Solar Pump Repair and Maintenance Project

In 1998 the World Vision NGO financed the installation of a solar pump system in the town of Sanadougou. The aim of this project was very straightforward; in this growing market town of more than 4,000 people where the bulk of the population regularly suffers from giardia, dysentery and worms inadvertently contracted by drinking from unsanitary wells, public health could be drastically improved with access to potable drinking water. World Vision hired Bamako contractors to build a groundwater pump, and two water storage towers to be powered by an array of solar panels. The contractors built a pump-serviced livestock-watering trough in the adjacent vicinity of the complex as well as 7 tap posts strategically-located throughout the town; altogether, there are 17 taps – 3 of the posts have room for 3 individual taps while the 4 other posts have only 2 taps. As promising as this system might have been at the onset, the entire system is now essentially useless due to lack of maintenance and necessary repairs. In response to these pressing needs, the Sanadougou Water Committee has petitioned their Peace Corps Volunteer to help them institute a plan to repair and reorganize the entire system.

The solar panels, the pump and storage towers are perfectly fine, but the entire system as a whole is seriously malfunctioning due to breakages at the livestock watering trough and in a way-station in the metal pipe connecting the water pump to the taps in the Filablena neighborhood. These parts cannot be shut off and flow at the maximum rate at all times.



The ever-flowing watering trough and broken way-station overload the capacity of the entire system, directly exhausting the supply of potable drinking water and often leaving the taps dry. Even when there is water left for human consumption the water pressure is significantly diminished, which allows for rust to develop and diminish water quality. Furthermore, the perpetually-flowing components create vast puddles of standing water which serve as a fertile environment for mosquito breeding. Note that the picture above was taken during dry season on a day when most of the overflow had evaporated in the 105-degrees Fahrenheit heat – during cold and wet season, the puddle of overflow from the livestock-watering trough expands almost all the way to the leafless tree in the center-left of the photograph.

The Water Committee has analyzed these broken parts and they have given them to local plumbers to try to weld them back together, but the plumbers have returned to say that these parts are beyond repair; Peace Corps Assistant Water and Sanitation APCD Adama Bagayoko has analyzed these parts as well and independently concluded that the only course of action is to purchase entirely new components. I apologize that I am unable to find the English translations, but specifically, the parts we need are (in French): une ventousse, un compteur, une vanne, un raccord union, une coude MF, un reducteur, une vanne p26, le clapet vapere. We plan on buying these broken parts from the Bamako suppliers SETRA, and we will hire the local welder Smeila Fané to reassemble the malfunctioning parts and weld them onto the rest of the solar pump system. To our understanding, there is no evidence of malfeasance or negligence for the broken parts – this is merely repair which should be expected in such a large system after 12 years of running and is now long overdue.

However, even if we were to replace the broken components at the livestock-watering trough and the way-station, this solar pump system would still be operating well below capacity and with little benefit for public health; only 3 out of 17 taps are currently operational. The problem with the taps is that they are simply too easy to break; children are used to pumping water with the vertical pump handles with such strenuous work that they have to jump up and down to obtain water, and though the horizontal handles to the tap system can be opened with the flick of a wrist, this is a point which apparently has not been conveyed as children have broken all of the tap handles.



Though the direct cause of this problem was of course the children themselves, this result was inevitable when World Vision built this system with the flimsiest, most fragile handles available. And since these little pieces of metal are now gone, the entire solar pump system is now effectively useless, completely wasting the charitable donations of well-minded humanitarians to the tune of about a million dollars. Well, to be fair, it wasn't a total waste - now for a million dollars the cows of Sanadougou could drink better-quality water than their human masters.



Since the townsfolk of Sanadougou cannot access the potable drinking water provided by the solar water pump, they resort to unsanitary, uncovered wells for their supply of drinking water. These traditional wells – which are really little more than holes in the ground – are home to vibrant populations of worms, snails, amoebas, giardia cysts, and in some cases even frogs and fish. In some locations – particularly during rainy season – these unimproved wells are directly polluted with wastewater and contaminated with human fecal matter. The fact that the people must fall back on such substandard water sources is the prime reason why giardia and dysentery are endemic in this community, and why diarrhea is after malaria the most common preventable cause of infant and child mortality.

Of the 3 taps that are functional, they are functional only because certain individuals have put in their own money to buy their own private taps with locks; one being the tap shared by the Peace Corps Volunteer, the doctor and kindergarten teachers, and the other two are adjacent to mechanic shops where they are used to clean motorcycles with potable drinking water. What differentiates the sites of these taps and the other are the functioning ones are used exclusively by a small number of relatively wealthy people who are both willing to spend money on clean water and also confident that their resources will be used almost exclusively by themselves with few (if any) free-riders. Asides from the tap managed by the Volunteer, the two other functioning taps provide little public health benefits to the population as this potable drinking water is used almost exclusively for cleaning motorcycles. As regrettable as this situation might be, it aptly demonstrates the universality of a saying from the American West, that “water flows uphill towards money”; as the rest of the community pays nothing, they are unable to obtain potable drinking water even from the tap system installed next to their homes at great cost.

When World Vision built the solar pump > tap system a decade ago, the NGO agreed to finance the totality of the initial startup costs only because the Mayor agreed that the citizens of Sanadougou would pay for maintenance and operating costs on a pay-as-you-go basis. However, such payments never happened since the taps were free for all to use and break anonymously; and since no one at le Bureau de la Mairie or the Water Committee could possibly know who was and who was not drawing water from the taps, they could not change anyone; without any accrual of maintenance costs, the system of course degraded into oblivion.

With this history in mind, the Sanadougou Water Committee unanimously resolved to 1) replace the broken taps and 2) begin a payment program so that the Committee will be able to garner revenue to finance inevitable maintenance and repairs in the future. The Committee decided that they cannot do only one of these things, they must do both at the same time. And in this way they will capitalize on the opportunity granted them by the need for repairing the solar pump system to fundamentally overhaul its use under the guidance of the Water Committee.

First of all, we need to get new taps that cannot break so easily. After children broke the last tap next to my house I bought a new tap with a hole through the handle so that it can be locked by the user. By limiting the access to this tap to the holder of the three keys, only I, the doctor and the kindergarten teachers next to me could get access to potable water. However, the doctor and kindergarten teachers were really bad about locking the tap after using it. And even when it was locked, children would come to the tap and try to open it – though they could not access water, they could break the handle in trying. After six months, even this tap deteriorated to the point that it could no longer be used.



A month ago I bought another new tap which can only be opened with a key – though unlike the previous model, the key goes directly into the head itself and there is no external handle at all. In other words, there is really no external part on this tap that can be broken by children. What is more, there is only one key to each tap – which means that responsibility unambiguously falls on him or her to maintain it and that they cannot pass the buck to someone else. This model seems promising enough to serve as a model for refurbishing the remaining 14 taps which are currently useless because their handles have been broken off.



Having showed this new tap to the Water Committee, we agreed that we must pair the repairs of the broken livestock-watering trough and way-station with the replacement of all the broken taps with new lockable taps with keys to ensure that the human population can have a sustainable supply of potable drinking water. As my homologue Sidiki Sogoba jokes, “Otherwise, we would spend a lot of money to help only the cows.” And this is the crux for our plan to reorganize the solar pump > tap system. Part of Sanadougou’s community contribution will be to purchase 17 new lockable taps at 3,000 CFA a piece, and these are going to be paid for neighborhood by neighborhood. Likewise, since each tap comes with exactly one key, the Water Committee is going to decentralize the daily operation and maintenance of each tap neighborhood by neighborhood.

Under our plan, each individual tap will be the responsible of exactly one person to whom the Water Committee and village chief – in consultation with the neighborhood – will assign the sole key. For example, the tap post in the neighborhood of Jigila has room for two taps, so we will assign the key to one to the butigitigi whose shop is directly adjacent to the tap post and the other key to a woman next door. Since water collection is primarily the duty of women in Malian culture, we are going to emphasize the assignment of keys to women whenever possible. Very rarely do men ever draw water, so only in circumstances such as this where there is a man who can in fact be counted on to always be next to the tap will we assign keys to men. The Committee agreed that the key criteria in assigning keys should be individuals’ proximity of their home to the tap, reliability of being at that location at any given time, maturity, ability, responsibility, trustworthiness, and of course their interest in volunteering for such a duty. We also agreed that persons of great importance in this community e.g. the chief of the village, the Mayor, the imam and the pastor should expressly not be assigned keys, for their other duties would make them unreliable to be in the vicinity of the tap at all times.

The kletigi – “holder of a key” – would be a position of great responsibility and great power. They have to be willing to open the water tap for all people at all times, to make sure that children to not play with the taps, and to moreover keep a record of who draws water from that tap and how much. Ultimately, the crux of the position of kletigi will be to collect money from every person in the neighborhood who draws water from that tap. The Water Committee agrees unanimously that we have to establish some sort of a payment system to pay for the maintenance and operational costs of the entire solar pump > tap system so that the next time that a pipe leaks or a tap needs replacement, the Committee will have money on hand to pay for any necessary repairs. In so many words, the Sanadougou Water Committee understands that potable drinking water is a valuable commodity that cannot be procured for free, and thus they have taken it unto themselves to transform this useless, broken-down NGO “cadeau” into a functioning utility that bends to the laws of market economics and finance its maintenance and operating costs through user fees.

The Water Committee still needs to work out how exactly they are going to conduct the payment program. There is one camp in the Committee that argues that people should pay a small price i.e. 5 or 10 CFA for every bucket of water so that payment is perfectly conditional to use; another camp in the Committee argues that such a scheme would be impractical to implement and so water tap subscribers should pay a flat monthly rate. The eventual payment policy will probably allow for users to pay for water either by the bucket or by a flat monthly rate. One area of agreement is that on every market day the Committee should assign one kletigi to man the taps next to the market so that they can draw water and collect money from all of the market vendors and customers who would otherwise consume water as free-riders. Each individual kletigi would be responsible for keeping accounts of how much money they collected from each individual and to forward those user fees to the Treasurer of the Water Committee. Another issue that has yet to be decided is whether the kletigi’s should receive any compensation for their work, for the Committee acknowledges that their duties can be an inconvenience, and I voiced wariness that any individual kletigi might pocket user fees which are meant to pay for maintenance and repairs.

One could pose the question of moral hazard in this situation; e.g. “The NGO built this solar pump system on the premise that the village would provide maintenance indefinitely thereafter – why should a foreign development agency pay for the maintenance costs that the villagers agreed to pay themselves?” I can commiserate with this argument; however, it is overlooking a number of important facts: 1) the Mayor's Office which made this original agreement and the Water Committee that wants to revamp the solar pump system are completely separate entities; 2) the World Vision NGO originally built this entire system with easily-breakable taps completely inappropriate for public infrastructure in an African village; 3) the NGO completely dropped the ball in organizing a payment system; 4) the village has never had any experience repairing or maintaining a running water system before. Not to be paternalistic, but the NGO must have had unreasonably great expectations that the Mayor’s Office could be able to effectively manage this complex system without any background experience and without any guidance, training or even suggestions. From my own experience, I can say that World Vision made an enormous mistake by entrusting this responsibility to the Mayor's Office and not the independent Water Committee, because in a rural village it is the traditional, informal government that actually wields all substantial power over public infrastructure - and the Mayor is really just a figurehead who gets paid to be everybody's friend. And le Bureau de la Mairie in question frankly has no genuine interest in managing the public drinking water system. As the Committee explained to me, it was precisely in the Mayor's best interest to just yes the NGO about instituting a payment system and do nothing once they packed up and left, because whereas presiding over a giant new cadeau and not asking anything of anybody is a boon to re-election (even if it evenually falls apart without maintenance), asking the people to pay for public services with user fees or taxes is decidedly not in the best interest of any self-interested public office-holder. Yes, eventually the Water Committee and le Bureau de la Mairie have to be able to eventually manage this system entirely by themselves – but in the meantime, now that one of the two groups has put forward a proposal to get serious about organizing these waterworks and fix what is broken, I think that it is perfectly reasonable to match their own repairs with $483.72 to rebuild a functioning system requisite for sound management.

Altogether, this project will allow the Sanadougou Water Committee to take the long-neglected solar pump system and overhaul it into a functioning water utility, re-organizing it with respect to market forces to benefit the public good. It will respond to the Committee’s desire to repair and reorganize the waterworks by raising funds through the Peace Corps Partnership to pay for new parts for the broken livestock-watering trough and way-station. The Committee will pay for the transportation of the materials from Bamako to the village of Sanadougou, they will hire a local plumber to assemble the parts and a local blacksmith to weld the necessary pieces together. They Committee will also raise money from the villagers to purchase new, lockable heads for the 14 broken taps. And the Committee will follow up by instituting a payment system – probably monthly for certain subscribers, daily for all others, so that they can gain the necessary revenues to pay for maintenance and operating costs in the future. Even after the initial repairs are complete, we will spend the rest of my service working to strengthen the Committee’s accounting and budgeting skills. And if this works out, the Sanadougou Water Committee should be able to build the capacity to effectively manage the solar pump and tap system indefinitely without any need for further foreign intervention.

If you are interested in making a financial contribution to repair and maintain the people of Sanadougou's drinking water infrastructure, click here. This project should be on the Peace Corps Partnership website within a few weeks.

Crisis in the Garden of Xanadu

Despite my earnest efforts to teach my neighbors how to treat their drinking water and to build improved latrines and soak pits, I have come to realize that my current lifestyle practices have an overall detrimental effect on Sanadougou's water supply.

It seems to me that when the Christian NGO set up shop in Sanadougou twenty years ago, they had a bit too much faith in Western technology – a conceit which I unfortunately inherited. Around the same time that they were building their residential quarters they also brought in engineers to put together a solar-powered groundwater pump and water tower to bring potable drinking water to robinets located in three locations throughout the town. At first the NGO personnel planned on placing one of those robinets directly inside the chain-link fence of their concession. I thank Jesus that the NGO apparently realized how completely awful the symbolism would have been of having a private supply of running potable water in a village where most people drink from parasite-laden wells; they ended up placing the robinet 50 meters outside the fence where it would be accessible to the public – technically.

Groundwater pumping can be fairly dubious in many environments, but it is not very harmful to the equilibrium of the water table when the quantity of water pumped is dwarfed by the annual recharge. In this Sahelian climate where the soils are supersaturated again every rainy season, the human impact on the water table by a single solar pump used for limited human consumption is quite negligible. Even if every single person in this village were to use the solar pump/robinet system to access uncontaminated groundwater for their personal drinking and cooking needs, any minor disruptions of natural water table levels are easily justified by the health benefits of reducing the transmission of giardia, dysentery, cholera, guinea worm, round worm and ring worm. In this society where the first two water-borne illnesses constitute a significant fraction of the infant and child mortality rates, it is no exaggeration to say that the value of groundwater resources as a source of potable drinking water can be measured in lives.

So after a decade of building schoolhouses and a kindergarten and a health clinic and a library and a playground in Sanadougou, the Christian NGO decided that they wanted to grow a garden. To Westerners who think of gardening as a weekend hobby, I don’t think that they understood just how much labor is required to irrigate even a small garden in a pre-industrialized Malian village. Most gardens in Sanadougou are really small – a seasonal okra patch, maybe a banana tree or two – because someone has to water that garden every single day with water pulled from well bags. Water is surprisingly heavy, and to repeat the motion of drawing well bag after well bag is remarkably strenuous and time-consuming. There are some larger gardens of perennial crops, and watering each one of those gardens with well bags is enough labor to constitute one person’s full-time job from September until the rains return in June.

So when the Christian NGO decided to build a garden in their concession, they planted 5 papaya trees, 5 guava trees, 5 banana trees, 4 lemon trees and an orange tree which remain to this day. To maintain moist, fertile soil around these trees requires approximately 1600 liters of water a day – to do this manually would require 80 large buckets, 40 trips to the well and back every 24 hours. I’ve tried watering this garden by hand many a times – But the NGO decided that they could avoid the hassle altogether and buy two plastic hoses to water their garden from the conveniently-located solar pump/robinet system. To Westerners who have lived all of their lives in developed countries where clean water is in such abundance that its perfectly ordinary to spend hundreds of dollars on mechanized sprinklers to irrigate their grass lawns with water that has been treated for human consumption, they probably did not think twice about irrigating this enormous fruit garden in Sanadougou with running water.

And like most Western do-gooders who come to Africa, after ten years the NGO had finished construction on all the buildings they intended to build and decided that their work here was now done. And like most Western do-gooders, they gave their residence and the garden and all the tools which came with it to the village of Sanadougou – because giving presents is the most effortless and instantly-gratifying mode of “aid”. And they gave the keys to a local fellow named Moussa so that he could water their score of fruit trees until the next resident came to live in the house, and in exchange for watering the trees in the meantime Moussa could take all of the fruit and also plant his own little annual plots of okra, beans and peppers.

As much as the NGO extension agents must have thought giving a massive fruit garden to a simple Malian peasant farmer to water with a plastic hose was a perfectly benevolent act of generosity, ten years after the fact it is pretty clear that was an enormous mistake. Plastic hose is a completely inappropriate technology to introduce to this society and in this climate, especially without providing any instruction or means to conduct proper maintenance. Polyethylene degrades over time, and this process is greatly accelerated when plastic is left exposed under the unforgiving African sun. Furthermore, in between the robinet and the garden was a dirt road, and for ten years Moussa left the hose to be crossed by tens of dozens of motorcycles and donkey carts each day. Battered by a medley of heat, dryness and acute pressure, to no one’s surprise this hose would spring leaks in the exact place where it was run over by donkey cart wheels.



Moussa had some pretty clever solutions to the leaky hose problem. Whenever a new hole would spring up, he would tie it closed with pieces of spare motorcycle tires; when these holes became so egregious that not even rubber could tie them up shut he would take a knife and cut off the offending section, cut off a piece of good hose from the end, and splice the two together with more moto-rubber. The new holes would always appear in the same place in the middle road where donkey carts rang over it, but Moussa kept on slicing and splicing and tying the hose together in such a way that the hose was migrating about itself. By the time that I arrived, this process had been going on for a decade and no more than 80 centimeters of this 70-meter hose remained intact. It was a veritable Frankenhose which got the job done adequately enough – but there were so many leaks that for every 3 liters of water which made it to the guava trees at least 1 liter would leak onto the dirt road. I don’t think it ever occurred to Moussa that if he hadn't left the hose in the middle of the road for 10 years then maybe it wouldn’t be such a piece of shit.


And when the village of Sanadougou applied for a Peace Corps Volunteer they offered the former NGO residence to be their house, so when I arrived last September this house and the garden became mine. When I arrived I took up the daily garden watering duties, and there was this plastic hose in the concession leading from the robinet and so I watered the orange, lemon, papaya, guava and banana trees with approximately 1600 liters of running water a day – not to mention the hundreds of liters of leakage onto the road - and to be honest I didn’t give it much thought either, for I’ve never watered a garden any other way. It’s not like I had a choice either – for there was no well in the concession, the robinet was the source proximate enough to get the job done. All I had to do was flip a switch and hang around in the garden every afternoon (the only time that sufficient water pressure would ever have accumulated from the solar pump to get water flowing), and as I waited for the hose to fill each tree’s individual furrow I could busy myself weeding furrows, pruning trees, annihilating termite nests or other small tasks.

Though eventually it dawned on me that something was wrong when went around the village doing my drinking water treatment lessons and everyone I talked to – even in the neighborhoods proximate to the robinet taps – told me that they always drank turbid, wormy well water. It’s not that they didn’t want to get potable water from the robinets – whenever women went to the fetch drinking water from the robinets they were always cut off. Part of this problem could very well be attributed to the fact that the solar pump is misused (women often use the fence around the solar array to dry their laundry), but a much more likely reason why the robinets were cut off was because I and the prior occupants of my house had been exhausting the very limited supply of potable, filtered groundwater during the entire ten years of this solar pump/robinet system’s existence.

By the time I finally put two and two together I felt like the world’s biggest douchebag. Here I am supposed to be helping the people in Sanadougou improve the quality of their drinking water, and every day I’m taking 2,000 liters of the best water in town and using it to water my papaya trees. That's enough potable drinking water for 40 adults to use for their daily drinking and cooking needs. What’s worse, each time I water the garden with this Franken-hose I’m taking another 500 liters of potable drinking water to water a big mud puddle in the street. I had to put an end to this.

I tried cutting this garden off of potable robinet water cold turkey. I talked to the doctor Diaraman next door and he said that I could water the garden with water from his well. So for about a week I would walk to his well with a pair of buckets and fill them with well bags and walk them to the garden, go back and do the same ad infinitum. Like I said, manually irrigating a garden is a pain in the ass. The degree of the pain in the ass of this chore could be expressed by the mathematical expression: (2.5 well bags to fill a bucket) x (4 buckets of water for each fruit tree) x (each bucket has to be carried 100 meters from the well to the tree) x [(5 papaya trees) + (5 guava trees) + (5 banana trees) + (4 lemon trees) + (1 orange tree)]. For a week I did next to nothing from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep but pull well bags and haul buckets of water for this garden, and even then my efforts were so inadequate that all the trees started to wilt. The whole stint I could not help but think of how much of a waste of my time and taxpayer money this was, and after a week of manually irrigating 20 water-intensive fruit trees I threw in the towel.

Neither the public robinet and the Franken-hose nor my neighbor’s well was a satisfactory source of water. Towards the end of my experiment in manual irrigation I seriously considered taking my machete to every last tree in this garden and giving my jatigi a few months worth of firewood. The Raskolnikov in me thought that chopping down these fruit trees would put 2000 liters of robinet water back on the grid for people to drink, I would save hours each day that I could otherwise spend building nyegens and altogether benefit the general will of all society. I really considered doing it. However, as much as the lure of creative destruction appealed to me I realized that in a subsistence agriculturalist society where children are dying of malnutrition and people break their backs just to feed their families with millet goop and leaf sauce – and where most people are content drinking muddy well water anyway, it would be absolutely incomprehensible why anyone would take a machete to an enviable grove of papayas, guavas, bananas, lemons and oranges. No one would understand the boon for public health, and I would go down in Sanadougou history as the white guy who destroyed a perfectly good garden.

Faced with this dilemma, for the time being I have no choice but to continue watering the garden from the robinet. But if I am going to be misusing valuable resources, I might as well be misusing less valuable resources. So I dug a half-meter trench across the road, laid 25 meters of plastic pipe, added plastic elbows to each end and covered all but the ends up again with mud. At the moment I’m on my back from Bamako having just bought 100 meters of new rubber hose, so once I get back to site I can thread the rubber hose underground through the pipe and it will never be run over by motorcycles and donkey carts. And I am going to cover the rest with mud, sand and mulch so that it is protected from the elements and will not degrade. So for $100 worth of rubber hose and plastic piping and a week’s worth of labor I can water this garden with only 1440 liters of potable drinking water a day as opposed to 2,000 – a 28 percent decrease in the total misuse of this precious commodity. I also bought a good deal of small, clear, ultra-cheap siphon hose so that I can burn some holes with hot pins and make a drip irrigation system to lace throughout all the trees – if this works and I cover it all with more mulch to reduce evaporation, I can make my execrable misallocation of potable drinking water tremendously more efficient in terms of time and application.

This is a good start – but still quite a long way from weaning my garden from potable drinking water. To feel content on this modest achievement would be like my mom who traded her Ford Explorer for a Toyota Prius and now goes around thinking that by driving a hybrid she is saving the world from global warming – every time she drives her fuel-efficient car she’s certainly emitting less carbon dioxide than otherwise and that is certainly commendable, but she’s still burning petroleum and emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I will not rest until I can water my fruit trees with zero liters of water from the solar pump/robinet system.

I needed a well. This was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision. This is the peak of hot season when the water table is at its absolute low point and thus the one window of opportunity I have for well-digging; though for insurance reasons Peace Corps Washington prohibits Volunteers from descending into wells without an appropriate helmet and safety equipment which I do not have. So I could either wait until all the paperwork went through to apply for well construction safety equipment and the climate aligned once again – which would be next year’s hot season – or I could pay someone else to do it now. So I rounded up Sanadougou’s best well-diggers and paid them the going rate – $80 – for an 8 meter well. It was kind of embarrassing being the Peace Corps Volunteer here to dig wells and not being able to so much as step foot inside the well, but I made up for my injured manhood by spending a week serving these nice men a constant supply of filtered, treated water and tea and sugar.

So now I have the equipment to lead a new rubber hose from the robinet underground to what will soon be a working drip irrigation system which will require no more work than a flick of a switch to water all of my papayas and bananas, two lemons and one guava tree - and I will also have a hole in the ground which I can use to water the rest of the guavas, lemons and the orange tree with buckets of well water. Once I have all of this set up by the end of the week I should be able to effortlessly irrigate the front row of trees with only 1040 liters of potable drinking water a day, and I can water all of the guavas, lemons and the orange tree in the back with only 28 buckets of water a day. Compared to a week prior, this garden will be consuming 48 percent less water from the solar pump/robinet system – but this irrigation overhaul will not be complete until those 1040 liters of potable drinking water which my papayas, bananas and lemons are consuming can be drunk by human beings.

The first thing I need to do is to do some top-well construction and build a concrete platform so that I can install a metal door so that I can pull water from the well when I need to and I don’t have to worry about James or Snoop chasing after lizards during the night and falling down to their watery demise. And I’m going to have to find some large, sturdy tree trunks or invest in some sort of finer material so that I can hand a pulley and reduce the workload in pulling well bag after well bag. Donné donné…

What I want to eventually do is to build a cistern with a storage capacity of 2,000 liters. I am going to build a platform fairly close to the well so that I can build the cistern at least 50 centimeters above ground, and the cistern itself is not going to be all that much different from the mud granaries which everyone in this town has in their concession – only my water granary is going to be built with concrete and lined with cement. And then I can buy a foot-powered Nafasoro pump so that I can put one hose down the well, the other in the cistern so that I can fill the cistern with well water. And by this point, I can attach the drip irrigation hosing to the cistern, and with an hour’s worth of pumping the foot pedals each day – which is kind of like working out on a stair machine – I can fill the cistern, turn a handle, and the garden will be watered with the force of gravity.

Once I have constructed the top-well platform, the cistern, and rigged it all together with a Nafasoro pump and drip irrigation hosing I will be able to water this magnificent garden of papayas, guavas, bananas, lemons and oranges exclusively with murky well water, and every molecule of filtered, potable drinking water in the solar pump/robinet system will be available for human consumption. And most importantly, my butt is going to look awesome.

The Revolution of Rising Expectations

November approaches. Operation Sphincter Plug trudges into its second month. It seems as though my campaign to rid Sanadougou of water-borne diarrhea is going to be a long, hard slog. The more I realize that so few people have any means of measuring the depth of their well water with the metric system, I now measure the man of the household’s forearm and tell them to measure their wet rope with the relative unit of “arm-lengths”.

The further I travel into the murky depths of the Malian fecal-oral cycle, the more I realize how incredibly primitive is the system of English units. It is a system intended for people who do not understand the concept of abstract scientific constants. The only reason why I need to teach this very limited system of measuring things in relation to one’s arm is that I am trying to teach well treatment to a largely illiterate population whose grasp of mathematics is more or less confined to counting. In a society where the decimal point is comprehended only by a select elite, this system makes sense. Though it boggles my mind that the United States of America – the most powerful, most wealthy, most technologically-advanced society in the history of human civilization which has split the atom, sent men to the Moon, and decoded the human genome – still measures things in relation to a 12th century English monarch’s foot.

The wide, deep chasm between the material conditions of technological development and the actual understanding of that technology also continues to baffle me. This most directly hits home when I spend each day maintaining the village water pumps – but people would rather drink from their murky wells. Modernism and medievalism coexist like corn and beans.

My favorite case study is that of my new all-time favorite technology: solar pumping. A few years ago a French NGO recognized that during each dry season a significant portion of Sanadougou’s respective herds of cows, donkeys, sheep, goats and pigs would die from dehydration, and that the seasonal water shortage posed an acute problem for this agricultural economy. And so they decided out of the goodness of their hearts to build a solar pump. This fascinating contraption pumps excess groundwater from the rainy season to two storage towers about 20 meters high; during dry season it gradually releases a stream of water into concrete troughs for the farm animals to drink. As the name suggests, the pump and release system is powered by its own array of solar panels programmed to track the Sun’s direct radiation.

The people of my village understand very well that during dry season when the streams and ponds dry up, they should herd their animals to the watering trough. But they apparently don’t really get what those shiny blue metal things are. I realized this when I biked over to inspect the solar pump the first time early one morning to discover that the chain-link fence surrounding the solar array was draped with some lady’s laundry – blocking the most direct of the sun’s rays. I was eventually able to find the owner of the offending laundry and tried my best to explain to her that a solar array is not a very good place to hang her clothes.

“But my dresses and blankets are wet”, she protested. “If I do not put them on the fence, they will not dry.”

It’s not as though the people of Mali are completely sheltered from the outside world. Even in my remote village, everyone gathers around the family television set which shows them images of the Western life of running water, credit cards, the Internet. Imaginations are surely whetted by these general concepts and they really want these great new things, but they have difficulty understanding that progress comes gradually; e.g. that before they can build a swimming pool they should concentrate on treating their drinking water, that before I can teach them to speak English they should focus on the alphabet. History books call this “The Revolution on of Rising Expectations.”

I have come to learn about the boundless optimism of my neighbors very well as I go door to door and ask people about how we can work together on local development. What I have in mind is to building covers on wells and digging pits next to people’s latrines as rudimentary septic tanks.

One old lady says to me, “you should build an airplane.” I thought this was hilarious… until I realized that she wasn’t laughing – she was dead serious.

“If you build an airplane, then we can sell our peanuts in France.”

Trying my best to not be impolite, I asked her who – if I indeed built this airplane - would drive it all the way to Charles de Gaulle International Airport.

“Me”, the shoeless, toothless farmer replied, “I have driven a boat many times.” To understand this statement, in Bambara the word for “airplane” is pankuru – literally “jumping boat.” Every few months the farmers hear a high whistle as they are hoeing their fields, they look up and see this metal thing flying across the horizon. In the logic of the Bambara language, but for the fact that one goes in the water and one goes in the air, a Boeing 747 cannot be fundamentally all that different from a wooden canoe. After all, there is no means of ever knowing, because I can guarantee that the shoeless, toothless farmer with maybe $100 to her name will never ever set foot upon an airplane.

I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, especially when this boundless optimism and desire for change is the manna upon which the Peace Corps feeds. But it’s a difficult sell trying to channel this dreamy liberalism into a passion for eradicating diarrhea and cleaning the streets of shit and piss.