Final Blog

Summary

We are now at the end of our project here in Cambodia. It has been a very challenging but productive summer. The main outcomes of the project where:

1. Setting up a distribution network for CWP's in the Poipet areas
2. Facilitating in the partnership between CHO and 1001 Fontaines where hopefully their system will be installed in the safe haven and AIDs clinic and provide clean drinking water for the children, as well as providing drinking water for several surrounding villages. Furthermore it will produce a profit which will help improve the safe haven site.
3. Setting up and developing a water treatment awareness programme that will hopefully be carried out in over 19 villages in the area.

Furthermore we donated $2000 to 1001 Fontaines to help them develop a promotional trailer that will contain a section on water contamination and aother section on how to treat the water. This will hopefully be a more effective way of educating the communities on water health.

We donated $5000 to CHO's water and sanitation department to help develop the water treatment programme and help fund the 1001 fontaines system if they decide this is the correct way forward.

We would like to stress that for any donation we gave, we made sure that the NGO knew they are welcome to spend the money on whatever they feel best, and that we made only recommendations for what we thought it may be spent on.

We would like to thank everyone who contributed and donated to the project - we hope you agree with how we donated it!



Next year EWB Edinburgh will be running another branch project - who knows where too! So until then, thank you for reading and goodbye!

The Cambodia Water Project Team

A fun fair, a waterfall, a donation, and a gaggle of women going shopping

Jack, Dany (from 1001 fontaines) and I spent the weekend having fun around Battambang. On Saturday evening we went to a fair. It was Dany's first time on a ride and her screams were scary.
It's difficult to make out in this photo, but Danny is screaming loudly whilst Jack and I try to work out whether she's having fun or in extreme pain.

On Sunday we went on a day trip to Pailin, where there is a nice waterfall. We also went for a trek through the jungle. Jack managed to get a leech on his toe and another three came after him shortly after. He was then bitten by a fierce ant whilst Dany and I had no problems.

All of the photos look quite similar unfortunately, I suppose that's the nature of a forest:

There was a rock slide at the bottom. We slid down it a few times, Jack almost went over the edge.

1001 Fontaines Donation
On Monday we went back to the 1001 Fontaines to give a donation from the money we raised before coming out here. We think they're doing a brilliant job but the weak link is marketing and awareness of what is safe drinking water. Therefore we hope the money will be used to create and run a water education trailer. This will include an example sand filter and a microscope to show the effect of UV light on water. We think this will be an effective way to get the message across about clean water.

Back in Poipet
Jack and I are now back in Poipet. Whilst holding a community meeting today we offered to take some of the community to the nearest pharmacy so that they could buy chlorine tablets. Doing this we hope that they will go back themselves to buy more tablets next time. Ceramic water purifiers, which we are very keen on, are beyond their means for now although they may be able to afford them during the rice harvest.

Once of the women was 68 years old and thought I was 30, she was more interested in commenting on how handsome we were than water purification. So tomorrow we are taking a gaggle of women shopping: I forsee chaos ensuing!

Angus

1001 Fontaines

This week CHO are on holiday for the whole week, so our project is effectively halted until they come back. Therefore Angus and I have spent the week in Battambang working for 1001 Fontaines.

Sunday

We took a boat from Siem Reap to Battambang. We were told by the boat operator that it would only take 6 hours to get there. It was an early start as we had to be on the bus (that takes us to the boat) for 6.20 am. Annoyingly however, once on this bus it continues to drive around Siem Reap stopping at cafés and shops until it has satisfied itself that all the tourists have given away money. Only then will it drive to the boat. We were also the last bus to get to the boat (unsurprisingly) and so we were greeted with the site of a jam packed boat with no seats left on the deck. This meant Angus and I had to sit on the roof with the luggage. This turned out to be blessing in disguise as it gave us panoramic views and cooled us down with a strong breeze.

First we went through the floating village. It’s a bit of a strange feeling going through the village as the tourist boat is completely out of place and was high enough that you could see directly into peoples huts. It almost felt as if we were spying on their private lives. The village passed quickly enough and we sailed out into the Tonle Sap lake. I took a time lapse video of the floating village:

After an hour or so on the lake we then went up the river that leads to Battambang. This was a long and very windy river that has many small fishing villages stationed along its banks. The boat got stuck several times on the banks and had to be pushed off with giant pieces of bamboo. We also met a French couple on the roof who had a tandem bike with them and happened to be cycling around the world.

Week with 1001 Fontaines

We spent the week visiting several 1001 Fontaines treatment systems and various rural villages. It is a fantastic system that appears to be quick complex on paper, but when seen in reality it is very simple to operate and maintain. It has two main sections: Pre-treatment and secondary treatment. The pre-treatment includes coagulation and flocculation using Aluminium Sulphate and a sand filter that includes activated carbon. From there it goes to the secondary treatment stage which includes 60,25,10,5 and 1 micron fliters and then a UV lamp. From there the water is safe to drink and it is stored in sterilized 20 litre bottles before being transferred to the customers door by a large motorbike and trailer. The water turns out to be incredibly cheap, roughly 1 pence per litre.

We also spent 4 days with the promotional team. This team walks around the villages talking to the families and lets them know that they can buy water from 1001 Fontaines. They also help educate the residents on the importance of clean water.

There were some interesting challenges that 100 Fontaines face. One problem is that people are happy to buy water from them in the dry season, however a large percentage do not buy in the wet season as they have a plentiful amount of rainwater. Rainwater can be safe to drink if the correct procedures are followed, such as the first flush system and closed clean storage, however nearly all the families who drink rainwater do not follow these precautions and thus the water can be easily contaminated. Another challenge they have faced is consistency of hygiene procedures followed by the system operator. They took us to a sight where the operator had neglected his duties and thus had been removed from the system and replaced with a far more dedicated operator. Through negligence of operation the system lost many storage bottles and customers. However as 1001 Fontaines consistently monitor the system they were able to help the site owner to solve the problem.

We spent a few days riding on the distribution trailer visiting families who were buying and families next door to them that might be interested. We got to meet nearly 50 families and sat with them for around 20 minutes at a time which gave us a lot of time to understand the way family life operates in Cambodia and people’s attitudes to water.

In doing this, we ended up in some interesting situations. We meet a woman who was making rice/coconut cakes. We got to see the whole process of how they are made including steaming them over a coal fire. When asked if she would like to buy water from 1001 fontaines she replied that she did not have enough money. So Angus and I came up with the idea that we would buy and eat enough cakes on the spot from her so she could afford water. We ended up having 24 cakes! That gave her enough money for nearly 100 litres of water. We coined the act ‘Cakes for Clean Water’. Unfortunately however on the same day we had challenged ourselves to only eating rice for the whole day. So I feel we slightly went overboard by the end of the day!

Through the week we got to meet a lot of interesting people. We met a family who made crazy patchwork shorts, a family that picked fruit with a giant 30ft piece of bamboo, a family who made concentrated fish paste and the cakes woman.

The most interesting food of the week was most certainly the Frog Roti. When Dany said she had ordered us this I thought little bits of Frog meet on a skewer. How wrong I was. It turned out to be a rather large entire frog that had been spit roasted. We were given an entire frog each. I started to nibble the bits of meat I could find on it, however when I looked at Dany she had eaten the entire leg, including the bone. It was then that we discovered that you are supposed to eat the entire frog, bone and all. It took a lot of concentration and even more chewing to crunch the bone small enough to swallow. The spine was a particular challenge. All in all though, after trying to forget about the bone, it was actually pretty tasty!

We would like to say a big thanks for 1001 Fontaines, especially Chay Lo for his generous hospitality and Dany and Samnieng for moto’ing us all over the region and for putting up with our bad khmer and bad jokes!We will return to CHO on Monday with fresh ideas and only 2 weeks to complete what we set out to do.

Jack

A weekend in Battambang

Even the best of us need a bit of time off. We've already seen all the sights there are to see in Poipet so this weekend we traveled two hours to the nearest big town: Battambang.

View Cambodia Project in a larger map

On Saturday we hired a tuk tuk for the day. Our first stop was the 'bamboo train'. Train maybe isn't the right word though: flimsy bamboo platforms are placed on top of two axels. A small 5HP motor is stuck on top and they rattle along like that.
These funky trains run along a railway that once connected Phnom Penh with Poipet and beyond. The rails are now quite buckled and it was not a smooth ride. The most amazing bit is how they overcome the limitation of having only a single track: when you meet another train: the train with less people is dismantled to the side of the railway to let the heavier train through. Perhaps the best way of understanding all of this is with Jack's timelapse video:

After the bamboo train, we went to Phnom Sampov: a hill protruding from the otherwise almost entirely flat terrain. It is dotted with caves and watts (temples) which we spent some time exploring. It all seemed very special.

Alison refuses to look normal in any of my photos.

On the way back it began to rain really hard. As we arrived back in Battambang the water was flowing through the streets a foot deep. The engine of our tuk tuk flooded, amazingly he was able to restart it though.

In time the rain stopped and the floodwater subsided incredibly quickly.We went out to experience a little of Battambang. We almost got a private karaoke room but decided in the end that it was a little too weird.

The following morning we weren't feeling on top of the world so decided to chillax at a pool. The first full length swimming pool we've found! I have managed to get horribly burnt around my shoulders doing laps. Meanwhile Evelyn was making friends:

Nice shorts:

Jack and I decided to take a cooking course. First we went to the market to buy some ingredients. This included buying fish. The fish were stored alive in a bucket. One jumped out and landed on the floor in front of me! It gave me a fright but I won in the end: the fish was promptly hit on the head, it's head was chopped off and a minute later it was reduced to a fillet. The fish head was still trying to breath as it sat on the bamboo leaves.

In the end we made fish amok, red curry and lok lak. This resulted in one of the best meals we've had this far. It filled us up until we were more than full.

Now we're back into work again.

Angus

Community Heath Workshops

Following Jack´s last post we have now come to the conclusion that it should be up the families to decide what is the best method for treating their water, and our job would be to provide awareness and education on the possible ways which they could do that. The way which we approach the community is extremely important, and this is probably going to have a direct impact on the outcome of our project.

One branch of the (current) plan is to carry out a Health Workshop with communities in/around Poipet. This would be done by the CHO Water and Sanitation team, so it would continue once we leave Cambodia. CHO currently implement wells and/or ponds at nearby villages, so we thought that running a Heath workshop would be the next step to provide a better quality of life for the families. We then decided to have a meeting with Saret, the water and sanitation coordinator, to find the best way to approach communities, and to stablish a workshop style that the team strongly believes on and will be happy and feel comfortable to carry it out after we leave.

Yesterday we met with Saret and Lang to discuss their Water and Sanitation projects, and found out that they already do workshops with the communities after ponds/ wells have been installed, which is a jump forward on our plan. They normally gather 1-2 people per family to attend the workshop, which is carried out at the village, they use pictures to illustrate what is being discussed, as most people are illiterate. The goal of this workshop is to provide health education (washing your hands, basic sanitary rules, to clean cuts...) and to promote the practice of boiling water. We thought that this fit in perfectly with water treatment education materials, where we can also promote ceramic filters, so we would only be adding on a section to CHOs existing workshop.

The first problem that we were faced with was the relatively high price of ceramic pots. Families struggle to afford the $2,50 needed (contributed by 30 families) to construct a subsidized well ($1,500), hence $12 just seemed out of their reach. However, Leng and Saret did agree that the only way ceramic pots could be successfully implemented, and properly maintained, would be if their were bought by the families themselves and not given by a NGO.

Micro-loans

In order to go around the problem of the high cost of ceramic pots Chommo offered to introduce a microloan skim to families willing to buy the ceramic pots. They would pay $4 per month, for 3 months. Since the water and sanitation team already does frequent well/pond follow-ups at the communities for 2-3 years, they could also collect the payment, as well as ensure the filters are used correctly.

Approaching the communities

We think that the most effective way of raising awareness is to make families realise for themselves that some of their illnesses could be heavily related to their drinking water source. This realisation process should be done through a group discussion section rather than by us "teaching them". The discussion would involve first the location of the family water source and possible contaminates of each. Then we would explain how these contaminants could lead to diseases and ask if these diseases do occur. If that is the case, we would then move on to the 3 options which we think are are viable in this scenario: boiling, chemical tables or ceramic pots.

The next stage would be to find out how much the families know about each method, whether they already use any and what is their opinion on each of them. From there we can add on to their knowledge by providing the pros and cons of each method, the cost of each and where to find it. If we are able to get interest from the group on ceramic pots we would then let them sample the water (from our new) give a quick demonstration on how to clean it and explain the micro-loan skim.

Current steps...

Today we had a meeting with the whole water and sanitation team (which includes agriculture). We realised that these workshops do not occur as often as we hoped, which means that we won`t be able to see many of them, thus we will not be able to improve from our experience as much as we hoped for. So the way we decided to overcome this problem is by running "sample" workshops with families which CHO has previously worked with. Tomorrow we will visit 2 of these families who haven't attended this workshops in the past. We hope that from these meetings we will have a better idea on what is the most appropriate way of approaching and educating the communities.

The issue now is, who should get the micro loans, village vendors or the families directly? Would the families be able to afford replacements to maintain the filters? Could they travel 20k to Poipet to reach the local shop? And which villages should we go to?

Evelyn

Self-sustainable farms

Leng, the agriculture coordinator of CHO, took Candice (an awesome nurse volunteer) and I to see the agriculture project that CHO has done. They took us on a motorcycle adventure to the village which was about 20k out of Poipet.

The first stage of the CHO agriculture project is to find the most vulnerable families of the community. One of the farms we went to had 5 children, their mother had died and the father had to take care of all of them somehow. After selecting the families CHO then provides training, the first batch of seeds and a basic irrigation system (a long pipe). These are all the resources needed in order create a self-sustainable farm. The training involves education on methods of sowing, irrigation and how to make and use compost, as an organic fertilizer. The farm we went to received the resourses from CHO only 2 years ago, now they are completely self sustainable and are also able to sell their vegetables at the market. They also learnt that it is better to alternate the vegetables which they grow at the same area in order to maintain the quality of the soil over time.

The father and one of his son proudly showed us around the farm and their healthy vegetables. He explained to us that the families that live in that community work together, we saw about 10 people working on his farm that day. The families work on an exchange of favours basis, no money is involved. By doing that they can also learn from each other and create a closer community. The land is owned by a "rich man" from Phonon Phen, and the family has to pay rent to him. They gave us a huge "cucumber", which turned out to be a cumelon (similar taste of melon and texture of avocado, good with sugar). We also visited a smaller farm which only had morning glory. There was about 5 little girls piling the plants. Its their summer holidays now, so they can help their parents during the day.

On the way back we noticed that the farmer next door was using chemical pesticides (with no type of protection) on his crop. This is a problem we are currently facing with on the water project. Fertilizes can sometimes reach the families` water source and contaminate it. Chemicals in the water can only be removed by more sophisticated systems, such as reverse osmosis. Reverse osmosis, for example, is a very expensive system when compared to ceramic pots, for a family of 1-6 people the price from each is 300 dollars to 12 dollars respectively. Hence, reverse osmosis could only be implemented if huge subsidies are available. The best solution is to educate families on this issue, so they can make sure that the water used for drinking is not being contaminated.

Evelyn

Ceramic Pots v's Mineral Pots v's Boiling

This week we have had a brief meeting with the sales representative for Hydrologic for our province. Due to the language barrier we did not make rapid progress with him, however we managed to get the message across that we would like to help Hydrologic set up a distribution network for CWP's in the area. We then arranged a meeting for after the weekend to meet and find a vendor.

Evelyn and Angus went to meet a monk who we had made friends with with at the start of the project. It turns out by a huge coincidence that the monk had already owned a CWP for two years. He mentioned that he got it from a pharmacy opposite the CHO offices. This was a big surprise for us as up until now, our understanding was that there were no CWP vendors in Poipet.

The next day we visited the pharmacy, however it turned out that they were not selling it anymore and they could not tell us why. The next few shops sold mineral pots. We asked them a few questions about the product. These visits highlighted an important question to us that we overlooked before. Are mineral pots effective at water treatment, and if so should we not be working with a technology like that, which already has an established market?

In order to solve this conundrum we got in touch with all the contacts we have made in the past few weeks to try to ascertain if there is any solid evidence that mineral pots are not as effective as CWP's. We are still waiting on solid evidence. However several NGO's have informed us from internal studies that some brands of mineral pots may have design flaws that actually breed bacteria and may cause the water quality to worsen rather than improve. We have decided to continue working with CWP's for the very reason that they have officially been tested and are effective. However we are still looking into the effectiveness of mineral pots.....

On Tuesday we had a meeting with the sales rep for Hydrologic. We were very impressed with how efficient he was. By the time we had met him in the afternoon, he had already located two shops in Poipet that would be happy to sell CWP's. This was great news for us as we thought this may take a few weeks to do. This means we can focus strongly on working with the communities and promoting and marketing the product.

To do this we aim to work with CHO and visit communties, village chiefs, schools, hospitals and any other public venue. Another avenue we plan to work down is the provincial radio. This opportunity came around by our friend the monk! We went to visit him as he wanted us to meet his step sister who had never met a foreigner before. We ended up going in convoy on moto's with the monk through Poipet which was a bizarre experience. Through conversation with him and his sister it turns out he has his own radio show. His is going to give us a shout out tonight at the end of his show which is quite exciting. Its a bit of a weird feeling having your name read out on the radio by a monk! But we hope we can help highlight the importance of clean drinking water and CWP's through his show.

On thursday we hit another snag in our plan. The realisation that ceramic pots potentially do not treat viruses. This is a problem in itself, but becomes a bigger problem when the people most likely to buy the filters are people who already boil water, and boiling water removes viruses, so by promoting CWP's are we promoting a product that is actually worse for you than what they are already using?

Its not quite as straight forward as this though. Boiling water is very expensive, time consuming and can cause long term respiratory problems. However can that be compared to CWP's not being effective against viruses? and can they co-exist? and why are they already being distributed if this is a problem?

This is what we are now trying to solve. We will update you when we work it out. If anyone has any suggestions feel free to leave a comment!

Jack