Case Study 1

We partnered with a Christian Missionary working in Burkina Faso, West Africa. He was heading up an orphanage in the desert. He had been to our project, saw what we were doing and wanted to try it in the desert. I told him that he needed water for that and I didn’t know a way around it. So he took a well truck and punched a hole 230 feet down through the sand and came up with cold, clean water! He sent me a video of children playing in fountains of running water. They had never seen that before. He called me and said “I have water! How do I power it?” I told him I was using small AC volt pumps to move the water. He then informed me that he didn’t have an extension cord that long. I realized he was going to make me earn this. I told him that I needed something to work with, a resource. Something that he has a lot of. He said that he didn’t understand the question. I asked if he could make cement water tanks? He said “Are you kidding? I am in the middle of a sand desert. I can make cement day & night. What do you need?” Perfect! We need 2-water tanks as large as you can manage. They need to be the same size. One tank we are going to put in the ground. The other is as high as you can safely manage. He said that he could get that done. I asked if he could find a bicycle and I would explain to him how to turn a bicycle into a water pump. And every morning someone would go for their daily bike ride and pump the water from the lower reservoir into the upper tank. Then we will regulate the water flow to drain through pipes setup as aquaponics. It would flow all day then at night go to sleep and the next morning we get up and do it again. And he started to grow food and medicines for his children and animals calling it “Together We Stand in West Africa.”