I went to Isele with the well drilling crew to drill a well. There were 5 of us and I met the truck loaded with gear at 7 AM on schedule. Two guys had to sit on the gear in the bed of the truck and we were soon stopped at a police checkpoint. Having people in back of a truck is illegal even though it happens all the time and the fee was 20,000 tsh if we wanted a receipt or just 2,000 if we did not want a receipt. There were two police and that is what sets the fee. We paid 2,000 and continued with the two guys up top and picked up another rider shortly later.
We got to Isele and tramped around looking for good sites to drill where there is some evidence of water nearby. Isele is on a ridge and we went up and down both sides for almost two hours. The well drilling equipment is portable but you need about 1,000 gallons of water to drill a well with this equipment and water is a hard thing to get to the site. They had two 1,000 liter tanks that could be filled on the truck from a river but in the wet season you cannot drive the truck off road because the soil is soft and the slope is steep. We found a likely site where someone was drying grass seeds that they ferment to make a beverage and went to ask the village leaders for help getting water to the site by carrying in 5 gal buckets. The leaders said that people were in the fields and could not help (there were women gathering who I suspect would be happy to help but we could not proceed without authorization) so we headed on to Kising'a.
In Kising'a we had a lot of help and set up to drill above the Kisitu well which is a spring with good water. Everything looked good as we drilled 15 feet and hit sand which is evidence of a water layer. We all stayed at the pastor's house (I am feeling quite at home there now because I have spent more than two weeks there) and the next morning started drilling again with a coarser sand layer until we hit rock at 30 feet. The guys installed casing in the bore hole and tested the water delivery but it was too slow. They then tried drilling lower down and hit rock at ten feet and broke the clutch on the drill engine. This area appears to be a rock slab with a sand layer delivering water to the spring and that Kising'a is built on a lot of rock at 5400 feet.
We went to one of the hand dug wells we had done in 2007 that had a broken pump and installed the pump we had brought. This well was only 15 feet deep but the water was 4 feet from the surface so there was more than ten feet of water. The diameter of the hand dug wells is more than a meter so there is quite a bit of water there and this well always performed through the dry season. The water came out crystal clear but water from a well this shallow would have to be boiled or treated with water guard tablets. In a place where most of the surface springs are yellow, turbid water, water like this is great to have. I learned a lot about the problems of drilling in a place like Kising'a and it was fun to get to know the crew who spoke reasonable english.
Picture of a picture of the simba (lion) they had in the village about a year ago that was killing livestock and keeping people out of their fields. Very rare for a lion to stray this far out of the parks and it had to be killed:
We had lots of help and even more onlookers in Kising'a:
LS-100 mud drill rig. Mud is pushed down the drill pipe to push cuttings to the surface and preventing the bore hole from collapsing. The mud is recirculated from two pits and 5 foot lengths of pipe are added as we drill.
Cuttings right to left at 5 foot pipe intervals showing red dirt changing to coarser sand:
Standard 1 and 2 (first and second grade) primary students gathered for a puppet talk on sanitation given by Asha who is in our crew. We think our classrooms are crowded.
Pastor Wihale and parish member happy to have the well near the primary school and church working again:
We got to Isele and tramped around looking for good sites to drill where there is some evidence of water nearby. Isele is on a ridge and we went up and down both sides for almost two hours. The well drilling equipment is portable but you need about 1,000 gallons of water to drill a well with this equipment and water is a hard thing to get to the site. They had two 1,000 liter tanks that could be filled on the truck from a river but in the wet season you cannot drive the truck off road because the soil is soft and the slope is steep. We found a likely site where someone was drying grass seeds that they ferment to make a beverage and went to ask the village leaders for help getting water to the site by carrying in 5 gal buckets. The leaders said that people were in the fields and could not help (there were women gathering who I suspect would be happy to help but we could not proceed without authorization) so we headed on to Kising'a.
In Kising'a we had a lot of help and set up to drill above the Kisitu well which is a spring with good water. Everything looked good as we drilled 15 feet and hit sand which is evidence of a water layer. We all stayed at the pastor's house (I am feeling quite at home there now because I have spent more than two weeks there) and the next morning started drilling again with a coarser sand layer until we hit rock at 30 feet. The guys installed casing in the bore hole and tested the water delivery but it was too slow. They then tried drilling lower down and hit rock at ten feet and broke the clutch on the drill engine. This area appears to be a rock slab with a sand layer delivering water to the spring and that Kising'a is built on a lot of rock at 5400 feet.
We went to one of the hand dug wells we had done in 2007 that had a broken pump and installed the pump we had brought. This well was only 15 feet deep but the water was 4 feet from the surface so there was more than ten feet of water. The diameter of the hand dug wells is more than a meter so there is quite a bit of water there and this well always performed through the dry season. The water came out crystal clear but water from a well this shallow would have to be boiled or treated with water guard tablets. In a place where most of the surface springs are yellow, turbid water, water like this is great to have. I learned a lot about the problems of drilling in a place like Kising'a and it was fun to get to know the crew who spoke reasonable english.
Picture of a picture of the simba (lion) they had in the village about a year ago that was killing livestock and keeping people out of their fields. Very rare for a lion to stray this far out of the parks and it had to be killed:
We had lots of help and even more onlookers in Kising'a:
LS-100 mud drill rig. Mud is pushed down the drill pipe to push cuttings to the surface and preventing the bore hole from collapsing. The mud is recirculated from two pits and 5 foot lengths of pipe are added as we drill.
Cuttings right to left at 5 foot pipe intervals showing red dirt changing to coarser sand:
Standard 1 and 2 (first and second grade) primary students gathered for a puppet talk on sanitation given by Asha who is in our crew. We think our classrooms are crowded.
Pastor Wihale and parish member happy to have the well near the primary school and church working again:
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