Water Balance Site Visit

As another part of my project I am conducting a water balance mapping the water that is available against the current use and future demands. This involved going and visiting the springs, which are in the middle of nowhere

On our way to the site we were literally attacked by soldier ants or army ants.

These giant biting ants which managed to go in my hair, down my top and up my trousers all at the same time! I swear despite being with three guys I was very close to stripping off. So after a frantic picking and slapping we were free of ants ish (I did keep finding them in my hair). I also managed to have a fight with a thorn branch leading to my first blood split in Bambui. 

So we continued to measure the flows using a bucket and stopwatch . I have also started to train up one of the technicians, Anthony, to measure flow and take the GPS reading.

He seems really excited to find out how to do it and amazed me today when he designed his own way to measure the spring at Nkandeng which has yet to be harvested. He dug down a pit which he placed the bucket in and then used a section of plantain tree to funnel the water into the bucket. They also seemed to be able to get their head around the simple mathematics behind measuring the flow.

If a 12 Litre bucket took 12 seconds to fill then the flow is:

 1 Litre per second.

This is brilliant as for seasonal measurements of the flows as we need measurements from both the wet and dry season. I’m only here in the wet season so I will need to have people like Anthony to be able to do these measurements in the dry season.

So i'm sure you want to know why I'm not crying about how this was the worst day ever, with the ants and all.  Well… When we went to Atunui to measure the water flow of the stream three Bambui youths we there in just their underwear having a swim, and let me tell you they didn’t look too bad :P Unfortunately it would be the height of bad manners to photograph them so here is a picture of the stream and you can fill in the blanks.

 But it was something like this