The Biosand Filter

The Biosand filter in action

The sand filters I’m working with here are known as Biosand filters. They could more specifically be described as intermittently operated slow sand filters. The idea behind this technology was developed at the University of Calgary in the early 1990’s as a way of adapting continuous slow sand filtration (used somewhat extensively to treat municipal drinking water in Europe) to be used on a household level. The filters were developed particularly to meet the needs of people living in the rural areas of developing countries. In these areas, centralized water treatment and distribution systems are obviously highly impractical, and will probably remain as such for many years to come. Another fact, which is maybe equally obvious, is that these people living without access to treated water must still be drinking something every day. People die every day from drinking this untreated water. Nearly one in five children in Uganda will die before the age of five from diarrhea caused by drinking unsafe water. Even in the United States, dysentery was a leading cause of death as recently as 100 years ago. For close to 1 billion people, this is still the case.

That’s the depressing information, but here’s something to smile about: the Biosand filter removes 97% of bacteria, over 99.9% of viruses and effectively 100% of parasites from raw waters. In developing communities, the primary water treatment concern is removing these three types of waterborne pathogens. Not only are these filters effective, they are easy to build, use, and maintain. The filters can be constructed and maintained by the local people using only locally available materials. The only cost of the filters is the upfront cost of materials and labor. There are no operation or maintenance costs, and the filters can last for years. Biosand filters introduced in Nicaragua were found to still be functioning in excellent conditions after eight years. For the people drinking dirty water everyday, the ability for them to treat their own water in their own homes would invaluable, and the potential for the Biosand filter to provide to this ability is enormous.

The goal of my project is to introduce at least four Biosand filters in Makooma Community. Hopefully, this introduction will stimulate much interest in the filters. I’m applying for a grant to fund the construction of these four filters including the manufacture of the steel formwork needed to cast the concrete filter cases. Once this formwork is obtained, many filters may be constructed with the only expense being a small amount of concrete, sand, and gravel.

I now have only five weeks left with Busoga Trust, so the remainder of my time is going to be quite busy with the construction of these four filters after my grant proposal is accepted for funding. I’ll probably be spending much time in the field, in Makooma, which I’m very excited about. During my previous two visits to this community, I got to spend a little time with some of the cutest kids I’ve ever seen. They shared jyak fruit with me and we chewed on sugar cane, ruminating on possible solutions to their water quality problems.

On a side note: during my most recent visit to Makooma, I saw a fisherman carting the biggest fish I’ve ever off to the market on the back of his bicycle. It was a Nile Perch, fresh from Lake Victoria, and must have been close to 5 feet long!

Internship Project - The Beginning

The project that I’m working on during my internship with Busoga Trust has really started rolling in the last two weeks. On the 13th, I visited, Makooma Community, the village which will hopefully be the first of many to benefit from the sand filters with which I’m working. The objective of this visit was to collect water samples from the community source to be filtered in order to measure how well the filter would treat this water. We needed to gather about eight jerry cans of water, each with a capacity of 20 liters. A jerry can is a plastic container very similar to the spare fuel cans you might see on Jeeps, Land Rovers, and the like.

Makooma Community Water Source

It was very hard for me to imagine living off the water source we saw in this village. It was basically just a swampy area near the community resident’s homes. The water there was stagnant, muddy, and I could only imagine how sick I would become if I drank even a cup of it. The local children were incredibly excited to see us, and were very eager to fill the jerry cans for us. They were practically fighting over them. To fill the jerry cans, the children waded out into the water, which was maybe just over knee deep on them, to an area where the water was supposedly somewhat cleaner. Once the jerry cans were full, the children were equally excited to carry them the approximately 200 meters back to our truck. Considering that 20 liters of water weighs 20 kg (44 lbs), and that these kids were probably no more than 8 years old, I was impressed. They weren’t able to lift the full jerry cans high enough to put them on their heads, but once we helped them get the cans onto their heads, they walked on back to our truck without seeming to struggle too much. After seeing the water which these people live with everyday, I appreciated the water which was in my trusty Nalgene, and the water with which I showered that evening like never before.

The enthusiastic volunteer water samplers

Sipi Falls

My most recent weekend adventure (17 – 19 Oct) was to Sipi Falls which lies just outside of Mt Elgon National Park close to the Ugandan – Kenyan border. This trip was the midterm retreat which FSD organizes for the interns to have a chance to just kick back and relax for a few days and reflect on the experience so far.

Sipi lies at an elevation of around 1800 m, which is about 600 m higher than Jinja and 180 m higher than Boulder for those of you following along at home. The local FSD site team warned us to bring warm clothes because it would be “very cold”. That was interesting because I really didn’t bring any warm clothes to Uganda, other than a fleece, but I wasn’t too worried because I knew very cold to the locals would probably mean a little cool to me. There was certainly a noticeable temperature drop as we gained elevation, and the cooler temperature was very comfortable to me in a fleece and long pants.

The slopes of Mt Elgon are similar to giant terraces. The mountains fall away to the valley floor almost in a series of enormous steps. There are large slightly sloped areas followed by sheer cliffs, and this geography combined with abundant rainfall results in quite a few spectacular water falls. The place we stayed in, called the Crow’s Nest, was located on a slope opposite from the falls providing a great view of two waterfalls of the four waterfalls which comprise Sipi Falls.

The view from our bandas

From where we were staying, one could hike about five minutes to the top of a small hill which provided a grandstand view of the Rift Valley floor below. We enjoyed the sunset on Friday evening from the top of this hill, and this was probably the second most memorable sunset I’ve seen.

Friday's Sunset

On Saturday, we went for a nice hike to three of the falls. We went to the uppermost falls first, and immediately upon arriving, it started raining. We found shelter under a house sized boulder which was overhanging on one side. The effort to stay dry quickly became moot as we decided to see these upper falls up close, and we got close enough that the spray from the falls quickly soaked us completely. We kept hiking through the rain, and stayed somewhat sheltered as a local cut us a few banana leaves to be used like umbrellas. The sun came back out as we returned from the hike and dried out my cotton clothes surprisingly quickly.

On Saturday evening, our hotel manager took us to his coffee plantation where he showed all of the steps involved making coffee starting with picking the beans from the trees. After the beans are picked, they are pulped which is the process of removing the actual coffee bean from its fruity exterior. Then the beans ferment for one day followed by sun drying. After the beans are dry, they are husked. This process removes a layer of material from the outside of the inner coffee bean which is accomplished by lightly pounding the beans in a mortar. After pounding, the husks are winnowed away from the inner beans by tossing the whole mess in the air and letting the lighter husks be carried off by the wind. After the beans are husked they are roasted and then can be ground, again in a mortar. We had the opportunity to grind some coffee, and it smelled very nice. I’m not much of a coffee drinker, but these freshly roasted and ground beans had a wonderful aroma. The coffee we ground was then brewed into the blackest, strongest coffee I’ve ever had. This stuff was like sludge, but quite tasty. It did a number on my stomach and kept me up pretty late that night.


The freshly ground and brewed coffee

Football

By football I mean soccer. During this most recent weekend, I was able to go to the Uganda national football team’s match against Benin. This game was Uganda’s last chance to qualify for the 2010 World Cup. I’ve been told that Uganda needed to win by at least five goals to qualify, and others have said that they simply needed to win while Angola needed to draw with or lose to Niger in order to qualify. Unfortunately, neither scenario came to pass. While Uganda did beat Benin 2 – 1, Angola won against Niger 3 – 1. Thus, Uganda’s hopes of qualifying for the next World Cup are no more. But, it was a very exciting game, and a win at home which was fun to experience. And boy, did we have great seats! (by we I mean myself and the gaggle of other foreigners I went to the game with) We opted for the slightly more expensive tickets, which were 20,000 Ush rather than 10,000 ($12 versus $6), in an effort to minimize our chances of being robbed. We got to the game about two hours before kick off, and found seats right on the midfield line, in the shade, and right in front of some nice looking couches which looked like they were there to seat someone of high political status. It turned out that the fancy couches were there for a former Ugandan president, Godfrey Binaisa. Binaisa was president for about eight months shortly after Idi Amin was exiled. Another thing which made the whole experience even more fun was that I was handed a plastic horn/bugle/trumpet loud noisemaker type thing on my way into the stadium. I was blasting away on that thing until I just about passed out. In the end it was a great day. Uganda won, no one in our party was robbed, and we made it home to Jinja without any difficulty.

The Routine

My daily routine here isn’t all too dissimilar from what I’d do during a typical day at home. I get up between 6:30 and 7:00, have breakfast, and try to make it to the office by about 8:00 after a twenty minute walk there. I’ll describe my days in the office later. I’ll eat lunch around 1:00 pm and head home around 5:00. On my way home I’ll sometimes stop by an internet café for an hour or two to catch up on my email mostly. Most evenings I’ll spend just relaxing around my host family home. We’ve got a nice big courtyard behind the house, and I’ve been enjoying just sitting out there in the cool evenings watching the sun set and the stars coming out. It’s great to have so much time to just sit around and relax.

On weekends I’ve been helping out a little with the gardening at my home here. Other days I’ll go out to run little errands and catch up on tasks which require utilizing the internet to complete. During weekend evenings I’ll usually meet up with friends at one of the local bar/restaurants for a few libations.

I've also recently begun training for the half marathon I intend to run in Phoenix in January. I usually manage to get out for a half hour run about every other day. The exercise is great, but I'm not sure my body has been adjusting so well to the impact on my joints. Good thing I've got three months to get ready.

Weather

The climate here has been very enjoyable so far. There are some days when it’s quite hot, but it’s never been unbearable. The evenings cool off quite nicely, and the occasional rain helps as well. We’re supposed to be getting into the rainy season now, and it should be rainy through November. The rains storms so far have been brief. The weather is really kind of similar to summers in Colorado, only the daily swings in temperature are less, and it’s much more humid here. It will usually be hot and sunny during the day, and then a big thunderstorm will roll in late in the day. It will rain for about a half hour and then it’s cool for the rest of the evening.

Four Day Weeks

The past two weeks were four day work weeks for me. Tuesday, 30 September, was a public holiday to mark the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. This was an interesting holiday because no one knew whether it would be on Tuesday or Wednesday until Monday night. The holiday is on the day after the new moon is seen, but it was unsure whether the moon would be seen on Monday or Tuesday night. It reminded me of having snow days when I was younger. You’d go to bed hoping it would snow enough for school to be cancelled, but you wouldn’t know until you woke up in the morning. Similarly, I didn’t know if I would have to go to work on Tuesday or not until I woke up that day.

The next Thursday, 9 October, was Uganda’s Independence Day. I spent this day at Bujagali Falls with Tess and Sarah, the remaining FSD interns other than myself. Bujagali Falls is a series of enormous rapids (grade V for you river folk out there) on the Nile River, and is the center of the white water rafting and kayaking industry in Uganda. It was nice to just sit and watch the river for a while. It’s quite impressive to see such a volume of water cascading over 3 – 4 meter falls.

Overview of Nile just above Bujagali Falls

The first rapid in the falls

More rapids downstream. The river is braided here, so the falls in this photo are from another section of the river coming back into the main stream.

One of the more impressive rapids. This photo does not fully capture the scale of the river.

Food

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the food, so I thought I’d add more information about it here. I’ve broken it down by meals, and below you’ll find a description of what I might expect to eat during each one.

Breakfast: My host family always prepares breakfast for me, and it usually consists of eggs scrambled with tomatoes and onions, some bread product, and juice. The bread product is usually what I would typically think of as a dinner roll, and sometimes it is chapati, the thick greasy flour tortilla I described in the “Mabira Forest and Kampala” posting. The juice is usually fresh squeezed lemon or orange juice made from the fruits picked right off the trees in my backyard. I almost never have much of an appetite in the morning (even at home), so I usually eat the eggs and then take the breadstuffs with me to eat at around 10:00 or 11:00, which is when I get an appetite and like to have a little second breakfast.

Lunch: In the recent weeks, I’ve been eating lunch at local restaurants near the office in which I work. One of my preferred places is called Nile Foods. You can get a very filling meal and a drink for less than 2,500 Uganda Shillings (Ush.), which is equivalent to approximately $1.60 USD. A sort of standard meal here consists of “food” and “sauce”. Foods are the starchy staples such as matooke (steamed and mashed plantains), rice, posho (a cornmeal and water mixture with a doughy consistency), and potatoes. Sauces usually cover the protein need and typically consist of either beans, cowpeas, or a chicken, beef, or fish stew. There’s also a peanut sauce which is common and quite tasty. It sometimes comes with smoked fish, which isn’t quite so tasty. I like to have beans or peas with rice and matooke or posho.

Aside from the local foods described above there are a few restaurants which serve more western foods such as burgers, pizzas, sandwiches, etc. Personally, I prefer eating the local foods to eating the western foods here. The food which the locals are more familiar with preparing simply tastes better to me than the western foods which they don’t know how to cook as well. There is also very good Indian food available.

Dinner: The same that I wrote about lunch can be said about my dinners here, except that I usually eat dinner at my host home rather than out. At home we have matooke almost every night, and the best sauce they make to go with it is fresh fish. The fish is usually Tilapia or Nile Perch, and both are delicious. I just have to be careful about the bones. Smoked fish: not so good, fresh fish: excellent.

Snacks: There’s a variety of snacks available either on the streets or in supermarkets. I’ve been supplementing my diet lately with crackers and peanut butter purchased from one of the local supermarkets. The street foods which I’ve sampled thus far are the chapatis, and a snack they call a rolex. The rolex is a chapati with a cabbage, carrot, onion, tomato, and green pepper omelet rolled up inside. Rolexes are delicious, very greasy, and filling. They usually cost around 800 Ush. (~$0.50) Other street snacks include various meat skewers, and roasted corn on the cob, which is called maize (pronounced like maze) by the locals.

Aside from the food describe above, there are three items I’ve encountered so far which I’ve never experienced anyone eating back in America. These three are ants, grasshoppers, and most recently, cow intestines. I had the chance to eat a big handful of fried ants during my first week here. I believe they have more of an acquired taste. The grasshoppers are supposed to be in season come November, so I haven’t been able to try them yet. My host brother, Dennis, promised we’d go out grasshopper hunting and eat so many of them. I’m pretty excited for this great grasshopper hunt. The cow intestines I ate with dinner the other night. I came outside to where the sauce was being prepared, and saw a pot boiling with what looked like noodles in it. After asking what it was, I was given the local name, which I now forget, and was told it is intestines. My next question was from which animal did the intestines come? Cow, and there is probably some liver and kidney in there as well, was the response. I was told the intestines are a great treat, and that they are very nutritious. I didn’t like them too much, unfortunately. My host brother was very happy, however, when I passed my bowl of intestines on to him.


The bowl on the lower left contains the cow intestines

Mabira Forest and Kampala

I spent the weekend before last in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, with Sarah, Tess, and June, the three other interns here with FSD. June was traveling to catch her flight home on Sunday, so we thought we might as well go part of the way to the airport with her and visit a few touristy places along the way. We spent Friday night and Saturday morning in the Mabira Forest Reserve, which is conveniently located approximately 20 km outside of Jinja on the road to Kampala. On Friday night, we stayed in these cozy little bandas, which are basically just cement rooms with a tin roof and a couple beds. Dinner was fresh off the grill from roadside vendors, and consisted of a skewered chicken breast and wing, three grilled bananas, and chapati. Chapati is a bread product similar to a flour tortilla, but thicker and greasier. I was amazed at how dark it was in the forest that night. The combination of forest canopy and distance from any city centers resulted in such a lack of light that I couldn’t see my hand when it was just a few inches from my face. As I was falling asleep, I noticed it was just as dark with my eyes open as it was with them closed.

The next morning we went on a little loop hike through the forest. We passed several enormous trees, saw a few monkeys, crossed a few ant highways, and sweated a lot. It never felt too hot, but the air was already completely saturated with moisture so there was no way for our sweat to evaporate.

One of the several enormous tress in Mabira Forest

After our hike, we hopped on another mini-bus taxi to travel the remaining 40 km to Kampala. The mini-bus taxis are these little Toyota Hiace vehicles which are maybe a little bigger than a VW hippie bus. The small space is used very efficiently, however. Each mini-bus has 14 seats, but there are almost always more than 14 people in any given taxi. I always think about how the 15 passenger vans I’ve driven at Cheley Camps during the last three summers are so much bigger than these mini-buses, and yet they carry the same number of passengers. There is certainly a compromise on comfort and safety, however, when you fit the same number of people into that smaller space.

We walked around the capital city on Sunday. At first it seemed very crowded and chaotic, but things were much quieter once we moved away from the main taxi parks. We visited the Kasubi tombs, which house four former kings of Baganda. The house in which they are entombed is reportedly the largest grass building in the world.

The Kasubi Tombs

After a weekend away from Jinja, it was nice to return to what now feels like home here. Jinja seemed very small and cozy on Monday morning after spending the weekend in the “big city”.