Ian's reflections: 3 2 16 Nkombo island

Today we set out for Nkombo island quite a large group with two cars one belonging to Mother's union and one from Rwanda Aid a local charity. We were led by Boniface, projects manager for the diocese. The trip had two main objectives 1) To give a new community filter to St Peters school. 2) To visit some of the families with family filters which were given by a church in Blakney last August.
The money for the large Aquafilter had been given by Salt Church an Anglican parish in Staffordshire. The Aquafilter suppliers bacteriologically clean water it works by a micro-membrane filtration. You can follow the link here: Grifaid Aquafilter
The trip across the lake is quite short and we go in one of the local boats which is built of boards and now has an outboard motor rather than the oarsmen which we used to have. The community filter was carefully loaded on and safely taken across together with a load of produce and other passengers.
This was then carried up the steep hill to the spine of the island. The school consists of two parts infants and seniors and is the main school for the island. A large number of families have now got water filters however the school was not given any initially. Rob supplied a large community filter to the school which unfortunately broke. This was replaced with four small Aquafilters but this was not enough to adequately supply the whole school, so the new community filter will be able to supply all the pupils with fresh safe drinking water. Rob spent a good while teaching the use of aquafilter to Eric head of studies, some of the teachers and some very enthusiastic older pupils.

As in all these situations there were speeches of thanks we briefly had a tour of the kitchen where the cooks were preparing enormous vats of beans and a sort of maize porridge. They have two meals a day and the maize porridge alternates with rice and they sometimes have sweet potatoes and some vegetables to supply some vitamins.

We then split into three groups to visit families with Aquafilters to check they were working and that the families had correctly remembered the training. Each filter supplied from 8-12 people, we found them all being used and in good repair except for one which had to be taken to be repaired. We had to reinforce the training especially for the back-flushing way of cleaning the filter. We were given an enormous meal by the pastor and his wife. Of delicious African food including some fish from the lake. Finally while we were waiting for our return boat Mary entertained a large crowd of children with a tube of bubble solution. After which they gave us an impromptu dance . Children dancing