The Quest for Clean Water

We are thankful that our water situation in Mpanda is as good as it is. We have a 1000L (264 gallon) tank that (ideally) gets filled up at least once a week. That tank feeds into our house and helps us wash our hands, wash dishes, flush the toilets, i.e. all the normal things that you just sort of take for granted in the States. We have a friend who works for the water department in the St. Louis area who says there's a daily usage of around 200 million gallons. If I've done the math right that works out to around 71 gallons a person per day. That would about wipe out our tank in one day. That's not to make anybody feel guilty or anything, I'm just trying to give a comparison.

And it's not just enough to get water, because we do have to bathe in it and drink some of it and that's a bit different than just flushing the toilet with it. This is sort of what it's like when it comes in. It looks (and smells) a lot like river or lake water.

We have a Katdyn water filter (micro) that filters out microbes but leaves behind a large residue of dirt, bugs, leaves, etc. This ends up clogging up the 3 ceramic filters and really slows down the process.

Hence, my quest to build a working bio filter that works on the macro level (and theoretically would work to filter out bad bacteria, amoeba, etc. as well). One step at a time though. I got the idea from some missionaries in the Mara region working on water filtration. It basically uses layers of sand and rocks (which naturally filter all sorts of water around the world in underground springs, etc.) I've gotten as far as a prototype (pictured below in white) which seems to be working well at the macro level.

Each run through seems to show the water getting clearer and clearer. I've already thought of a few improvements I could make, so we'll see how it goes. Check out: http://villagehealthproject.org/biosandFilters.html for more information. There are loads of NGOs/missions doing this sort of thing in Africa. This site happens to have PDFs for plans and photos of each step in the process for building concrete bio filters.


-TMR