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

Here in the US, we most often use plastic tanks or ‘heavy-duty’ metal tanks with a strong plastic membrane interior, for our rainwater storage. But what happens in remote areas when we either can’t bring or don’t have these plastic or metal tanks? Where do we go then?

My two favorite rain storage solutions (cisterns) are rammed earth tires…

To prepare the site for the cistern, remove the top inch or two of soil, pour a slab of concrete for the foundation (steel reinforcing bars will improve structural stability if you have them), lay the rammed earth tires on the concrete slab, and cover the tires with a layer of water-tight concrete. Is the process labor intensive? YES!  And if you can obtain all the materials, well worth the trouble.

and ferrocement…

Structures made out of both rammed earth tires  & ferrocement have high load bearing capacity and equivalent or better structural stability than traditional building materials provide. Despite being very thin, ferrocement bends rather than fractures under compression tests and withstands earthquakes and other natural disasters with ease.  

 These are very cool ideas and as far as I have researched not nearly implemented often enough.

If you are traveling in remote areas of Africa, or anywhere else for that matter, you have to be willing to think creatively and invent solutions with the materials that you have access to. Maybe we won’t use rammed earth tires or ferrocement, because it takes supervision (education) and a skill set not often found in many remote areas, but we must keep an open mind and be ready to try new and different things and always try to design rainwater storage solutions to the available local resource.

 When you arrive in a new remote developing area, one you have never visited before what are the first three things you need to understand before considering rain collection and storage?

1.   You need to determine the annual rainfall of the area and when the rainy seasons are. For example if it rains from January-March and July- September, this leaves two dry seasons of around three months every year. Whether you are focusing on a community or individual family you now know you will need storage for 90 days, and you can estimate usage of either focus…. You will find water usage per person in the developing world is quite a bit less than in our wasteful west.

2.   After you have determined how much water is needed, the next step is to figure out a location to collect the rain run-off. Does the school have a metal roof, or any other material suitable for rain collection? What are the local roofs made of? Do you need to build a new structure with a shed roof to accommodate the rainfall collection?

It’s all very well to set out to collect the water but if all the roofs in the area are made of thatch, what then?

3.   The third thing you need to address is how to store the water. You have rainfall, you have roofs, you know how long it has to be stored based on usage. So, what are you going to store the rain in?

This is where understanding the local culture pays off. You need to research what building materials locals use and what local industries exist. Are there local businesses dealing in commercial products that could be repurposed for water storage? Is there a UN  (or similar) presence that could provide their cast-off blue 50-gallon food containers in which they receive their supplies?

This third part could lead to a local sustainable business that provides products or services related to water collection and storage within the community.

If we were to be very lucky we might find someone hoarding piles of used tires hoping that one day he or she might find something useful to do with them ~ we should be so lucky!

Please let me know if I have missed anything important in my list above, related to getting started in developing areas installing rain collection systems? Please leave a comment below or email us at info@bank-on-rain.com

Emily Berg and Caroline Di Diego for Bank-On-Rain

Follow us on twitter: @BANKONRAIN @EmilyBerg @CASUDI