Today has been a long day. It started hot and now it is cool. We had a good storm this evening that cooled the place off. Unfortunately, it has also effected the mobile internet. It is now at the slowest mode (GSM) which is too slow to even log onto. We started the day at just after 7 AM loading up the Land-ota. (Land Rover that has had its V6 replaced with a Toyota 4 cylinder The engine mount has already broken a couple time and tonight it sounds like it is broken again.)
We headed back to Banjiram to see it the newest solar pump was in working order and to see if the other borehole we found was actually clogged with roots or just sticks and cornstalks the kids had thrown down
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We arrived at the school to find that he Principal had gone to Yola for a meeting and he had the only key for the room where the pump is stored. We got the cables from another area and found that one of the wires was loose on the cable. Eventually, we decided to go work with the other borehole while the school staff worked on getting the pump.
The other borehole appears to be as old as the village. Late 1980’s. It used to be a MonoLift progressive cavity pump spun by a diesel engine. The pump usually, outlast the diesel engine. In this case both were gone and we found a Afridev hand pump had replaced the MonoLift and it had be converted inside to a India Mark II. I have been told of this conversion but never seen one. Basically, I am told no one here knows how to work on the AfriDev so they take the riser pipe out by cutting it up as they remove it and replace the down hole parts with Mark II parts. The problem is that the AfriDev pump stroke is 225 mm long and the Mark II cylinder is made for a 125 mm pump stroke. The Afridev have a heavy duty pump handle that can put a lot of force onto the connecting rods. There was a rod and cylinder sitting near the borehole. The rod was bent in a couple of directions.
We had made a grappler out of some wire and two connecting rods. The camera last week had stopped at 10 feet down and showed sticks and corn stalks. The homemade grappler was much smaller and went down to 20 feet before hitting a pretty solid barrier. With a little work it seemed to penetrate into the obstruction but did not grab anything to bring to the surface. We decided to add the rod that was on site. We were pounding hard with the three rods, when a man came up and confirmed that it was roots and probably a layer of rocks, sticks and other things. He had been working with a driller that was hired to drill another borehole on the edge of town. He lost his drill bit down the hole . The rig is sitting there by the village but driller has left. The man explained that the driller brought his compressor over to blow out the hole. He got past the blockage and hit water at 8 meters. Lots of roots came up out of the hole. We wish we had talked to him last week. The borehole appears to have a 6-inch steel casing. If we are able to cut the roots out think we might be able to insert a 4-inch steel casing inside the 6-inch casing past the roots and then use a cement groat to seal the area between the casings. This way we may be able to get this borehole working at a fraction of the cost of a new borehole. We will need to make a root cutter and have the men of the town use it to cut the roots.
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| View from the top of the water tank. |
We went back to the school. They had been able to get the door open and get the pump out. It did not look promising. The underwater electrical connection looked corroded and had been taped up with electrical tape. After not being able to get it to start with the existing solar panels we decided to take to the repair shop in Yola and see if it is repairable.(picture is from the top of the elevated tank. The line for water extends another 10 or fifteen feet out of the picture. The wait for someone arriving now is about 4 hours.There seems to be a constant argument going at the water point.
Leaving Banjiram no worse than they were when we arrived we headed back to Yola about 1 PM. We stopped in Numan for a late lunch at a Mama Safayia Memorial Restaurant. They only serve Nigerian here and only had a fish today. I had fish with pounded corn and a green soup (sauce). This is the same soup as I had when I eat with the Easter Campers at the Deaf Centre. The difference was this was better. It had less potash in it. It tasted like spinach.
When we got back to Yola it was only 2:30 PM but I was hot and tired. I took a quick ½ bucket shower and changed into a tee shirt. At 3:00 we drove to City Internet Café as the raid approached. For the next almost 5 hours we did what would have take less than an hour in the US. We completed the online Visa application for Yakubu to come to the US. We had started the application the previous day and had spent 3 hours at another Café and were almost finished. The storm affected both the Zain mobile internet and the internet at the Café. We jumped back and forth between the Zain modem and the wireless internet depending on what was working. The system had a time-out security feature. If you did not complete a section in the required time you had to log back in and start the section over. I could not even guess how many time we logged back in. Finally, we finished the application and started on the online Visa Interview Appointment process. We got to the point of entering the information of the bank receipt for the $140 application fee. Here we are stuck. The bank receipt is almost a year old and is good for one year. The US Embassy had now switched banks from UBA Bank to GT Bank. GT has an online system that registers your receipt. Our receipt was not found. It was too late to contact the Embassy so we went to the Feedback page and left a message explaining our problem and we emailed the website. We hope to hear back by Friday and finish the Visa Interview Appointment Request.
Power came on at midnight and the modem is working slowly. So I have edited this post a little and uploaded some pictures.
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