This project has been completed under the direction of Peace Corps Volunteers Garrison Harward and Erica Berlin. To read about the beginning of the project, CLICK HERE.
The project was to repair 3 pumps in the community.
Garrison reports:
As you can see from the pictures, these pumps are a lot bulkier than ours. As the Senegalese would say, they have a lot of “baggage”. Because of this, repairing them turned out to be quite a bit more expensive than anticipated. As a result we are splitting this into two pumps so pump number 24 will be the second half of these repairs.
We know it’s not always as glamorous to pay for repairs, but this way we get three pumps up and working for the price of two new ones. Still a good deal. Enjoy the post!
We are now fully into the rainy season so pump installs are a little less certain than before. The initial day that we planned to fix the three pumps had to be canceled due to a massive thunderstorm. The rescheduled date started out very cloudy and ominous as well but we decided to just cross our fingers and go for it.
We started by taking out all of the broken parts and replacing as many as we could. This was difficult due to everything being cemented in place or excessively bolted together with now very rusted bolts. This made a simple morning repair job into an all-day affair with multiple welders working. We replaced ropes, PVC pipe, bolts, ball bearings, cement, and greased everything up so it ran more efficiently.
By about mid-day, we were done with the first pump and it was running beautifully. We’ll talk about the other two in the next post. Due to this being the rainy season, the leaders of the group were out in the field and weren’t able to come see the repairs. We’re going to come back though once the work calms down a little to explain the repairs and make sure they know who to contact in the future for other problems.
Pump Output: 35 Liters/Min
Total Number of People Benefiting: 75 women and girls
Funder: Husain Rasheed, dedicated to Parveen Rasheed