Mali Water Pump Project

We began our day by taking Asha and Dr. Carter's luggage to the Air France terminal in downtown Bamako. The Bamako airport gets very hectic, so Air France has their passengers check their luggage earlier in the day, so they don't have to do it at the airport. Once we actually got to the village, we finished installing the see-saw, now that the cement had hardened and the paint had dried over night. When the see-saw was finished, all of the kids wanted to play on it at once, so we finally got them in two lines, and every ten seconds they would switch to the next set of kids.

Today the team finally began drilling. When we arrived at the village this morning, we began removing all of the material from the storage unit and moving it to the drill site. We ended up loading about 350 feet of small steel piping, 350 feet of large steel piping, the pump, and all of the linkage system including a 13 foot I-beam. After we loaded it all onto our full sized van, we returned to bring the wood box used to store all the materials. Getting the 4'x4'x18' box onto the top of the van was quite a process, but we finally got it up there and to the drill site.

Jason, Asha, and Pete (one of the people who runs the misssion house) went to two different villages today. Asha had raised money and school supplies from her work to donate to a school in N'Darala, one of the villages that Pete visits frequently. In the first village, Pete had to change the bandages on a man that was involved in a motorcycle accident, but wasn't properly taken care of. After he took the bandages off and gave us a warning we were able to see his leg.