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+

These fish totes (no longer needed by our local fisheries) will be repurposed for rainwater collection at the school or a family home in Sierra Leone. In the interim they make ideal shipping containers.

 Here is the list of the shipped goods. If you want to know more about why “God is Watching,” see our last post!

I am hoping that when I arrive at the Barina Agricultural School in August, students will be reading the books, using the gardening tools, and Bank-On-Rain will have the items and tools necessary to install the rainwater harvesting system. I am looking forward to show students how they can take repurposed containers, just like the fish totes and use them for collecting rain during the dry season.  

If you have any books or tools that you would like to personally ship, email us at info@bank-on-rain.com for suggestions on how to go about this!

Emily Berg for Bank-On-Rain

Follow us on twitter @BANKONRAIN @EmilyBerg

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