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