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Photos by Brooke Yamakoshi |
“Want to go to Africa?”
It may not seem like a common question, but it’s one that Jason Manto (BME ’06) and Brooke Yamakoshi (CE ’06, SE ’07) have been asking a lot lately. Two of the seven students who traveled to Tourou, Cameroon, last year to design and implement a sustainable water filtration system, Manto and Yamakoshi have organized multiple return trips to the province. Their most recent trip, held over winter break, included a new face, Ezekiel Fugate (CE, Mathematics ’07), for whom those five little words prompted a unique journey.
Manto and Yamakoshi first traveled to Tourou for four weeks in the spring of 2006 as a part of the Engineering in Context capstone program. Together with teammates Mike Brown (Commerce ’06), Katherine Clopeck (Aero ’06), Lauren Foster (SE ’06), Carly Krause (Envi Sci ’06) and Dara Phillips (CE ’06), Manto and Yamakoshi sought to provide the Tourou community with a water purification system that could be easily sustained.
As a part of this system, the students created several clay filters throughout their spring trip. To make the filters, which fit on top of the canneries in which the local residents store their water, the students developed a clay and flour mixture for their base material. After digging up clay, grinding it in a hammer mill and running it through a sieve, the students combined the processed clay with flour and molded the mixture into bowls that would fit atop the storage canneries. The students then cooked the filters in a pit fire they had dug in the earth. When fired, ideally, the flour throughout the mixture combusts, leaving little pores big enough for the water — but not most impurities — to pass through. However, the students were not satisfied with the results of their pit firing.
At the conclusion of their first trip, Manto and Yamakoshi determined that the use of a kiln would greatly improve the quality of the filters — and thus of the water throughout Tourou. The use of pit fires to cook the filters, although convenient, was an imperfect process. With a kiln, the heating of the filters would be much more consistent, and at the kiln’s higher temperatures, it would be much more likely that the tiny flour pockets throughout the filters would burst. Therefore, Manto and Yamakoshi set out — with new teammate Fugate — to build a kiln this past winter in Tourou.
When Manto arrived in Cameroon last November — Fugate and Yamakoshi did not arrive until mid-December — he found himself in need of bricks with which to build the kiln. Accordingly, Manto visited the local village of Maroua to search for brick makers the only way he knew how: he found brick edifices and asked the owners where they had gotten the bricks. Eventually, he was met with success, when a Maroua resident led him to two brick makers, Pierre and Samedi, who agreed to help him make bricks for the kiln.
Together with Pierre and Samedi, the three students made roughly 3,000 bricks, the first ever fired in Tourou. (Most of the houses in Tourou are built of mud and concrete.) They fired the bricks for four days, after arranging them in layers separated by dung and millet, a grain the students had to compete with goats to acquire. The group then transported the bricks to the city market or Tourou-Centre, where they built the kiln and ultimately fired several quality filters.
“There were definitely a lot of firsts for everyone involved,” Manto says not only of the firing of the bricks but also the construction of a complex brick arch to lend extra support to the kiln. “After encountering a number of problems, we had everything we needed to proceed with the arch, and the rest of the kiln went up quickly, layer by layer.”
After building the kiln, the students focused on their second priority in Tourou: performing rigorous water testing in each of the local wells — over 50 in total. During their spring 2006 trip, the students had mapped many of the wells as points on a GPS system with the help of Peace Corps volunteer Eric Pohlman. On their most recent trip, they visited and took samples from each well and then performed membrane filtration tests, courtesy of Civil Engineering Professor Jim Smith, to look for fecal coliforms and other impurities in the well water. “In performing these rigorous tests,” explains Fugate, “we hoped to find a correlation between water quality and wellness in the area. This information will also be incredibly helpful to Peace Corps volunteers here when they are trying to identify whom to talk to first about water filtration.”
The students employed both innovative and traditional methods to raise money for the return trip to Cameroon. For example, Manto created a group on Facebook, entitled “I support the Clean Water for Cameroon Project,” whose membership has approached 350. The team also created a fund-raising Web site, www.firstgiving.org/cleanwaterforcameroon, through which family and friends can donate any amount to the project. In addition, the team held a successful fund raiser last November at Sakura on the Corner, and the students received further funding for their return trip from International Relief and Development, a Washington, D.C.-based NGO; the U.Va. Parents’ Committee; the U.Va. Alumni Association; the Engineering Student Council; the Willows Foundation; and friends and family.
This summer, the students plan to return a third time to Tourou, where they will then focus on technology acceptance studies. “Making pottery is only a dry season activity,” says Yamakoshi, “so we can use the rainy season to distribute the inventory of filters and focus on water filtration education. We’ll be doing a lot of education and marketing — we want to create knowledge, teach people why there’s a need for water filtration and provide a connection between water quality and health.” The students plan to introduce the filters first to the leaders they have identified in the community as the “water team,” who can lead by example and educate their peers about safe water practices.
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