Update to March 2011

2011 has been extremely busy so far. I have started work on a new project enhancing the village centre of Hirwaun. I have been given more resposibility than I ever imagined having in my first year of working life. I am responsible for ensuring all materials are on site, clearing waste paving and tarmac away, setting out, inductions, toolbox talks, programming works on a short term basis, routine health and safety tests, service avoidance - the list goes on. Hirwaun now looks something a little like this:

Elsewhere, I have carried on with the Ambassadors activities and attended the State of the Nation Launch at One Great George Street. This was where the ICE submitted its report to the government recommendinga strategy needed to meet Waste Framework Directive targets between now and 2050.

The most exciting part of the year so far was the visit to Uganda with EFOD. Sally Sudworth, Lianne Shepherd and myself joined Ian Flower and his gang on a mission to complete Soroti medical centre and visit some projects previously completed by EFOD, including an Orphanage now home to 40 young children and a working mill specially intended for use for widows. A sustainable community has developed there whereby the widows can grow crops to sustain themselves and surplus for selling on to the market. The profits made can then go into maintaining the special machinery. The site includes a groundwater pump and composting toilets.

My main role there however, was to assist the drainage of stormwater. Rainwater harvesting tanks were built in, but there was no means of water flowing away from the medical centre. Ponding water can become stagnant and attract mosquitoes. Mosquitoes lead to malaria which is the last thing needed at a medical centre. So in the course of 2 weeks, I built in a soakaway and an overflow system for the tanks consisting of outlet pipes leading into swales. This was done with the aid of 4 labourers who I paid at the end of each shift - 6000 shillings per day (About £2 - this sounds exploitative but it is above the going rate in Soroti and it is dangerous to exceed this too much as an imbalance is created)

The soakaway was dug by hand in temperatures exceeding 30 degrees. The downpipe from the roof fed into a manhole we constructed by digging a hole and building a chamber from pressed mudbricks and skimming over with mortar. We laid pipes from the manholes at a steady fall away from the medical centre and backfilled. The pipes fed into a siltation trap which we built in the same manner as the manhole. Next to the silt trap, we dug a hole 1.5m deep and filled with crushed stone. This was the soakaway. We fed a pipe from the silt trap into the soakaway and provided rodding access by situating a pipe upwards into the soakaway.

For the overflow system, I set about core drilling 4 inch holes into the tanks. I then got a labourer to set a 90 degree bend into the tank (because he was far more skilled with motar than I was!) to which I connect a length of pipe followed by another 90 degree bend. Effectively this was a downpipe. I had to divert this water away from the centre and so the labourers and myself dug a trench away from the tanks and laid pipes at a steady fall and backfilled. After a few pipe lengths, we backfilled the remainder of the trench with crushed stone, so as to create a swale.