Weekend at work

A weaver bird poses by its nest near the camp

Sorry I didn't get a blog post out this weekend, we had a bit of a crisis at work.

Here it's rainy season and last week on Tuesday we had a terrific storm that brought down a major electricity transmission line feeding the southwest of the country.  All of our camps have backup generators, so that was no problem, but the local water company, SODECI, apparently does not and one of our camps in that area was hit particularly hard.  They have a borehole to supplement what they get from SODECI, but that hasn't been working very well for a few weeks now.

Pulling the pump pipework out of the well
(it is not supposed to be muddy)

The camp in question is pretty isolated, in a town right on the border with Liberia, and with the whole Ebola situation the soldiers from Niger stationed there are understandably a bit on edge.  When the water was still out after 4 days, tempers were running high.  So I went down with two of our plumbers for the weekend and replaced the borehole pump, which had been overwhelmed by mud.  It didn't fix the problem, and we'll have to go back to clean out the well completely and maybe even put in a new one, but at least the troops there don't feel like they've been abandoned.  SODECI got the water running again by Friday night, which really helped!

I didn't do much of the actual pump removal, I stuck to the (less dirty and maybe not quite equally important) job of taking pictures.  I made it up to the guys by doing most of the driving, and by doing all the paperwork for our trip - and in the UN, there's a lot!

Will try to get a blog out this weekend though, as usual - maybe about the joys and pains of driving here...