Sabon Gari District Church in Mayo Belwa

Goggle Earth Image from 2006. VES 1 is by the church VES 2 further up hill past the exist broken borehole.

I do not know how many times I have been to the area around the Sabon Gari District Church since 2008. The community is on the edge of the town of Mayo Belwa. But it is not in the Mayo Belwa Local Government Area. They are in Furfore Local Government Area. Across the highway and down the road a little way is the Secretariat for the Mayo Belwa Local Government. An easy walk from this community. But they do not get any services from Mayo Belwa. Furfore where their local government is located is about an hour by car south of Jimeta and they are about two hours north and east of Jimeta. Fufore LGA does not give them much services either.

The community got organized and hired a “so called driller” to drill them a borehole. He did not have a very strong rig and he did not charge a lot. He drilled down to his limit and had barely hit water. The people talked him into drilling deeper. After he drilled a little deeper he told them that his mud pump was not powerful enough to pump the mud out of the hole so he installed the casing and screen into the drilling mud and left. Long story short, they went through several “so called drillers” before they finally agreed to work with the LCCN WASH program and got the pump working. It did not last long as the pump stand and casing are misaligned and people pump on it from morning into the night.Today they told us that they hired someone from Jalingo in Taraba State to come and repair the pump and it is broken again. Adams and I agree that the rod is probably disconnected from the piston. I am going to figure the cost to put a small borehole pump into the casing that does not matter if it is misaligned. To give them the same amount of water flow as the hand pump which as about all this borehole will produce will probably be the smallest borehole pump made. Since the pump will probably cycle on and off as the water level drops it would waste a lot of expensive fuel to use a generator. A small solar system will make more sense for a daily operating costs. 

We were not in the area today to fix the pump.The community is interested in a second borehole and we had brought a geologist from the Upper Benue River Authority to do the geophysical survey to find a good spot for the new borehole. It had rained the night before and remained overcast to the weather was nice for working. Julius started by dowsing the area using two wires. If they opened up the water was getting less and if they closed the water was increasing. He first worked the area around the Sabon Gari church and decided on a spot. We set his equipment to do a resistance survey to determine the apparent depth to the water. 

I was first introduced to dowsing in the mid 1980’s when investigating a grain elevator explosion in southwest Minnesota. A local farmer informed me that there were old drain tiles running from the building that exploded out to a creek about a mile away. He grabbed some wire from the rubble and bent them into an L shape and proceeded to dowse for the pipe. He marked where the pipe was. I thanked him. Later that evening I took the wires and crossed back and forth where he said the pipe was and got the same reactions. I figured it was just my subconscious controlling the wires where the farmer had shown me. I continued doing cross sections out into the fields and found the outlet of the pipe about a mile away. Since then I have dowsed for wires and pipes, but I have never tried it for water. For me there was water everywhere and some areas where they diverged indicating less water. I would rather review aerial photographs and geological maps. But in built up areas like this the land has been disturbed and geological features have been obscured. I have an open mind. I still think there are some clues your mind is seeing in the area that makes you manipulate the wires.

After the finished the resistance test at the church site, Julius set out around the community looking for more areas that his wires told him there was water. He did not get much of an indication and decided on the second test area after about a half hour of walking around the area. This spot happened to be near the house of the man that was showing him around. This has already created talk about “why at his house. Why not at my house”. The second site is up hill and in from the dirt road that leads through the area. Its main advantage is that it is up hill. So when you walk to the site with your empty containers you are walking uphill and then downhill with the full containers. Most of the community will not have to walk uphill with their full water containers.The church site will be downhill for almost the whole community. 

After we finished the resistance surveys of both sites Julius choose we were invited by the Water Committee Treasurer to go to Twin Sisters Restaurant for lunch. They had four tables inside and two on the outside. The twin sisters are the Treasurer's sisters. I had my regular, rice with soup (red sauce, spicey, with two pieces of beef). Today they just had rice or pounded rice and soup.The area behind the sisters in where the food is dished up. I think the actual cooking is done out the behind the building where they can hand the food in through the window.

 As I was typing this into the computer, I was at my desk in the middle of the room under the ceiling fan. A young boy maybe 10 years old yelled from the street "White Man, How are you?" He was more polite than most of the street kids that yell through the fence. I noticed he was selling sachets of cool water. So I walked out to the fence and bought two sachets from him. The water in my frig was colder. so I put his in to cool down and went back to work.

Ngbekendiwe - New Water Source Proposal

Ngbekendiwe: Try to pronounce that three times fast.  The "Ng" is mostly silent. With my level of hearing loss it is silent. The name means “place where grains are stored”. The village asked the Todi Diocese for assistance and the Bishop referred the project to the Health Board WASH Program. This was the WASH Team’s third trip to the village (my first). The WASH Program emphasizes community participation. In many past projects the participation was limited to contributing a little labor and collect sands and gravels for the concrete. The WASH team has learned that this limited participation did not produce community ownership. Now they are requiring a minimum of 10% up-front cash. People get serious when Naira is involved. But they have never been asked by a church or the government to participate in this way. This is something new to them. The WASH Team tries to emphasize that they are not here to give a gift to the village but to help the village to build create a sustainable project that they will own and operate.

Small Store near the LCCN Church.

This is not a very poor village, but not a rich village either. It has small stores and other local conveniences.  The village structures are mostly made of mud brick and thatch. There are a scattering of concrete block buildings with aluminum roofs. It is a clean and well kept village. There are several clay pits in the village for making mud bricks. This will be mosquito breeding grounds in the rainy season. The village lies above a tributary to the Benue River. This whole area was alluvial at one time. The village is a linear village along a small ridge line.

Dry borehole. Tank and all pipes have been removed.

The government has sent “so called driller” to install boreholes in the village. Mostly, around election time. Of the four that they told us about only one ever produced any water and the water is “salty”. Here salty means hard not necessarily tasting like table salt. Many time the driller can go deeper and get better tasting water. The trouble is that here they drill will not seal the boring between upper layer of “salty” and lower layer of water. 

Ngbekendiwe was about 1.5 kilometers long in this 2007 Google Earth Image.

 At today’s meeting the WASH Team met with the Chairman (also the local Imam), the Secretary and one committee member of the local water committee and the pastor of the local church. The other four members could not be found. They reported that they have formed subcommittees in different wards of the village and they have gone to the Local Government and received the proper papers to be a recognized social agency and can now open a bank account. They did not know how much money has been committed to do the project. Yakubu encouraged them to get the subcommittees working and collect the money needed to meet the 10% minimum. Open an account at the nearest bank and deposit the money collected. Soon the rains will start and they will be busy planting their fields. 

Yakubu , Adams, Chairman, Secretary , Committee Member and the Pastor

In earlier meetings they had been told several options creating a new water source. They had chosen to have a motorized borehole with a generator, pump, tank and a distribution system. The cost estimates they were given were general in nature. Specific, design and detailed cost estimating have not been done. I currently, have my doubts that this project will happen this dry season. The road to the village looks like a stream bed in many places. If they get the funds together by the end of April the new borehole could be drilled before the main part of the rainy season begins in June.

Back to Banjiram

Goggle Earth Image of Banjiram and the location of the taps. At the end of the blog is a view wider view.

My idea of by-passing the tank and pressurizing the water line to get water to flow at the remote taps was a little off base We went back to Banjiram last week to check out some details. One of the main items was to find the specifics of the pump data from the pump box. The box is gone. Someone had a use for it so it was taken out of the storage room and the paperwork is gone. Another was to check the actual distances the water had to travel. I was told 75 meter to a junction and then 150 meters in two directions to the remote tap stands. Actually it is 160 meters and 200 meters. These lengths make my idea not feasible except if you wanted to take 10 minutes to fill a 20 liter container.

Tank outlet configuration

 The next thing was to see what was buried underground. Once we had finished digging up the connection of the tank outlet to the remote taps Yukubu showed me the picture he took when they buried them. This is the pipe coming down from the tank outlet. The 2 inch pipe has two elbows to get around the foundation and underground it has a Tee. The right side stays at  2 inches and only goes about 6 meters where it goes into the School Tap Stand.

School Tap Stand with school in background

The school does not want the people from the town coming to the school to fetch water. They have allowed their borehole and tank to be used to supply more people in the village but they built two remote tap stands closer to the homes.

The picture on the left is the North Tap Stand and on the right is the South Tap Stand. You can see the school and the tank in the background of the North Tap Stand. Notice there are pots only lined up at the end two taps at the North and a well worn path to the school. The South Tap Stand has  buckets at all of the taps but mostly on the north end where the water comes in. The North Tap Stand is actually up hill from the school and the south is slightly down hill. We did an experiment and turned off all the taps at the School Tap Stand and we opened the tank. All the taps at the South got water. Only a little water on the North. Based on my hand level I am guessing the North Tap Stand is 2.5 meters higher than the borehole.

The two remote taps stands get little flow when the school tap stand is open. Resulting in people walking to the school every afternoon to fetch water when the tank is opened at 3:30.

I spent much of the weekend and Monday doing manual mathematical modeling of the piping system trying to come up with a solution that will work. There are also village politics involved. My best solution would not work because the farmer who owns the field will only allow one trench through his field. He had to be convinced to even allow one. He has a tractor plow his field. The plastic pipe will not withstand a plow hit.

Here is the solution I am currently proposing. We will still use a new pipe to by-pass the tank and pressurize the pipes with the pump. This should add up to 2 more meters of water pressure. But the 2 1/2 inch by-pass pipe will now continue down the trench along side the existing 1 1/2 inch pipe and go all the way to the north end of the North Tap Stand and connect there. In my models this solution started to work at a 2 inch pipe. But there are several unknowns that I could not put into the model. The exact elevations is one and the capabilities of the pump and pump controller. This was the first time since college I have run mathematical models by hand. Fortunately, I found a website that would calculate pressure drops for me. I several liters of fuel in my little generator while doing it. I ran the calculations for around 10 different combinations of pipes. If someone like me shows up in the future and sees the way this is piped, they will wonder "What kinds of drugs was the this guy on, when he decided to run the pipes like this?".

Just tot he south of this Google Earth Image is the dry river bed where much of the town gets its water by digging.