These are standard off-the-shelf “fish totes” used in the fisheries industry which can be repurposed for rain collection and storage with minimum plumbing. They also make ideal shipping containers.

We are partnering with Pedals for Africa—a non-profit that brings bicycles to Africa to allow for better educational, healthcare, and employment opportunities. Bank-On-Rain will learn about working in Sierra Leone from Pedals for Africa and we will help each other out with logistics—obtaining materials, transporting ourselves, etc.

Our Bank-on-Rain team in Malaki, Seirra Leone is going to install a system that will provide the agricultural school with a source of clean water as well as a sustainable example of how to gain their own access to water. We will engage the students and community with the construction of the rainwater harvesting system. Such a project is extremely important as obtaining water to maintain a small plot of land can provide a family with water and support a small business during the dry season. This is a learning experience, which can be helpful to many students at the Barina Agricultural School in the future.

The students still have no books……. we are sending a donations of books; thank you Lopez Island Community Library.

We are including gardening tools; thanks to a very generous donation from The Seattle University Grounds Department. The 15 donated hand tools are headed to the Barina Agricultural Secondary School, which will allow students to learn how to maintain a small farm or garden.

We are very optimistic that anyone who comes in contact with Bank-On-Rain shipments to the Barina Agricultural School will respect God, and the educational materials related to rain collection, agricultural use, and school learning inside our shipping containers will all arrive safely!! God is Watching!

Please leave us any comments on resources for books and garden tools and anyone you think might be interested in sending these extremely important and necessary items. Perhaps an elementary school needs to dispose of some old textbooks? Do you know of any garden clubs with spare tools?

The logistics of shipping to Africa are complex (approved logistics company required) and expensive…… so we are looking for any suggestions on how to ship to SL in a cost effective way…….. does anyone have a small amount of available space in a container already headed to the area?

Comments below or email us at info@Bank-On-Rain.com. We appreciate every bit of help we receive.

Emily Berg for Bank-On-Rain

Follow us on twitter @EmilyBerg @BANKONRAIN

On June 10, 2011 Katie and Sam were training, gearing up to ride for their lives for safe drinking water, when Katie cruising at 25 mph took a crash on the Santa Cruz Mountains. She got up thinking she had nothing but a bruise and a scratch only to find walking was terribly painful. After gaining courage and strength to visit the doctor, Katie found out that she had fractured her pelvis in several places. She believes that people can do more than they think they can do, so of course Katie was not out of the race. She reflects, “there are countless people out there who see every challenge as opportunities in disguise, and I want to be one of those people.” Bravo, Katie!

“If you focus on the problem, you’ll see the problem. If you focus on the solution, you’ll find a way” Katie says and with just 36 hours left before the 3,000-mile race starting on June 18, Katie decides to learn how to ride a bike again with the help of cycling partner, Sam Williams. How can someone ride a bicycle with a fractured pelvis? I had only heard of her fiery passion from Mike Williamson, Director of Bank-On-Rain, who rode across the country with her in 2006, and I must say I really doubted her ability to ride a bicycle with a broken pelvis!  However I had neglected the possibility of a hand cycle!

As Katie begins her journey, she certainly does not feel alone with Sam, other competing cyclists, her quirky crew, and an abundance of support from followers. Two days into the race, Katie finds that her biggest impediment is not sleep deprivation or fatigue, but rather her fractured pelvis. One week ago, Katie says her “idea of a challenge was cycling a 5,000-ft climb. This week? A flight of stairs.”

But she collects strength and continues on her journey…

“Pedal and pedal and pedal—until you want to cry,” says Sam. After taking a crash on her hand bike, hops back on her beautiful Renovo bicycle to finish the race (with a doctor’s consent). It seems that nothing could stop Katie!

Katie’s passion is clear in her actions and words. “It’s not where we get in life that defines us – it’s what we overcome along the way that truly matters,” she says. Her excitement and willingness to challenge both her physical and mental stamina are tributes to her commitment to a cause—clean water for all. Katie reminds us to put intention into our unthinking actions and consider not just our momentary struggles, but a sense of what we can learn or gain from our experiences. We are encouraged to think of ourselves as individuals that are part of a community within a world that is greater and more troubled than we might be. Bank-On-Rain, supports and thanks you, Katie.

Katie and Sam and their unsung crew of heroes finished with the remarkable time of 7 days 16 hours and 59 minutes, which would have broken the original 2-person record that Sam and Katie set out to beat. This is an extraordinary accomplishment without Katie’s injury and absolutely amazing under the circumstances. Despite not breaking their record time, Katie and Sam have accomplished something quite unique. We might say that they set a new record managing to throw together a 4-person team at the last minute; and with one team member on a hand bike for the majority of the race due to fractured pelvis and a crash along the way! Unfortunately there is no category for this sort of effort, but you are first place in Bank-On-Rain’s books, Team Ride for Your Lives!

Follow Katie’s journey with Sam at rideforyoulives and please check our other posts on Katie Spotz “Glamour is not Enough” and “Ride for their Lives.”

Emily Berg, Social Media Intern at Bank-On-Rain
Designing a Green Planet One Raindrop at a Time.

Follow us on twitter: @BANKONRAIN @EmilyBerg

Caroline Di Diego (CASUDI) for Bank-On-Rain ~ celebrating world water day 2011 Designing a green planet one raindrop at a time.