Water, Water, Not Everywhere.

Clean water's pretty much a taken for granted fact of life for most of us. Not so much here. And while we've been talking of helping to fund a new water treatment plant, I've been chatting with Miss Sarah Pumphrey, formerly of EastBurg, now doing good research in Tanzania on smaller and more decentralized water purification. Here's something she wrote worth thinknig about, especially here in our neck of the woods in Iraq: "in the rural setting, water is frequently recontaminated between the place where it's treated and where it's used. For little more than $1, families could build a system directly in their homes that would last them as long as they maintained it. The system itself cannot be called perfect - I made many modifications to the original design to account for cost, but for the rural villages in which I was working, out goal was improvement not necessarily perfection at this phase. In each community, I requested the chairman to call together a water committee. Then, through seminars and one on one training sessions I taught them the three basic water treatment methods and how they could do them locally."

Here in the rural Sunni heartland, most water flows from canals. And I can tell you from firsthand experience that it's sometimes less than perfectly clean. Bit of advise: if the chai is remotely cloudy, don't drink it. The Captain, Lt S, and I felt like we were close to for at least 24 hours. Actually, they got the worst of it. The LT was out of commission for about 3 days and needed an I/V because he was so dehydrated from frequent trips to the bathroom.

Helping clean up the water here would be a good thing for the locals. And if we can do it in a decentralized manner, especially with a water committee and utilizing women as custodians and teachers, we'll help keep any one central water treatment facility from becomnig a political football among corrupt sheiks while empowering local individuals. Definitely political wins in my book.

So it's 0430 here and I'm googling water purification. Particular via use of Moringa oleifera seeds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moringa_oleifera). Seriously, evidently, this tree's a pretty impressive crop - extremely nutritious, it helps clean water, and it even sells itself with claims of increasing ual virility. Pretty cool, no? We've also got solar water disinfection via UV radiation - http://www.sodis.ch/Text2002/T-Howdoesitwork.htm and, my personal favorite filtration, including via sand in buckets.

Definitely alot for me to continue researching. And definitely a worthwhile thing to do. And once I'm armed with more facts and stats, I can go and approach people with some actual say.

Sorry if this latest post's a bit more scattered than usual but, hey, it's not even 5am.