|
|
Sunday, January 1, 1978, 5:00 pm, Day 705
Today is the first day of 1978. I didn't do anything special to celebrate. I felt really tired, so I went to bed early last night. I was up at the crack of dawn this morning, but never did actually see the sun come up.
My money is holding out okay. I still have 2.50 leones left. I haven't been getting as much flack as I thought I would by cutting off any and all handouts. I still pay out 10 cents for water, 10 cents for di-mints, and 10 cents for Sia Kundi's cigarettes each day, but beyond that almost nothing. Last Thursday I stayed away from Market Day because of lack of money, and Sia Kundi was able to manage with only 2 leones for buying food. I plan to go to Koidu this Wednesday, so it looks like I will make it.
Yesterday we finished bush clearing for the survey of the road up the hill into Kamiendor. Today, I finished doing up the survey notes and cross-sections. I now have the road located precisely on paper and know just how much cut and fill will be required. Overall, it comes out to about 1800 cubic yards of cut over 2100 feet of road. This is all to be done with pick and shovel by communal labor during our spare time.
Work on the water system has pretty much come to a standstill. Tomorrow, the people will go back to collecting stone, after which they will then finish collecting sand. This shouldn't take more than two weeks at the most. Materials are now one month late, compared to my work schedule. Who knows when they will actually get around to coming. Also, there is still the problem about the money to buy the pumps. I am hoping that these things are being worked on by the people down in freetown, but I know that the chances are that, like me, they haven't done anything. It is probably all left to me to see that things are accomplished, but so far I have shirked that responsibility.
My last time in Freetown, I was always too pre-occupied with my own personal state of affairs, and never felt in the mood to work on my project. I knew it had all of these big setbacks that needed to be resolved, but I just didn't feel like seeing about it then, although I knew I should have. Instead, I just left Freetown, leaving all of these things undone and unsettled, and came back up to hide myself in my own little world, back up in Kamiendor.
Sooner or later, I will have to go back and tackle the project situation, because no one else has probably been doing it, so that they are probably just as unsettled as they were when I left three weeks ago. Until these things are done, the project will not go before. At the moment we are just on "T minus 6 months and holding."
Thursday, January 5, 1978, 2:00 pm, Day 709
I've heard indirectly today that the people here in Kamiendor want to leave the road work alone. That they don't want to do it. I think that a big part of it results from the fact that it seems that I cut down two small orange trees when I was out bush-clearing along the road. They were no bigger around than my little finger, and I didn't even see them until after they were cut. It didn't bother me though, as I think they were just volunteer trees, as there were bigger orange trees nearby. The ones that I did see, though, I carefully cut around, leaving them untouched. The rumor has it though, that I cut down orange and coffee trees, supposedly on purpose. The man that owns the trees complained to the town chief, and the town chief is sort of going along with him.
Bigger than this though, is the fact that to build this road right, then about 4 orange trees and 20 to 30 coffee trees, all well established, will have to be cut down. The owner, the same man, won't agree to this until he is assured compensation for them. Therefore, this is all their basis for saying that they don't want the road. Luckily, I think that the Paramount chief wants the road, and so would decide things my way. The trouble is that at the moment he is not here, so the road just has to wait.
Friday, January 6, 1978, 11:00 pm, Day 710
This morning I went out and took a look at some alternate routes for the road. I found one route where, if feasible, only 5 coffee trees will have to be cut. The new route will have to be surveyed, with cross-sections taken and a profile made. Then I will be able to see how much work will be involved. I also counted the trees on the old route. If the road was put through as originally laid out, then 19 coffee trees and 2 big orange trees and 13 small orange trees will need to be cut down. This new route also looks good, in that it is 50 feet shorter and more direct, while still keeping a constant 15% grade.
Also, while I was out looking at the possible new routes for the road, the owner of the trees came along. Together, we went around for awhile, looking at possibilities, and him showing me which trees and plants are important and which ones it doesn't matter if I cut. I don't think that he is really against the road, but just wants me to try to avoid as much of his trees as is possible.
Saturday, January 7, 1978, 6:00 pm, Day 711
At the moment things are looking pretty good. It looks like things are actually being accomplished. Today, I finally sat down and started on the Jagbwema design again. I started it over from the beginning again, with Moiba sitting in and going through it with me. We figured out all of the design populations and flows and all, with the required tank sizes and number of taps. We located the taps on the town map and drew up the pipe network, and finally went through the calculations on the network to get the first approximation. The network still needs to be adjusted, gone over again, and finalized, but we did a good first-day's work on the design.
Also today, the Chiefdom Central chief clerk happened by today. He had nothing but good news for us. It seems that there is 2000 leones in the chiefdom budget appropiated for Kamiendor's water supply. This is 2000 leones more than I thought we had, so it is good to see that the chiefdom is ready willing and able to meet all of their committments that I had them listed down for in my project proposal. We discussed it and so far the money will be used for the hiring of a tipper to transport the sand, purchasing and transporting the timber to be used for the formwork, and also for the petty cash fund to buy any tools or materials that we find we need but forgot to get beforehand.
Also, the clerk mentioned a bridge project that they were also financing. It is to be on the road about 5 miles behind Kamiendor, near Sagbawa. He asked if I could help, and I told him that I would be glad to assist. Tomorrow, I plan to go out and measure the width and depth of the stream, so that I would know just how big to design the bridge.
Thursday, January 12, 1978, 8:00 pm, Day 716
It's been awhile since I have written in here, so first I want to catch up on what was missed.
Last Monday and Tuesday, I had a bit of a break-through in water system design. I finally figured out some good, reasonable design flows for different numbers of standpipes. Before, it had always been just my best guess at what it should be, but my best guess tended to change from day to day. On Monday, I was going through, redoing the Kamiendor design flows, using the same flows that I had just used in the Jagbwema design. There was quite a difference from the old design.
This got me a bit concerned, so I sat down and worked awhile, using a hint that Bob Stein, our new volunteer, gave me during training. He had said something about probabilities, to which I had agreed, but I had never followed up on it until Monday. Starting with the criteria of the design flow for one tap to be 4.0 gpm (gallons per minute), and that each tap is to be on one third of the time, I started fiddling with all of the possibilities of different numbers of taps being on at the same time, when there is a certain number of total taps.
By Tuesday, I had all of the possibilities for from 1 to 24 taps total. I then went through and found different quality levels, like the 90% quality level means that for a given total number of taps, there is a certain portion of these such that this portion will only be exceeded 10% of the time. I then took all of these results and graphed them, and then connected up all of the different quality levels and found a pattern.
With all of this, I am now able to design certain design flows for certain total numbers of taps that a pipe feeds, and then by always using the same quality level, arrive at a total pipeline system such that each section of that system will be operating at the same level of quality.
Friday, January 13, 1978, 6:00 am, Day 717
I arrived here in Yarya, behind Kayima, yesterday morning. I am planning to do a "quickee" survey of the town and water source. Yesterday we went out and put pegs all over the place, and today I hope to be able to get all of them surveyed. Then tomorrow I would be doing all of the calculations and drawing the map.
|
