Akropong

We made the trek out of Accra this a.m. through the parking lot traffic and made our way up the winding roads of the coastal hills to the northeast of Accra.  The blue dot is the Gillbt House and the red pin is Akropong - not too far as the crow flies, but add in some traffic and winding roads and it's about an 1.5-2.0 hour drive.

Our first stop was at the Akuapem Campus PUC in Akropong where Idlewild installed a LWW system several years ago.  Akuapem is out of covenant with Idlewild and is producing less water per week than we would like, i.e. 300 gallons per week.  This is a location that should be producing much more pure water volume than it is and therefore we continue to go to Akuapem because we beleive we can help the staff figure out what can be done to increase volume.  Today we met with the Dean of professors, the senior administrator, and a couple of more staff persons.  Akuapem continues to struggle with consistent electricty outages and some water source outages through out the average week.  It is also a struggle for the students (who most commute to the campus) to carry the bigger 5 gallon water bottles (about 50lbs) any great distance.

There is not much we can do about the unpredictable nature of the electricity and water source.  In fact, we think that because of the unpredictable scenarios and the few bottles that are being filled - that we don't really know all of the negative impacts, i.e. it's probably a huge challenge to time having power, havving water source, and filling demand - ALWAYS A PROBLEM.

So, we think that introducing a smaller bottle size to the student body (5L - less than 10lbs) will drive up demand for pure water and shine "the light" on the real problems - which then can be addressed, i.e. Presby getting the school a better generator, larger raw water tanks, etc.

Our next stop in Akropong was at the Presby College of Education (PCE), remember from the 2014 visit - it's called "the mother of all schools" in Ghana.  The PCE is the oldest teacher college in Ghana and is a partnership between the government of Ghana and the PCG - similiar to the Teach for America program in the USA.

This is our second visit to PCE and we believe it could make a good site for a LWW solution.  There is lots of good bore hole water available and good access to Ghana Water Company water.

We took more time today looking at several potential campus sites for the water system to be located, understanding the daily flow of student life, and how the campus is using the current untreated water.  

We left PCE with a good feeling that this might be a good fit for a LWW solution given some of the postives around water source, use, etc., but also left with the task of needing addtional information that will come with a full Water Information Survey.

Charles K., our in-country coordinator pointing at a spot on the PCE campus where a huge underground cistern is located.

Couldn't resist showing some of the "footballers" some of my old plays.  PCE has a school inside of PCE that is mainly attended by the kids of teachers and other PCE staff.