MZ irrigation pictures update

Yesterday I was in MZ village and grabbed a few updated pictures of the irrigation project.  I had not been there for over a month, so it was exciting to finally see how things wrapped up before the snow came (which has now melted), and how the community were feeling about the completion of the pipeline.

This is the completed check dam and ditch that feeds the settling reservoir.  It looks real good.

Here's the reservoir with it's lid on.  The first air vent is also pictures (brown pipe beyond the reservoir standing 1 meter tall).  There are four air vents that make sure the up-and-down pipe has the best gravity water flow possible.

Here's the view from down the valley.  The white gate in the ditch is a small measure to protect the reservoir from flooding.

Below is the suspended valley crossing.  The suspended pipe is 42 meters long!

Two men from the village with my staff member who is most technically-inclined (and technically-daring!  He's willing to try anything, so I am usually raining him in with safety considerations, i.e. wear a mask when you weld, only do dynamiting when the work crew retires for the day, use a safety cable when winching the bridge into place, etc.)

The foundations that the suspension cables went over were not perfectly true, but they are doing the trick.

Here is air vent #3, which cycles through blowing air and water until the pipe is completely full from beginning to end.  It takes about 18 hours for the 800 meter pipe to completely fill and flow well after a shut-off and repair.

This is the end of the pipe for now.  The community is eager to build a reservoir at this location in the spring.  The best flow we have had so far is 2.6 liter per second from this 2-inch pipe.  We are hoping to improve the venting or intake in order to get the full 4 liters per second that we planned for.  I wish I knew more about hydrology!

I had tea with the 104-year-old (or so he claims) elder of the village, and was pleased to hear him say, "I've lived here all my life and there has never been water here before.  Now look at the water flow, and look at the new potential for growth here."  Here is one of his grandsons collecting water for his mother to wash clothes and dishes with.

MZ village project pictures

This is the village we call "MZ" (Nov 2013)

For 2013 the big project in MZ village was constructing an irrigation pipeline to move water 1/2 a mile from a mountain spring to the middle of the village.  We really got to know the community well by working through plans and challenges in this project.

Below is the site of the check dam that diverts the mountain spring into a small reservoir for funneling to the pipe.  We built this carefully, with spring floods in mind.  Breaking through the rock to make a sure foundation was a huge challenge, but the men were able to a 50cm-30cm foundation, without dynamite.  Progression of this site is seen counter-clockwise from the top-left.  

Below is the other view of the dam and reservoir as it progressed (again top-left, clockwise).  It took two blasts of dynamite to open up space for a small (1.5 meter x 2 meter) reservoir.  The dam diverts water to one side of the valley, down a short canal to the reservoir, which functions as a settling tank before water enters the pipe.

Below is the construction of a suspended valley crossing.  We couldn't afford to lose the elevation in cross the valley, so we reinforced the pipe and hung 42 meters of it like a suspension bridge.  Putting this up in one piece was a nervous day, but we were successful.

Below is some pics of the community members and workhorses of the project.  No one can say that this was our organization's project, because without these men, it would not have happened!

If you want to read some of the narrative stories of this project, just click on the labels "Agriculture" or "Irrigation" below this post or on in the Labels list in the right-side column.

Before the snow flies - projects update

Last week I was in the villages last week, and here are the short updates on where the falls projects are at:

MZ – The big irrigation water supply project is nearly done!  The checkdam, ditch, and settling reservoir were just 1 day from completion.  The foundations for the suspension bridge were cured and ready for the pipe to be suspended.  The 830-meter-long ditch was dug and the pipe was installed and only the outlets remained.  The community has continued to go through some challenges deriving from differences of opinions, differences in priorities, and weak planning and informing on their part.  I’m glad that these struggles have gotten easier as we’ve progressed through this project.  Part of it was the necessary building of relationship and trust with the community, part of it was little mistakes, assumptions, and miscommunications that added up, and part of it can be seen as just an ordinary part of community work!

AQ – Big encouragement in visiting this village!  This was the community that was so angry with us not so long ago, and now that they have access to water in each of their three neighborhoods the mood has completely changed!  The construction of this project was not too difficult; once we got through the careful surveying it was just a matter of bringing the few extra materials and letting the community get to work.  The solution has not been perfect, because the electricity power supply from a nearby hydroelectricity plant has not been very steady, and that causes the flow rate to go up and down, causing some people to say that they are still not getting their fair share of water.  The water level in the well itself is also down in this season, so we are monitoring that.  There are still risks to watch for, but at the moment it is encouraging to see that this simple project provided a good solution.

We also went to KT, but I still need to back up and tell out about the latrine work there.  That’s for another night!

FYI: I am storing up a number of blog ideas, and hope to get them out before we send our next newsletter in mid-January.  In the week after Christmas, the family will also be going with me to one village for one day, just to enjoy a visit and see the MZ irrigation project.  That project should be completely done then, and we’ll try to get a number of pictures that we can post on the here for your enjoyment!

By the way, snow has fallen!  We got a couple inches last week, and cold temps have followed, so we are done with cement until spring.  It was a great fall project season, and I'm looking forward to wrapping up photo summaries of the projects for you in the next few weeks!

11 days into MZ irrigation project (pictures)

Today is day 11 of the construction of the MZ irrigation project.  Everyone involved is working extremely hard.  I can't remember if I have made 2 or 3 trips out in these 11 days... it's a bit foggy.  I put in a lot of hours on the office end as well: getting price quotes for all the materials, sweet-talking and haggling over prices, purchasing, getting a truck loaded and sent out, getting custom parts ordered from steel fabricators, encouraging said steel fabricators to do the jobs and do them well, etc.

Since everyone is so busy, I have had to think of other ways to get out to MZ village to monitor the work.  On Monday I took the watchman from our yard, and the handyman who I have written about before, and drove one of our organization's oldest vehicles.  It's only a '92, but this Toyota Landcruiser has been through the works.  Nearly every part in the thing has been replaced one or two or five times and still it shimmies and shakes down the road.  The most infamous story about this truck is that two days after insurgents stole it (in 2010) they gave it back because it was worthless!  Yep, we're still driving it.  Since it hadn't been out to the village for a long time (it usually just makes runs to the airport or school), I decided we would take the smooth road, park it by the river, and cross the river by raft.  4 men plus a generator seemed like a pretty good load for that small raft, but we made it.

In Monday's monitoring trip I noticed several ways in which the plan had changed once construction started.  I was very glad I came out to remind some people of the plan.  Some changes were already beyond reversal, however, so I am learning some great lessons about how thorough and disciplined the planning process needs to be.  Example: The community men swore up and down that they would have no problem digging the rocky soil, but a few days into the work they were saying they could no longer do it without dynamite.  I wish that in the planning process I would have required them to bring shovels and picks to sample the soil in different parts of the pipeline, and see and understand how much work it was going to be, prior to contract signing.  We compromised and much to their delight, I permitted the use of dynamite on the deepest foundation hole.  I only wish I could have been there too, at a distance, with a hardhat, and goggles.

Yesterday during Thanksgiving celebrations I got a call from my main engineer saying that he was running short on cement and would need more by Friday noon.  I thought about sending it on local transport, but decided instead to use the opportunity to monitor the progress again.  Again I invited our house watchman to come along (big smiles from him, he loves seeing projects), and we went to pick up cement.  We also decided to attempt to bring some pipe to the village.  It was not one of my wisest moments when I willing let ambitious local men load four 4" steel pipes, each 20 feet in length, on the 5-foot-long roof rack of the ancient Landcruiser.  But you know, once they were up there, wound up in a ridiculous amount of rope, it was a situation that summons the inner-asian in me, "come on, try it, if God wills it will work great!"  I added a rope from the front bumper to the pipes hanging overhead, and tied one of my wife's red Christmas cloth napkins to the overhang on the rear, and off we went.  The trip was slow, and we had to stop and retighten ropes once, but there was no other difficulty with the pipes.  We reached the riverbank again, and the raft operator grinned from ear to ear while he said, "you're back, did you bring me a music cassette like I asked?"  He had asked on Monday, and I had forgotten, but lucky for him my watchman had not!  Cassette in pocket, he then eagerly loaded pipes and cement bags on his raft, until the villagers on the other riverbank convinced him with waving hands to not attempt it all in 1 trip, but rather split it into two.  I went on the first trip, along with 1 of the pipes and 2 bags of cement.  My engineer returned, loaded the other 3 pipes and 2 bags of cement, and the raft sat low and teetered.  This was the point where I took off my jacket, vest, and bag.  The thought of getting in that rushing river in December was insane, but if it toppled I would have to go after our watchman who did not know how to swim.  Fortunately the raft did just fine, and I wish I could upload the video I captured.

In monitoring the work today I saw a lot of progress on the hardest parts of the project, but also some additional unexpected changes.  The location, angle, and height of the dam has turned out different than I suggested.  This is tricky, because I don't want to discredit anyone's judgement or hard work, but I am responsible for sharing the best insights I have gathered from several senior engineers on this project.  So I asked a lot of questions to make sure I understood their thinking, then built on what they were looking for with some alternate ideas and concerns that I saw.  I do not know exactly the result of this will be... hope for the best?

On my way down the valley and back to the river raft I took some great photos for you.  Before today's photos, here's a before shot of the dam and tank location... The water comes down the valley from the upper-left.

And here is the current...

The dam catches the water, directing it to the left-side of the valley which is out of the floodway.  Then a canal routes the water to a small settling tank (bottom center), where the 2" pipe begins.

Here's a couple shots of the men of the village hard at work digging the ditch and installing the pipe.

In the above shot you see the foundation for the suspension bridge that is yet to be built.

800 meters of trench is nothing to sneeze at, but add the hard rocky layers, and it's been a pretty tough job!  

We're hoping for 4 more strong days, then I have to pull my lead engineer back for the weekend (he's worked through the past 3 in a row).  Then in the week following that, this project should be done.

What it took to sign the contract for the MZ irrigation water project

 A lot has gone on in the past week regarding the irrigation project that I wrote about recently.  Last week I thought we might have shovels in the ground on Mon or Tues.  That’s hilarious, because on Monday morning we ran into a challenge in the community that almost derailed the whole project!  The short story is: we got through it, and the project has started.  The longer story goes like this:

Got to the MZ village on Sun morning, went straight to measuring some fields to verify the irrigation sample figures we had received from farmers in the community.  We very quickly realized that the numbers had been skewed, either by hopeful bias (aka lying), or for not knowing better.  Went to other villages to get more sample figures to try to get better data triangulation.  Found some consistent figures.  Now we know more accurately what the irrigation need for the village is.  Success. 

Next up: afternoon meeting with village elders.  The point was to discuss the project design one last time before the contract meeting.  This is the point when it becomes real to everyone: this project is going to happen, say your beef, if you have one, now.  No one had any lingering concerns, so we planned to do contract meeting after supper.

We all split for prayers and supper, and when the men came back, it was a different feel altogether, and couple of the key guys were not there.  Where were they?  One man I had never met launched into complaints about the locations of both ends of the pipe.  Where was he during the surveys in the past month?  Why hasn’t this come up before now?  Arguments start between the men present.  My local staff, worn out after long days, join in the arguments.  Several attempts are made by the white beards to calm the arguments.  The one man will not back down, and his complaining gets obscene.  I sit and listen, puzzling for the background story on this one man.  I decide I will call him “saboteur”.  The scene is chaotic for 15 minutes, then finally one white beard gets control and says, “We’re going to quit arguing, because we’re here with our foreign guest.  We’re going to ask him to make this simple for us and say whether we can move the start of the pipe up the valley, or not!”  Simple is what I gave them, with, “Anyone who wants to discuss what has been surveyed and look at other possibilities, I’ll see you out in the valley at 6 in the morning.”  Goodnight grumpy men.

Next morning, out with the sun we were, walking the line planned for the pipe again.  We went first to the village side.  Saboteur was arguing for the pipe and project to better accommodate him, but his points don’t make sense.  He claims that one man will be upset because part of his field will be left out.  That man appears and represents himself, “I don’t have a problem with the plan that has been laid out.”  Saboteur gets really upset and obscene.  I regret I understand his language so well because his slander is raising my blood pressure by the minute.

We continue the walk to the source side.  My local staff and I stand on the spot we have carefully surveyed for the best possibility to gather maximum water and stand resilient to spring floods.  Saboteur’s slander continues.  We follow him up the valley to his proposal.  His suggestion is spending 2 weeks digging a large reservoir in the bed of the valley to get to “the real source” of the water.  In this valley that experiences violent, boulder-littering floods… it’s impossible.  I can’t figure this guy out.  I also can’t figure out the council leader, who sits idly by.  I call him out, saying, “you have been with us the last two three times we’ve been up here surveying, why have we not heard this other opinion before now, and why won’t you represent the opinion of everyone else right now?”  He stood strangely silent.  Saboteur is again slandering everything: our surveying, our local staff, our project that has done nothing, and I won’t say how he views foreigners.  I’ve had enough, I call my local staff to head back to the village.  Weighing for one more moment the pros and cons of speaking out, I go for it.  “Sir, this is a community project, and the community has led us to the plans that are now fully prepared.  Where were you when this was going on?  Have you sat back with the goal of wrecking this project?  Have you wanted everyone to lose this chance of irrigation?  You’re reaching that goal.”  And we exit, with swift steps down the valley.

Walking back to the village, my local engineer is charged and angry.  He is ready to quit working with this community altogether.  I calm him down and tell him to think it through.  We both calm down, and talk it through carefully before reaching our room in the community.  We decide that the council leaders need to be challenged about this lapse in their representation.  If this guy was credible, they needed to represent him earlier- why hadn’t they?  If he was nuts, why did they let him wreak so much havoc on last night’s and this morning’s meetings?  We decide to take it one step further, and let the council know that their leadership is so important to our projects that if they’re not going to take the lead, there’s nothing more we can do here, and we’ll pack and leave immediately.  A severe ultimatum of sorts, which should be used carefully, but it’s what we calculated as the best way to respond now.  If we went through with this, then only the action and request of the council could bring us back. 

As it turned out, we did not have to wait long for the action and request of the council.  As the men of the community returned from the valley, 3 key leaders made a bee-line for our room.  The old council leader, the new council leader, and one other key man came to our room and asked if we could solve the problem right away.  They apologized for the way last night and this morning had went.  Then they assured us that they had and will continue to deal with the saboteur.  They state that they have officially put him, under their authority, out of eligibility to hassle us any further.  We record the statement, and they sign and thumbprint that written statement.  Next they state that the whole community was in consensus opinion about the project, and wanted it to continue.  They asked if we would overlook the arguments and complaints of one man, and continue.  We agreed.  Then we all spent some time making statements that in essence smoothed the relationship back out.  They apologized for making the foreigner angry.  I assured them that I was not angry for any personal reason, but because of the great potential change that was being sabotaged by one man.  They liked that statement, and said that my statements in the valley to the saboteur woke them up to see what an opportunity they were potentially losing for the whole community.  That’s when they decided they needed to act and discipline the saboteur, and catch up to us before we left.

So, everything was smoothed out in less than a day since it all started to blow up.  That’s sort of how things work here sometimes.  The above is the story as it happened.  Now, let me add a little underlying meaning for you.  The old council leader has been in that position for 22 years.  Just last month the others in the council, recently trained in community leadership by our local staff, decided they wanted to replace the council leader.  They said he was not matching up to the standards that our leadership course introduced to them, and they had an idea of a man who would better fill the role.  The old council leader was not happy, but reluctantly accepting the will of the people.  The new council leader, then, was very recently chosen by the people, but not officially instated by the government yet, because election time has not yet come.  Due to this background story, my staff and I believe there was some political weaseling behind the above story.

The political conspiracy:

We believe that the old council leader paid or otherwise motivated the saboteur to do what he did.  The proof was in the way the old council leader stood by while it all happened.  It didn’t fit.  At the end of the night meeting, we thought that the old council leader was behind it, and that he wanted the project to fail, in an attempt to discredit the leadership of the new council leader.  This still seemed true in the morning, until we were ready to leave, and the old and new council leaders came to stop us and fix the problem.  Then the full motive of the old council leader was revealed: he wanted to save the community from the problem he had created.  The new council leader was also there at the solution session, but it was the old council leader who dominated with implementing the solution.  He definitely wanted his name on “saving the day”. 

I left shortly after this story finished, heading on to our two other villages to help with issues going on there.  I got home late that day, did some last checking of our calculations, and made some phone calls with the local staff in MZ to confirm their plan.  Spent most of 6-7am the next morning on the phone with them again, and by 7am, on Tues, the contract with the community was signed.  MZ village is officially moving ahead on their irrigation project.  Let’s see how much we can get done before freezing temps stop us.

Learning to do irrigation, the hard way

Tomorrow I might be ready for our team to sign a irrigation project contract in MZ village.  Of course I could have said the same thing three weeks ago, and between that time and now I have twice been ready to cancel the project altogether!  It’s anybody’s guess then how tomorrow will go!

More than a year ago, before my time here, the project team was working with the community at addressing different development hurdles and analyzing which ones could be addressed to provide real economic growth for the community.  Irrigation water was named, and so a search for an appropriate water source began.  The community first took our team up the mountain to see the spring that provided “this much” (picture hands round and wide enough to hold a watermelon) water.  They reached the hillside spring and found that it was only “that much” (picture fingers curled around a golf ball).  Thus the team learned early on that this community did not excel in precision of measurements.

All the irrigation options were explored: the upper mountain spring, an electric pump on the riverside with power from a hydroelectric project, a diesel generator, and a nearby valley stream.  All four of the options were ruled impossible for one variable or another: shortage of supply, no suitable site for hydropower project, and generators are expensive to buy and maintain.  The last option, the nearby valley, was pretty much tossed aside by the people of the community, because although some had used that water by means of a dirt ditch, they were not unanimous in feeling it would be a worthwhile source to work for.

The idea of irrigation for the village thus went dormant, until this summer, when the shortage of winter precipitation caused people to think again about the need for irrigation.  This time the valley stream was the first idea to be brought back up, and it quickly, somehow ironically, gathered a consensus opinion from the community: we want that water back!

With interest gathered, I went for a first look at this valley in July.  It was the first time that I had really pondered what it would mean to do an irrigation project.  As I thought about it, these 3 essentials came to mind:

1- Everyone in community must have access.

2- Water supply must be adequate for all to be reached, for the full season needed.

3- The project design must be doable, affordable, and sustainable.

Unfortunately I did not take a minute to write these down at that point, to make sure I got them in the right order.  Then this happened:

We thought we should start with #1 on the list above, so we surveyed and worked with the community until we had ironed out a plan so that all fields of all residents would be included.  I took encouragement in this, because I have heard of many irrigation projects in this country falling apart on this point alone.  I also took encouragement in the fact that the community, once in disagreement about the worth of the project, had united in favor of doing it.  I believed that if the community thought it was worth the hard volunteer labor, it must be worth doing.  I also thought that they could best judge the amount of water the stream would supply, because they had previously used the water coming in a dirt ditch, and thought that this was worthwhile.  Restoring this water source with plastic pipe would only increase the amount that reached the fields. 

My encouragement came from the social development potential I was seeing, but in the next step I made a mistake.  What I should have done next was carefully surveyed the actual supply and demand of water for irrigation.  I should have worked out point #2 before doing anything else.

Instead of getting specific data about the irrigation water supply and demand, I went on to surveying for project design, in other words: how could it be built?  I visited the valley four separate times, each time with a new design question.  I measured, thought, and planned carefully how to make a flood-resilient checkdam, how to minimize and clean out silting in the pipe, how to hang the pipe from a suspension structure to take the pipe across a 37-meter valley, and how to install pressure relief valves to keep the water flow moving well.  It wasn’t that I was engrossed in the fun of construction design.  It was actually rather stressful to face all these technical questions and have to research answers, because I had very little experience in addressing these matters.  So then why didn’t I realize sooner the importance of answering points #2 before moving forward?

I don’t know.  Like I mentioned above, I found encouragement in the development between the people in the community, and in the absence of any real experience calculating water supply and irrigation demand, I let the community and my staff woo me into thinking it would all be alright. 

Everything was looking alright, until I stumbled upon the right questions at the wrong time.  By chance, I asked some men in the village if they had any figures on amount of water needed for any sample size of wheat field.  One man said he has run a petrol generator water pump for 90 minutes to irrigate a field that he sows 6 sers (roughly 93lbs) of wheat seed in.  I broke that down and realized that with the 2.5” pipe from the pump he was irrigating over 36,000 liters per jerib.  At that rate, our project would require 2,781,000 liters to reach everyone one time, and with our current trickle of a flow rate that would require 128 days!

I went home dumbfounded, literally, because I had just found out how dumb I had been.  This was the first time that I considered canceling the project, because it seemed just plain impossible.  Then I got to work penciling out all the details and thinking of ways we could change this up.  I thought of restricting the field size per family that could be irrigated.  If no one could irrigate more than the average field size of all, that would reduce the irrigated land by 30%.  Not enough.  I took into consideration that spring flow rates are said to be much better, and made some calculations of what could be done with steady flow rates of 1L/second up to 5L/second (the max for our 2.5” pipe).  This brought the days needed down between 6.5 and 32 days.  An improvement, but much too big of a range, and too unpredictable!

The stress of this was getting to me, so I went to talk with one of my lead local staff on the weekend, and we formed a new idea.  We had not been able to built a hydroelectric plant there, and we had not been able to petition a neighboring villages to share their hydro power with MZ village, but perhaps we could petition for power only for day-time use, only for a pump?  We both thought this was a fantastic idea, because electricity here is mostly unused in the daytime hours.  Surely the other village would share their power for daytime use for our economic improvement project, right? 

We decided we needed an answer sooner than the start of the week, so we took off on our motorcycles the next day, to get an answer from the other village.  It was not fun to burn my weekend on this project, but I will admit that it was very fun to take this trip on my motorcycle!  The highlight was when we crossed the river by small raft!  Then we searched a couple villages for the boss man who could give us the answer we needed.  We had to climb into a high mountain village in the end to find him, he was there visiting a man who has just returned from the hajj. 

We sat down with boss man and the new hajji, and drank some tea and ate some chickpeas, raisins, and almonds.  We explained our situation and the petition of the MZ village.  My hope in this solution was quickly dashed when the boss man politely but resolutely denied our request.  Actually he fudged it more than anything, he said we could install a pump in his village and pump water to a ditch that would then flow back to MZ village.  A quick calculation told me that just the electric lines and cement for the ditch would cost more than double what we had budgeted for the project.  Thanks for the chai, hajji, no we can’t stay to eat the lamb you’ve slaughtered, maybe next time? 

Back down the mountain we rode, to the river that we would have crossed by raft again, but it was prayer time so the raft man had disappeared.  Probably for the best.  Balancing two motorcycles on a raft made out of just enough wood to hold four truck innertubes in a square was probably a bad enough idea to do once.  Home we went on the dirt road, which made me feel alive as ever.  Then I realized my cell phone had bounced out of my pocket, with over 150 contacts that were only saved on it.  Ahhhhhhhh.

Today I spent most of the day working with figures that I received from some reliable ag workers here.  I had asked them a few days before how much water was needed for wheat here, and one had replied.  I went to work converting acre-inch and gallons per minute figures to sers and jeribs and liters.  It was worth doing, because I’m encouraged by what I’ve found.  For example, alfalfa can be grown in Texas and Arizona on less than 16,000 liters per jerib; less than half of what the MZ farmer told me he was putting on his wheat field here!  I talked with my team about this, and they said, “well, how would he know what a jerib is?”  Yeah, we’re going to measure that field tomorrow.

Here’s the figures I am looking at now:

In the spring I estimate the valley stream can provide 4-5L/second, yielding enough water to cover everyone’s fields in 2.5-3.5 days, at a rate of 16,000L/jerib.  That’s doable, and will get them through the harvest of the winter wheat.  After that it gets harder to say what will be available for a second planting.  Right now I think the community would have to decide what their priority is for the summer: tree planting and domestic water (washing, animals), or irrigating a smaller section of their fields. 

So, tomorrow I go to MZ village, measure the one farmer’s field and see how many liters of irrigation he really applied, and head into discussions with all the white beards.  I’ll give them the good news that I think I’ve found for the spring season and first planting, and then call their attention to the careful planning and monitoring we will need to do for the second crop season.  If we can get some good negotiations started on this, and if no other crazy unforeseen events unfolds, we might be ready to talk project contract tomorrow, and have shovels in the ground on Mon or Tues. 

Or it might not happen, there’s really no telling what the next day will bring here.

Before the snow flies

Right now is a busy time for physical projects in community development.  All the farm work is done so more men are available, and there are a few weeks remaining until it will be too cold to pour concrete.  In case you are interested I will give you the rundown of the projects we hope to finish before freezing temps and snow, and what each of the participants roles in the projects are.

Village "MZ"

Situation:  This village is eager to get irrigation working again in their village.  Until 3 or 4 years ago they were directing a mountain spring to their village with dirt canals, but the 700+ meter hillside canals were irreparably damaged by avalanches.  They know that we have done plastic pipelines before so they have requested for us to assist them in making their irrigation more efficient and durable.   

Project:  We are going to dam the stream coming from a mountain spring, and feed it into a 2.5 inch pipe that will run to the top of the village, where it can feed at least 3 different canal routes in order to irrigate all the yards and small fields in the village.

Community's role: They will supply all the labor and local materials.  That means rocks, gravel and sand for building the dam, canal, and settling pool before the pipe.  They will also dig a ditch by hand shovel, the entire 700+ meters length, 1 meter deep. 

CDP team's role: We will supply the non-local materials (like cement and pipe) and the engineering support that exceeds their own capacity.  We also advocate for the poorest farmers in the village to make sure that they do not have to work harder than others to get an even share of the irrigation water. 

My personal role: This is this team’s first irrigation project so I am responsible for making sure that it gets done right, and making sure the end result is just and fair for all in the community.  It's easy for guys to miss the social justice or injustice that happens in physical projects, so I'm working with our facilitators every step of the way to make sure that they are noticing all the times and ways that the project can go awry or poor people lose out.  To make sure it goes right I have to be the technical consultant, meaning that I take the plans of my local engineer and test and calculate them to make sure they will work.  The way he was surveying, for example, was lacking accuracy, so I made him a 5-meter fluid communicating vessel and trained him to use that.  We also have to stretch the pipe across a 35 meter valley, so as he gets his materials and plans figured out I'll calculate the weight and figure what kind of foundation anchors we will need on both sides of the valley.

Project cost: CDP team is budgeting $4000.  Local labor will be valued around $2500 (they won’t get paid, but this is the value we can attribute to their labor contribution, at the local labor wage)

Project benefit: In the fall this source will not provide much water (14,000 liters/day right now), but the community is very eager to restore this source of irrigation because of the supply it offers in spring and summer.  Using a pipeline will guarantee more water makes it to the village rather than being lost in the dirt canal.  Restoring irrigation will allow this village to double their first-season wheat harvest, plant fruit trees, and plant some second-season crops as well. 

Village AQ:

Context: This is the drinking water pipeline village (aka pants-less welldigger), so I have told this context on several chapters before.

Project: to divert the current single water pipe so that it sends water to 2 additional faucets in different parts of the village, by turn.

Community role: They first have to establish some agreements as a community, before we will start the physical works with them. Then they have to supply local materials and labor.  This means digging the ditch and bringing rocks, gravel and sand for the faucet foundations and valve boxes. 

CDP teams role: Same as in MZ: supply of non-local materials and technical support.  The team does have to work harder on the social aspects of this project, because the problem causing this project is partly their fault- they missed some important and powerful opinions last winter when they were planning the original pipeline. 

My personal role: This is the community that has experienced a number of petty conflicts (and some not-so-petty), so I have made it my job in this village to keep contact with several key people and support them in maintaining peace and cooperation among their own community.  I also play engineer in this project, but mostly I am using my technical work as opportunities to stay among the men and observe how the relationships there work.

Actually, my role in the technical aspect of this has been important, because we are nearing the limit of what the electrical submersible well pump can do.  It is rated for 120 meters of head, but calculating in the inefficiencies and friction throughout the system, and it seems we’re quite close.  Fortunately on Wed the team and the community were able to carry out a test that I gave them: they rolled 200 meter of 40mm hard plastic pipe up the hill, hooked it up to the reservoir, and turned on the pump to see what the flow rate would be at that higher elevation.  There was about a 40% drop in flow rate from that at the reservoir, but I think the community can reshuffle the number of families that go to each of the 3 water points, so that it stays somewhat equal.

Project cost:  CDP team is budgeting $800.  The communities labor is going to be nearly the same!

Project benefit: Simply put, this project makes 3 water points in a village that has had only 1 since we finished the well and first pipeline in April.  The reason that this is a big deal is that the village counts themselves as 3 neighborhoods.  When I finally realized that, and voiced that back to the community leaders, it changed the whole dynamic of how our relationships and work with them; we had finally seen life through their eyes.  You might still be asking: why 3 neighborhoods?  Gender, religion, age, and rich and poor all factor into this.  Women were not supposed to be crossing from one neighborhood to the other at the time of day that water was available.  Water was supposed to be more locally available for washing for prayers.  Men were continually cutting in line in front of children.  The rich were using vast amounts of water and the poor were not getting enough even for drinking.  Enough convoluted reasons for this paragraph?  To be honest, these new water pipes and collection points are not going to solve the whole issue, but they stand the chance of putting us in a better position to continue to work with this community and get some of these unsavory tendencies dealt with.  In the long run, I believe it will have been worth it to do this extra work and expense.  By the end of this week we should have the pipes installed and water flowing to all three collection points (one at a time that is!)

Village KT:

(writeup coming soon, it’s too late tonight!)

Projects to put hope in

Aid work and community development can sometimes wear a person down.  The intents are so good, but often the challenges are so huge and transformative results are elusive.  That is why I constantly seek new ideas, reports, and stories of projects that are really providing great results in this tough country.  Tonight I want to share 2 great projects with you.  I am currently not working with these projects, but I would like to be!

Terraced, irrigated gardens:  I'm currently gathering results of the yield output change in this project, but it looks very promising.  As roads improve and markets develop, every farmer could increase his livelihood by converting a hillside into gardens like these.  Irrigation is lacking in a lot of places, but as electricity spreads into more and more villages, they have a new option of pumping water up from rivers to their fields, which, if they plant the right crops, would easily pay for itself.

Pistachio forests:  You're going to want to click on this picture below to see the bigger image, so go ahead and do that, then come back and read this..... okay did you see the trees on the top of the mountain, and the thin terraces on the lower half?  The trees up high are the remnants of a great pistachio tree forest that covered the hills here.  During the war years when markets were in shambles and people just needed to keep warm in the winter, they began cutting down the trees, working their way up the mountains from the base.  Fortunately their need for heat did not completely exhaust the forests, and some mature trees remained for a time when their produce would fetch a great price.  Today the owners of these trees are sell 15 lbs of pistachios for close to $40 USD!  That's good money!  Big organizations have taken notice of the economic opportunity, and assisted villages in this area in planting pistachio saplings in the terraces, to recreate the former forested hills.  Pistachio trees take around 20 years to mature to fruit-bearing, which is a long investment of time, but regardless, villages are clamoring to get aid help in planting their hills with pistachio trees again!

TRACTORS!

My 2-year-old boy loves tractors right now.  The capital letters and exclamation point in the title of this post are for him.  A couple weeks ago I attended a field day put on by another NGO.  A good friend of mine who manages agriculture work in the whole northern region asked me if I would go and give him some feedback about the event, because he was unable to make it there.  So, one of the local staff and I went to tractor day, just outside town.  There was a small group of farmers there, some of them interested in tractors, and some were just there because it was more interesting than sitting at home.  

The prospect of the 2012 crop here seems good.  2011 was a drought because there was no precipitation from April 2010 until late December 2010.  Some snow came in January in February, but too little and too late for rainfed fields.  This year, however, will be good because rains and heavy snows started in November, and although there was a break in December, we are getting more precipitation in January.  Farmers here wait to see if there will be enough moisture, before they plant winter wheat.  In December much of the hillside winter wheat was planted by hand.  This tractor field day took place on January 2, on a 5 acre field.  The field was nice and flat, and was described to me as something between irrigated and rainfed, meaning that it was not flood irrigated, but they would try to direct irrigation water to it at 1 or 2 strategic times in the growing season.

The first demo was a relatively new 2-wheel tractor (2WT).  These have come in through China in the last couple years, and are slowly but surely grabbing interest.  The benefits for small farmers include: cheaper to operate and maintain than a team of cows (they run on 1 liter of diesel/hour and hay is expensive here), very versatile, can get into small fields, and a growing number of people in the country are learning how to tinker with them, so servicing them will only get easier.  On the downside, with a belt drive and power-take-off, they're quite dangerous for a farmer that has never had anything mechanized.  Above is a picture of the 2WT being used with a cultivator (read garden tiller).  The tractor clipped along at a good pace, the only criticism from the farmers was that it did not cultivate deeply enough for melons.  It is deep enough for wheat, but a lot of farmers like to plant a crop of melons after the winter wheat is harvested.

After the small portion of the field was cultivated, another 2WT with a direct seeder was put to work.  This seeder is quite new so it drew the attention of the farmers.  This also seemed to work simply enough, although I'm not sure it really had a good control for seed population.  Still it offered improved control on planting, because the standard practice is scattering seed by hand over chunky plowed soil, and then dragging a log sled over it to put some cover on the seeds.  The 2WT can also be used to harvest (a cutter-bar can be put on the front), pull trailers, and pump water.  Quite a useful technology, and available for right at $1,000.

 On to the big tractors!  These are not as new as the 2WT, but here farm tractors have been used more for hauling trailers than actually in fields.  On this demo day this NGO wanted to specifically start a comparison between direct seeding with prior field cultivation, and direct seeding without prior field cultivation.  So above you see the farmer field cultivating half of the field with a Belarus tractor.

And here they are getting the direct seeding drill set.  I thought at first that the point of the comparison was to show how well the direct seeding did in uncultivated soil.  To that extent, I thought the comparison was weak, because the uncultivated topsoil was still quite soft.  The real point of the comparison, however, was to see if weeds could be controlled without prior field cultivation.  Though it was January 2, there were small green weeds already peeking through the topsoil, so they had broadcasted a generic Roundup on the whole field.  If the wheat can bring a good crop without the prior field cultivation, farmers will be more interested in this direct seeder, because it's a one-pass planting.  

Who uses big tractors?  Not very many people in our province.  It seems to be just a few wealthy men that buy tractors so that they can do custom work at a rate of $20-40 an hour.  At that rate, it's a pretty big deal if planting can happen in 1 pass rather than 2!  

Here's a closer look at the drill.  The front hopper dispenses fertilizer, and the back drops the wheat seed.

Conclusions:

I have mixed feelings about bringing mechanization to farms here.  Right now the unemployment rate is miserable, and I do not see how mechanization can improve that, because manual field labor is one of the few things that men can do seasonally.  However, there have been and probably will continue to be some surprises.  For example, the 2WT turned out to be cheaper than keeping a family cow.  Also if the mining industry takes off here like so many hope, it may be profitable for women to manage the ag while men work the mines.  In this case I could see women getting smart, pooling some money, and getting a big tractor to share.

I guess the bottom line is that it is interesting to see farmers gather to consider new ideas, and though I don't know how the future will go here, it is fun to spend time in the fields!

Greenhouses

Our community development project here has a significant agricultural emphasis.  The elevation is lower, precipitation more, and soil better than the mountains we lived in before.  Last year the project built two large (20 meters long) demonstration greenhouses.  One was built at an agricultural high school, and the other at the agricultural department's (gov) compound.  Students and young farmers were invited to construct and plant the greenhouses, and local TV came to film the planting day as well.  Our hope is that farmers will get excited about the ability to grow more diverse crops and increase the growing cycle.  

Here's one of the large greenhouses in January.  The lowest night temps were around 5-10 F.  The temperature dipped just below freezing inside the greenhouses, and the frost damage was not severe, so really, this is a great place for greenhouses.  Our teammate in the mountains also had a winter greenhouse, but he spent more than $200 on fuel to heat it through the winter!  This greenhouse did not require any heat.


Now, demonstration greenhouses are fine and good, but we wanted to have a more direct impact on the lives of poor farmers and villagers.  So we played around a bit, and found that the branches of a certain berry tree (which is abundant here) have great flexibility and strength to form a greenhouse frame.

So for our first year of village greenhouses, we surveyed and found 5 women in each village we work in, women who are known for being the most responsible and influential agriculturalists in their village.  We gave these women a 4 meter x 10 meter piece of plastic (less than $10), a handful of vegetable seeds (a few dollars), and trained them in how to set up their own greenhouse with sticks.

These pictures are the small greenhouse that I built in our yard.  I hope to get out next week to see some of the other village greenhouses.  We hope that poor families will find an increased ability to provide nutritious food, because most families cannot afford the vegetables imported from other provinces or neighboring countries.