Expect the unexpected

Imanuael Medina (IM) is a PCG church that is located smack dab in the middle of the urban suburb of Medina in the greater Accra area.  If you look at last year's blog, I wrote of the history and challenges of the system at IM.  We had a follow up visit with the minister and elders to get an udpate on their progress to improve their volumes of clean water produced each month.

The brief summary on IM is it has 2,000 members - don't get that number confused with financial wherewith all.  IM does appear to have at least a few members that have made themselves a better life than what may be reflected in the community around IM, but the neighbohood is poor (understatement) and although big numbers - each probbaly brings a little to offering each Sunday.

IM leases a portion of their facility to a school.  IM does not run the school but certainly provides more than just land and a building.  Clean water is identfied as one of those items that IM wants to provide as their system increases volume.  I forget the number of kids in the school, but it is ceratinly in the several hundreds based on what we saw during our visit. 

In the meeting we learned a few things:

The problem with their rain water harvesting system has been solved by IM constructing a filter between the outflow of the rain water harvest pipe and the inflow pipe to their cistern.  This has eliminated the pipes getting clogged with leaves and such.  The cistern is full!

 

As part of last year's update, IM told us that bottle size was a problem.  The reason - many of their congregation and mission services are right there in the neighborhood or on the grounds of IM.  Carrying around 5 gallon bottles for these events and services is just too cumbersom.  Where they can use 5 gallon bottles, i.e. IM sanctuary - they use them.  So this trip we agreed on the right bottle size and we believe this will give IM the ability to serve and produce more water for their events & missions.

IM had also modified the entry to their cistern to a "hatch" verses a concrete block which will allow the operators to have better/easier access to the cistern to monitor cistern levels and deal with any problems.

It was very interesting to Jim and me that IM had made these changes to their system given their low volumes and given what we knew about their bottle size challenges from last year.

IM still faces the same challenge as other users of rain water harvesting and that is at some point the rain stops.  Rain water harvesting is all about planning for when there is no rain and that involves being prudent as you use the rain water and it involves having either addtional storage tanks, i.e. that is what Dora does at BOPA, and/or having water brought in by truck - expensive.

We left IM with a better understanding of how IM uses the clean water and how they plan to use the clean water going water going forward.  IM appears to have the desire to increase volume, they appear to have the desire to use the system for their events and services and their mission work in/around IM. This is one where all the "puzzle pieces" are there, but maybe not in the right place right - but laid out on the table such that one can see it could be very close to coming together.