Tuesday, February 12th 2019 (Uganda)

Today we visited two water treatment plants. One was a conventional plant that takes water from the lake. Here they were doing an expansion and we saw a plant that was undergoing construction. We also ate random berries Yuehao found in a bush on the ground. Hopefully we don’t die! (They were aptly named ground cherries and were very good),

At the current plant they explained to us how the treatment processes they used worked and the how once the new plant was online how the old plant would be used. This plant worked pretty much the same way as the one at base camp we saw yesterday. This plant has a capacity of 300-400 cubic meters per day.

After that we went to lunch with Jean Baptiste and Silvia the people in charge of water management for the Nakivale camp. During that lunch some members of our team used that opportunity to learn more about the plant operations, Gabi our wonderful TA used the opportunity to make fun of Mike for drinking his Coca-Cola too fast.

The next plant we visited pumped groundwater. This plant pumps groundwater 500m up a hill into a sand filter and then from there gravity is used to send it to the spigot used by the refugees. Team 3 drive up in one of the trucks to check out the filter and the rest of us ran our water quality tests and interviewed the community. We got a lot of information about water availability at the source. The source turned out to be pretty good. The only major problem was that the water table would fall below the pump during dry season and there would be no water.

We also went with one family to there home where they told us about their daily life and thought it was really funny we wanted to see their wash basin. The intermittency of the water source was a big issue for them because one of the other sources they went to for water was the lake. When they took water from the lake the people who own the land around the lake make them pay.

Plant under construction

Current plant

Landscape around the plant no lions 🙁

Author: Michael Boetel