Kikoo

Everyone takes a break from a day of enthusiastically excavating the tank site. They encourage us to join in their songs as we work together. They are very grateful for our support. Villagers currently draw their water from polluted streams. These streams are severely contaminated due to agricultural runoff, wandering livestock and sanitation issues. Disease due to this polluted water supply is rampant in the community. While boiling techniques are acknowledged to purify water, few villagers have extra fuel resources. A water distribution system fed by a natural spring will make clean water available to the community. During the dry season, the tank overflow will run into nearby fields. This irrigation will be appreciated in a community where the majority of villagers are full-time farmers, and every family has a farm. Kikoo is well known throughout the region for its excellent vegetables.

A Day in the Life

            “Iranyah” “Ah siy bune ki jung ah?” “Good Morning! Did you sleep well?” Each morning we awoke with the sun and took a bumpy trip into the village. Kikoo is located at 6000ft in the midst of corn-covered hills. Traveling in the rainy season often meant that the steep and slippery roads were only passable on foot. In the village, these children greeted us, shy but enthusiastic, water containers perched on their heads. Lunch was always a picnic of rice, beans, corn and potatoes in every imaginable combination. This was complemented by sweet palm wine served in a drinking horn. Rainy season meant that torrential downpour arrived at 1:45 daily, so digging stopped for the afternoon. Instead, we spent this time working on design challenges with the Cameroonian engineering students, preparing water samples and exploring the local market.

Ongoing Health Education Program

These children are excited to show off their paper-bag puppets. Here their enthusiasm is reflected with solemn pride. They treat this rare encounter with a camera as a serious affair. Each day these 95 children jammed into a single classroom for health workshops in Kikoo’s school. Local teachers led classes and will continue the health and water protection curriculum. We made hand-washing stations out of large 50-liter lidded containers fitted with spigots, which served as “running water” for the school. Hands-on activities taught the routine of hand washing. In one game students acted out scenes of daily life with their puppets. Their peers shouted, “STOP! Don’t forget to wash your hands!” whenever appropriate. The actors tried to trick them with a diverse range of situations. Children loved this creative new learning style.

Engineering Challenges

            These masons are hard at work building the stone walls of the storage tank. The walls are built of two layers of hand-shaped stones and filled with mortar. We built the reinforced concrete foundation and learned to lay stones alongside the master masons. Since then, the villagers have completed the walls and the top of the tank. Throughout each day, we learned how Cameroonians face practical engineering challenges. For example, lengths of rebar reinforce the slab to prevent cracking. In Cameroon, villagers cut this rebar by pounding the metal rod with a stone until it is weak enough to bend and break! Our engineering mentors helped us learn both Cameroonian and American approaches to ensuring that the tank was structurally sound, and to dealing with water overflow and pressure buildup in the system. The system is built so that the villagers will have water for years to come.