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Johm rieb lee Kampuchea!

Goodbye Cambodia!

We are at the end of our 10 week project. We leave for home tomorrow morning from Bangkok.
We finished all of our projects in Teuk Saat and presented them last week to the staff. We think they have been a great success and we hope Teuk Saat will continue to make use of them in the future.

Best of luck to Teuk Saat 1001 in the future. We really believe in this organisation and the people behind it, and we are confident the good work will continue.

We would to thank everyone we have met in Cambodia, especially those that have gone out of their way to help us (and there have been many!). Goodbye to all the friends we have made, we hope to see you again in the future.

Our friends in the office.

GPS Mapping of the Stations

Just a quick test of displaying/sharing the GPS coordinates of the water treatment stations on google maps.



http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=217597791763490392095.0004a869049f5ca8db979&msa=0


Or you can look at the embedded map above, click on the a station to see its name (for now) and details about it (in the future).

Demonstration Day!

Today our demonstration kit was used in an educational workshop in a village near Battambang. We set up the kit in the village meeting hall. The first hour was spent doing health education and good hygiene practices. It was really great to see how the Teuk Saat community facilitators explain why clean water is important. Despite the whole talk being in Khmer it was clear they are really good at what they do and the audience was captivated.

We held our breaths as they moved on to demonstrate the technical process but thankfully it went brilliantly! The villagers were really eager to see each process and hopefully they are now convinced that our water is safe.

After the educational part of the morning everyone had a chance to taste the water made in their local station and eat some biscuits. Everyone seemed to enjoy the taste which is a very important factor for them and they definitely enjoyed the snacks! It also gave us a chance to practice our little Khmer and play with the incredibly cute children.

A successful day all round.

Doug holding down the kit

Villagers watching the demo

The demo kit and the team!

The poster and the treatment stages

For those of you that don't already know, here is a brief run down of the stages of water treatment used by Teuk Saat (and us in our demonstration model) and the relevant posters to go with each stage:



1) Raw water - this contains a whole host of different particle sizes as well as bacteria and viruses

2) Sedimentation and Flocculation - here we add a flocculant which 'sticks on' or adsorps the suspended particles in the water and causes them to stick together thus becoming heavier and sinking to the bottom. Here the larger suspended solids are removed.

3) Sand filtration - the sand traps the suspended solids thus reducing turbidity (cloudiness) of the water. Most if not all of the visible suspended solids are removed here.

4) Microfiltration - they use 60, 10, 5 and 1 micron filters to remove very small dirt particles which are not visible to the naked eye and to remove bacteria as it is larger than 1 micron and gets caught by the filters.

5) UV filtration - the UV light damages the DNA of the viruses which are left in the water (because they are smaller than 1 micron in size) and means that they cannot cause infection and the water is safe to drink.

6) Finally the treated water is used with chlorine to wash out the bottles to ensure the water does not get re-contaminated and then these washed bottles can be filled with clean Teuk PisSaat (drinking) water and distributed.

Success!

We did a full run through of the demonstration kit in front of two of the Teuk Saat staff in charge of village education and it went really well! The differences between the water that comes out after each stage is very obvious to see and the whole process only takes 25 minutes from start to finish. We’re presenting the process again tomorrow to the whole of the Teuk Saat staff in order to get more feedback before the first official demonstration on Monday morning at a village meeting hall near one of the stations.

The next stage is to help them develop the education workshop to go with the demonstration. So far this has involved explaining the technical sides of each stage and the kit as well as drawing cartoon bacteria, viruses and rocks for the supplementary posters. Never a dull day.

The full setup

From left to right: Raw water, after sedimentation tank, after sand filter, after microfiltration

We’re hugely pleased with the kit, especially after all the set backs and problems (which are still going on as the transformer we were using for our fake UV light decided to break) and are off to the circus tonight to celebrate. It’s run by an NGO with 1500 students and the last show we saw was genuinely breathtaking.

August

Once again, apologies for the lack of updates. We are very busy at the moment, working to finish the projects and in our spare time we are trying to see as much of Cambodia as possible before we leave in less than 3 weeks. We spent the last weekend in Siem Reap to see Tonle Sap and went to Phnom Penh the weekend before and saw the Royal Palace and Toul Sleng prison/memorial museum.

Last week we were focusing on the demonstration kit as we are hoping to take it into a village before we leave. It has been a test of our creativity and DIY skills but it is finally looking good. It is finished on the most part, just a few finishing touches. This week will be spent developing the workshop and supporting materials for the actual demonstration. We will also be showing the staff here how to use it and are hoping to take it in a village near one of the stations on Monday morning. It has turned out that our timing couldn’t be better as they are having meetings all next week for the guys who run and coordinate the stations and we’re really excited to show them all what they’ll hopefully be working with in the future.

The sand filter and sedimentation tank on their custom built stools

The microfiltration and UV tube

And from Phnom Penh (where Doug and Sinead ate spider):

Sinead and Hiba