How alternative energy changes lives

I was in Tanzania, Africa a couple years ago over the summer working on a solar project. This particular post is about a small village area in Bagamoyo. To get to Bagamoyo from town (Dar-es-salaam) was a couple of hours and to get from the center of Bagamoyo to the village area was a couple hours more. I remembered the road (if you can call it a road) to be very extremely bumpy.

When I got there, I could see a couple of girls carrying buckets of water on their heads. If you look at the picture, the girl is actually carrying a baby tub on top of a bucket. They walk from their huts to a small watering hole twice a day to get water. Each trip probably last an hour.

The picture above is what their huts look like. I've been told that because it is made out of mud, after a while it gets 'holey' and snakes tend to come in uninvited.

Hmm...so what is this structure? Looks like a regular water tower you find in more modern housing areas. And that's exactly what it is. The government gave some funds to some people to build this thing to store water so that it could be distributed to the surrounding households.

How do they get the water in the tank? Via water pumps pumping water from the underground source (aquifer).

The above picture shows the water source. The pump is close by. Since the village is not connected to the grid, the only way to get the pump to work is by using alternative energy.

And in this case, they chose solar panels. We did the testing on that day and everything seemed to work ok. The pump had enough horsepower to pipe the water up into the tank and the piping network from the tank was working too. So the people in the village only had to open a tap and water would be flowing.

It might not matter to us coz we are so used to having water whenever we wanted it, but to them, this small effort is worth so much more. Now the girls won't have to walk to and fro for long hours just to get water.

But I bet the small kids would continue going to the water hole to bathe (read: dangerously dive) just because they can :)