Pompe à eau

It took around a week to resolve the water crisis at SIL. I’ll (John) write this one in first person, as I’ve tried in third and it’s a mission! It’s pretty much the biggest situation I’ve had to deal with so far and I wouldn’t have managed without some bizarre examples of the Lord’s timing and the input of a couple of key people. The sequence of events went roughly as follows:

Tuesday morning the submersible pump in the bore that supplies all of SIL’s water failed. The circuit breakers were burnt out and no amount of fiddling was looking like getting the system going again. I was pulled off the construction site mid-afternoon as no progress had been made all day and the workers had tried all they could think of.

A Swedish guy called Leif happened to visit SIL that afternoon as he was in N’Djamena getting ready to head East to Mongo for a year to drill around 30 bore holes (some coincidence!). Leif and his team should have already left town the day before, however maintenance on their vehicle had taken longer than anticipated – thank you Africa!

After working in the mission field in Sudan for many years, Leif had tried to set up projects in Chad once before, only to be thwarted by unprecedented levels of bureaucracy and red tape. During his first attempt, SIL had allowed him to store his drilling rig on the compound while he tried to sort things out, so he was keen to lend us a hand now we obviously needed it!

So in the dark on Tuesday night, with the help of Leif and another guy on his team from Malawi (he had also been a missionary in Sudan for some time), we pulled up the pump and the 27 metres of pipe it was attached to. Thank the Lord for His circumstantial timing; we would have been in a precarious situation without the help of these guys.

Wednesday morning: new day, same problems! David, the Chadian Centre Manager at SIL arranged for the supply of water to the centre from the local water cart dudes. There was a barrel to keep full at each of the three accommodation buildings and we were contracted to supply water for the construction of the new building, so we also ensure there was a constant flow of carts for the construction site. I can’t remember how much we had to pay, but each hand-pushed water cart carries twelve 20L plastic jerry cans and maybe filled 2 of the accommodation water barrels. Construction slowed right down due to the water supply rate.

In the meantime, David and I spent all day driving around N’Djamena with our purchasing lady Halime trying to find a decent quality submersible pump and new piping to replace the deceased version now lying in the dirt at SIL. Eventually we found a guy in the main market who said he could supply us with a new pump (no such thing as specialty stores here, or even hardware stores for that matter). We jumped back into our Hilux (apart from sitting and driving on the wrong sides, the vehicles are familiar here) and followed our robed guide and his buddies in their beat-up ute to a random side street, then on foot down a dusty back alley to an equally dusty small mud-brick warehouse type building (I guess you would call it that). This was a fascinating little adventure really and sure enough, there were warped shelves full of pumps and associated gear covered in, you guessed it, layers of dust!

Most of the hardware here is Chinese or the goods that don’t pass quality control elsewhere. It is seriously hard to find anything that feels like it won’t break in a ridiculously short amount of time. I had tried to communicate a few decent pump brands, like Grundfos and Davey to Halime, but the only pump we could find that matched our specs was a Shimge (Heard of it? Nope, neither had I. Sound Chinese? I think so). We didn’t have the time to throw away more time looking for a better quality match, so Halime got us a decent price and we headed back to SIL with the pipes we bought at the Grand Mosque Markets and the new pump.

Late Wednesday evening, we gave Leif a call and he still didn’t have his vehicle back (thanks Lord!), so he came straight over to help provide us with the manpower to get this thing back in the ground (27m of galvanized pipe with a pump at the end is not easy to lower into a borehole by hand). By around 8pm Wednesday night, the pump was in position and there was a bird’s nest of Chadian electrical wiring still to sort out. Time for bed after two 13-14hr days!

Out with old (foreground - attached to rusty old pipe), in with the new - yeah Shimge (China some?)

All hands on deck to lower the pump and 20 odd metres of piping into the bore hole (yep I'm up the tower supporting the top end of the pipe) 

If you want to draw a crowd, apparently having a water crisis when the ambient temperatures are consistently above 40C is a pretty good way to do it!

I wish I took a photo of the electrical junction box before I cleaned it up. It was a scary piece of work. Thursday and Friday I basically worked on my own trying to figure out what else ran through the junction box and how to wire up the new pump properly so its cut-off switches worked and I didn’t fry the new system as soon as I flicked the power back on. I received a little input here and there from the other males on centre, but we were all in the same boat where electrical experience was concerned.

After cutting and reconnecting all of the old wires to tidy up the box so that the next person could actually make some sense of what was happening, I had the pump connected and it was time to flick the main circuit breaker back on. I called David Oumar, closed my eyes, held my breath and…click! The switch stayed where it was, check; no funny smells, check; the led for the pump switch came on, you beauty; time to try the pump switch! With a hum and vibration in the pipes, the pump came on and water began to flow – success, thank you Lord!

We realized after running the pump for half a day that the issues with the water system went deeper than a broken pump. When the pump is running, the centre has filter water for drinking, as water is pumped straight to a central filter unit and then around to the different apartments under pumped pressure. For washing, the toilet and any other non-drinking use, the pump also sends water from the bore straight up to a tower to a water tank which then gravity feeds water around the centre. Each apartment has one filter tap and the rest are from the water tower.

The SIL water tower

When the pump stops/fails, the filtered water stops immediately, but the water tank still takes around 24hrs empty, so the centre has limited non-filtered water for a short while. This wasn’t the case this time – when the pump stopped, all the water stopped. After pumping water up the tower to the tank for half a day we realized that the water was simply running straight back out of the tank and the tank wasn’t filling!

This problem was the last piece of the puzzle and no-one on centre could figure out what was happening – our best theory was that we had a massive leak somewhere and we were losing as much water as we could pump out of the bore. Think comic strip where someone is secretly pumping water over the wall at night into a water truck and then selling the water back to us the next day J

Lief had finally got out to Mongo, so he was no longer contactable. Thankfully John, the director of AIM in Chad was around and available to have a look at the system. John is definitely a handy guy to have around. As I guess would often be the case in Africa, if you have a role fixing problems of a practical nature, you soon gain a lot of knowledge about a whole range of things. John is one of these people.

It turns out that there is a non-return valve at the bottom of bore holes to stop water that is pumped out returning to where it came from. Having not dealt with pumps before, I didn’t know this, but it makes sense. Thankfully, you can add that little valve at the top of the bore and it will do the same job. So after one more day driving around N’Djamena with John to find the required parts, then install them (after a small lesson about the quality of fittings in Chad for me which nearly delayed us yet again [AIM John – just after pipe snapped off in T-junction] “you were pulling on that pipe like it was made in Australia John”) we were apparently done!

There have been a few little teething problems since, but the worst of those we managed to sort out in a day. We have essentially had running water ever since and for that I give God the glory – talk about being thrown into the deep end!

This A4 thank you card was organised and illustrated by one of the SIL linguistics ladies - after such a hectic week or so, receiving such thanks for my efforts was very moving (see if you can guess who Katie and I are)