WASH Practices and Skills

eMi Communities of Practice

Yammer response from Kevin Hale, eMi WASH disaster response volunteer:

Skills for WASH work that come to mind:

1. Calculate:
1. The dosage of chlorine to add to a well or other supply to disinfect it.
2. The amount of chlorine required to provide a safe but effective level or residual chlorine for drinking water.
3. How much water is required for drinking for a given population
4. The amount of available chlorine in whatever source is available
5. The TDH required to pump a given flow of water from a well of specific depth.
6. The required kWh of portable generators to run such pumps efficiently.
7. The amount of appropriate fuel required to run the generators.
8. The probable amount of wastewater flows for a given population
2. Use & Do:
1. Use and understand the results of, and the differences between, water test kits.
2. On-site percolation tests to determine the size of leaching basins/leaching fields required to serve a given population
3. Understand:
1. Cultural norms with respect to latrine use in the area being served
2. Level of disinfection required for water uses, that is drinking/bathing/washing and the ability to communicate this to the population being served.
4. Different water filter technologies and the physical sizes of viruses, bacteria and helminths with respect to the filer sizes.
4. Principles:
1. High tech solutions are rarely appropriate in the undeveloped world and certainly not in disaster response work.
2. Whatever solutions WASH teams recommend must be easy to understand and easy to maintain, and that local population must be instructed in how to maintain them with locally available skills and where any necessary resources for maintaining them will come from,
3. As in any consulting situation, teams must understand that the 'client' had not had years of engineering education and experience and likely will not fully comprehend what is recommended without teaching them the basics.

Grace’s Mission and Our Mission

This is the first of two posts that have been stolen from Spring 2011 EMI intern Samantha Rowell (I believe a recent VT grad). I found the post in December 2015 while surfing. Sam had not touched her blog since the trip, but I wanted to hold onto the memories. I’m a cad, a thief, a man with no soul.
Sam’s blogspot site: http://samrowell.blogspot.com/

It was hard to resist the feelings of hopelessness that crept in as we drove around Haiti, but the people and mission of Hatian owned and operated Grace International was inspiring. Their vision is to bring opportunity to the Haitian’s and in doing that empower the people. One of the ways they are trying to do this is by building communities, not just homes. In the 2010 earthquake displacement camp tent village that Grace runs, we saw that they were applying expectations to the people who lived there and enforcing strict consequences. It seems simple, but I think this is a huge value to the Haitian people.

View of a portion of the displacement camp on Grace International’s property

Soccer game in Grace village

Our mission was to provide Grace with a master plan for a new community. We achieved that, but could not give as much detail as will be needed in the future for this site. EMI has worked with Grace for several years. It is very likely that this partnership will continue and we will be involved in helping them realize this long-term vision for the community at Lafiteau.

Our EMI team (Ash Wednesday)

The beautiful planning work of Dan Ford.

Our presentation at the end of the week to Grace Int’l

Be Flexible. Really.

This is the second of two posts that have been stolen from Spring 2011 EMI intern Samantha Rowell (I believe a recent VT grad). I found the post in December 2015 while surfing. Sam had not touched her blog since the trip, but I wanted to hold onto the memories. I’m a cad, a thief, a man with no soul.
Sam’s blogspot site: http://samrowell.blogspot.com/

The EMI staff really meant it when they said expect things to go awry and that we must be flexible. Our trip required a lot more flexibility than most.
First, it was a surprise that we would be riding back from the airport with another group (Fuller Center) that was there to help the same ministry we were, Grace International. The result was this –

35 people plus their luggage in a extended-cab truck

Upon arriving at Grace Village we found out that their other vehicle was broken down. So that meant our team and the Fuller group had to coordinate transportation the whole week between our respective schedules. The bus became known to the EMI team as “the cage.”

All those people came out of the cage

That first night we found out that the Mardi Gras celebrations would mean roads through Port au Prince would be blocked off. Sunday and Monday we could not drive through past 3-4 pm and on Tuesday we could not drive through at all. This meant we had to push our visit to our work site back to later in the week.EMI was involved with Grace Intl on a previous project in Fall 2010 and that site (Lambi) is fairly close to our new site (Lafiteau). Our team had planned to go to Lambi and do some survey stakes at that property. Because we could not get to Lafiteau, we went to Lambi at the beginning of the week (we did not have to travel through Port au Prince to get there.)

Yes, that is a large pig next to the surveyors

In a way I think this was a blessing in disguise for a few reasons:

There was a big rain event the night before our visit to the Lambi site and this helped the engineers and our client, Grace Intl, to see that drainage at this site was a bigger problem than first realized. Basically it’s a flood plain and not an easy good [edited by sokkaleo] site to build on.

Construction on the first house at Lambi started a few weeks before our arrival and when we got out there, we saw that it was not located according to the plans we gave them. It was misplaced enough to knock out space for several homes.

Because of these two things, some of our team spent half the week re-designing the Lambi site…not what we had intended to do during the week.

Another little surprise at Lambi. We spent a whole day putting stakes with flags in the ground to mark out the road and some drainage ditches. That night we found out that some kids had gone around and pulled them out of the ground…we think mostly because they wanted to play with flags.

Later in the week, on Lafiteau, some of the guys that went out to walk the perimeter of the site were met with men with guns and they were not happy that we were there. That night the team found out that the site was 13 acres. We were told it was going to be 105. The next day it turned out that we actually did have the whole 105 acres. But this information on how much property we had was not a promise. Grace is currently working on securing the property.

Beginning stages of planning

Walking the Perimeter of Lafiteau

Meeting with Grace to talk about the site