Some of the Diocese's work in Kaara

The people of  Kaara, like many in the Diocese, lived on the top of the hills. Which to British person seemed rather bizarre as we live in valleys. However, just as we live in the valleys to protect ourselves from the elements, the Ugandans have a perfectly good reason to live at the top of the hills. The land in the valleys is more fertile, so they live on the top of the hills on the less fertile land. Naturally though, this presents some problems especially for water collection. So, the KDWSP provided the people of Kaara with several options to collect clean water.

The protected spring:

At the bottom of the valley, near to where we went to play football. The KDWSP have protected a spring allowing the people to collect clean water without needing to worry that it may have been polluted by animals or faeces.

The spring that we went to collect water from looked like this:

As you can see, the water is tapped from the ground, thus ensuring that it is clean and therefore safe to drink.

Whilst the people of Kaara, had this spring and therefore access to clean water all year round, because it was at the bottom of the hill it wasn't possible to tap the source and bring it to the people through a gravity follow system, as the KDWSP had done successful in other areas as the water had to go up!

The photo below hopefully will give you an idea about how far people had to climb up from the spring. We  lived very close to beginning of the path down into the valley, so many people had a long walk once they'd reached the top.

A photo taken from the spring, back up the valley to our house.

As it wasn't possible to construct a gravity flow system, the KDWSP needed to harvested the water falling on Kaara in a different way...bring on the water tank!

The household water tank

Our tippy tap

The KDWSP provided the household of Kaara with a 4,000 L water tank for UDX 250,000 which was a quarter of what it would cost if they didn't go through the Diocese. However, the KDWSP required the household to have several sanitation items:

1. A good toilet
2. A 'shower' facility (we had a bucket and a cup)
3. A drying rack for washing up
4. A tippy tap - a very clever device with was small jerry can with a hole in it. Thus allowing you to pore water out and wash your hands. 

How KDWSP provide for families suffering from HIV/Aids

However, families which tested positive for HIV/Aids recieved a tank free of charge from the Diocese. We visited two women who had recieved tanks through the project, both had lost their husbands to Aids and were left with children to look after. To make matters worse, neither of their husbands had been able to build a house for them so they had been left at the mercies of their families-in-law for a house.

The first women we visited was living with her Mother-in-law (whose house the water tank was attached to) however she had been given so aluminium sheeting by the community and was building herself a house next to her Mother-in-laws.

The second women we met story in also included in the link below (she's the second woman.) And as you can see in the below picture, the Diocese decided that her house (right house) was too old to have guttering added to it for the water tank and as the woman was having issues with her brothers-in-law who wanted to her to leave the house, KDWSP decided to construct the structure of a new house with a roof (left house) on the land she did own. 

                                                                                           

The two houses, KDWSP constructed the one of the left as her initial house was too old.

The women know only needs to fill in the walls with mud and the house construction will be complete. However, Liz said that she was so weak that she didn't have the strength to collect the water from the bottom of the valley to make the mud so she was waiting until the rainy season to finish her house.

Please click here to go to an article written about this lady, and other work done by KDWSP to help support families suffering from HIV/Aids.

The Institutional water tank: what we did!

This was the water tank that we were working on, a large tank which collected water of a community building, in our case the Church, for the community. Whilst the KDWSP provided some of the materials and the expertise, in our case Geoffrey an engineer, the diocese expected the community to provide basic materials, for example; sand and water and the manual labour, which included us.

The following pictures will be of us, constructing our tank, and some explanation about how. It was the same method used to construct the household tanks, and the diocese trained up men from the community with expertise in how to build them, so when we left they aim to construct another 22 household tanks before the raining season started (so around a month.)

The foundations! A hole was dug and the filled in with large stones, then smaller stones, then sand followed by pouring water over the top and adding more sand!

The base! The framework of the water tank was constructed out of wire,  and  we then passed cement with stones (aggregate - I think is the proper term) inside the tank to form the base and strengthen the foundations

The outside of the tank had chicken wire wrapped around it and was then covered in large plastic bags which had string wrapped tight around it.

The inside of the tank then had two layers of cement applied (we were only allowed to help in the second layer)

The plastic bags were then removed from the outside and stored for later use.

We attempted again to help withe cementing, like the inside  the outside also got two layers.

The roof! Like the tank, the roof was first constructed from wire, here's the team  attaching large wire sheets together.

The wire roof was then covered in the plastic bags which were sown onto it, before being placed on top of the tank. The wooded post you can see going into the tank helped to support the roof as the cement was added.

The roof was a one man job, carried out with what appeared great ease by Geoffrey.

A hole was then dug for the taps.

And steps, a wall and a drainage pipe was added.

How the tank looked when we last saw it. 

Hope you've enjoyed seeing those shots and seeing how the tank was constructed. What amazed me was the ease that the tank was made, nothing was too fancy or hard and yet it still does the job brilliantly! No high tech machinery was used, and if they needed something, something was constructed to be that something.