Overflowing

I was just thinking the other day that I needed to give an update on our water situation. This was obviously one of, if not the greatest challenge and concern that we had in our first several months here and it dramatically altered the experience we expected to have. I really haven’t said much about it since, but am often asked when people are checking in with us.

In short, our situation has improved dramatically. With a few improvements to our system, learning to conserve sparingly, closing off the water supply to campus except for the necessary buildings at necessary times (homes and school when its open), we have had much more success. We also have learned much through trial and error (mainly the latter) about how to best obtain, conserve, and use water. Unfortunately, we’ve had to move away – hopefully temporarily – from the solar pump we had hoped to use and have had to experiment with several borehole/pump/power source solutions until we found the combination that seems to work best.

For the past couple of months, we have been powering a 2HP pump with a 5KW Honda Generator in the newest deepest well (nearly 400 feet!). We monitored this pump time using a very sophisticated method of me (Kevin) climbing to the top of the 30 foot water tower and listening for the sound of water pumping. Then, when it stopped I would wave my hands to Drew who was waiting and watching about 500 feet away down the hill where the well is, and he would shut off the generator. In the beginning this would often mean that we were in position for over a half hour at a time which brought lots of interesting reactions from our neighbors!

We eventually honed in on the window of opportunity and were even able to “train” the well to pump even more so that it currently pumps for about an hour each morning and each night. At this point, supply has been keeping up with demand. In fact, on Monday, while pumping in the morning, I heard a strange sound outside the house and went out to find this:

I’m not sure how well you can see it, but these are pictures of our water tanks. And they’re OVERFLOWING!!! As far as we know, this has never happened before and it’s obviously a big practical and psychological blessing. Ironically, it happened in the morning just as I was leaving to pick up a plumber that was flown here to correct some plumbing issues we inherited. The timing was perfect, though, because we were able to conserve by closing off a few areas of campus that were leaking and he is working to fix them so we can open up the entire system. Now, especially heading into the rainy season, and Lord willing, we should be able to move forward with our water situation.