Saturday Part 1

We left Accra this morning to head north to Kibi to the Presbyterian College of Education.  This was about a 2.5 hour drive to get to Kibi on the road north toward Kumasi.

KPCE has about 500 students that live on campus and another 150 students that commute to the campus from the surrounding area.  The good news for KPCE is that it has 3 active bore holes on its campus.  The bad news for KPCE is that the bore holes are spread out across the large campus with no central distribution.

Our goal for this trip was to assess Kibi as a potential new site for a LWW system.  Shari & Forrest did a field test of the water from one of KPCE bore holes and from a distribution point inside the administration building.  Both field tested fairly well.

We asked the headmaster and his staff to obtain a deeper testing of the water by a laboratory here in Ghana.  The KPCE staff will make this happen and report back to us.

KPCE has a couple of spare poly-tanks available and a room adjacent to the kitchen available to house the system.  KPCE would need to erect a suitable tower to hold at least 1 poly-tank of the processed/clean water from the system.

One aspect of KPCE having a LWW system is that students from KPCE travel out to local communities for teachings and learnings.  The students would be empowered with the knowledge and use of clean water that they could demonstrate and teach with their expereience at KPCE.  The staff agreed that they could weave the LWW health and hygiene into the students curriculum on an ongoing basis to make the knowledge transfer and demonstration part of a LWW system sustainable.

We left KPCE with hopes that KPCE is a good candidate for a LWW system.

Now for the interesting fact about Kibi.  Kibi is an area of Ghana where gold can be found on or close to the surface of the ground.  So drift back to your American History class and the chapter within the chapter on the American Gold Rush and all the stories about the washing, eroding, & polluting of the California landscape - well Kibi is one of these areas in Ghana.  The river next to the KPCE is polluted with severe erosion and chemicals/minerals from the washing and dredging.  The river borders the KPCE campus.  Beatiful - but harmful landscape.