Today, heading to Vingunguti we passed over a rickety old bridge with some foul smelling blue/green water running below. The water is passing by homes into a pool, in which people are also disposing of their waste. After speaking to some of the local students it turns out this green river is industrial waste from a local soap factory! We ran some tests on the water and unsurprisingly it’s unsafe, with a pH value of over 11. This water poses a real concern as we personally witnessed children washing their buckets in its waters during our testing.
Water testing in other areas has continued over the last few days and we have been further collaborating with some local university students. In the picture below Hajime and Jonathan are carrying out some turbidity testing on “rubbish river”.
This Smart Village project has also been working in parallel with a Cambridge Development Initiative (CDI) project here in Vingunguti. We’d like to hand the rest of this blog post over to CDI to highlight the good work the engineering are doing here:
The CDI engineering team is constructing a simplified sewage network connected to a biogas system in Vingunguti.
By using this system, organic waste is recycled and converted into biogas which can be used as cooking fuel.
Martha Stokes (CDI Engineering Team Member):
Below is a photo of sewage piping being laid, leading down towards the biogas reactor.
