Greetings from Cameroon (Part 5)

Hello once more from Cameroon!

As I had mentioned in my previous note, we had a tough talk with the villagers of Metoko Bakundo this Friday. This was the first village we had visited and surveyed, and all the pieces were in line to make this a successful project… except that the stream did not have enough flow to provide for the village’s current population of 1,500, let alone their future projected population in 20 years of 2,600. We offered them two options: to go ahead with a pipe bourne water system, or invest in biosand filters for every home. Through our meeting with the villagers, they were unanimous in wanting a pipe bourne system. They led us to another water source that has much more flow, and should be more than enough for the village. We were extremely glad to have found another source of water. We decided not to measure the flowrate, as it would have not been accurate due to the rains during the rainy season.

We have noticed that the seasons of Cameroon has given us difficulty in appropriately designing our water systems. Where as in America we have four distinct seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, in Cameroon there is but the rainy season and the dry season. These seasons are much more profound in the SouthWest and the NorthWest provinces. The rainy season lasts from mid to late March to about October. During the peak of the rainy season, we have been told that the weather is constant rain for the first two weeks of August. During the dry season from November to February, it does not rain at all. If it does rain, it is but a sprinkle that would barely be enough to keep the dust down on the roads. As engineers, we like to design for the worst case scenario, which would be when the streams are feeding water at their lowest, during the dry season. Unfortunately, our schooling schedule prevents us from coming to Cameroon during those dry months of November to February. So determining whether a stream is adequate during the dry season is next to impossible for us to quantify, apart from simply asking the villagers if the stream still flows in the dry season. The best we can do to create an accurate system is to ask the villagers to measure the flow rate during the dry season and send us the information. We want to try our best to design a system that will work all 12 months a year, and it is disappointing to see that many villages accept water systems that don’t supply water during the dry season.

The weather is a big subject here in Cameroon, namely the changing of the weather. Global warming has played a large factor in altering the timing of the rainy and dry season. The rainy seasons are coming later in the year, and it is becoming harder to tell when the rainy season will begin. Sometimes there may be a heavy rain during the dry season, which suggests the dry season is over. This all is affecting the farmers here greatly. Farming makes up the vast majority of the people here in the SouthWest province, especially in the villages, where cocoa is king. When these heavy rains come, the farmers begin to plant their crops of cocoa, plantains, bananas, and cassava, among others. However, if the crops are planted and the sun comes out and the dry season continues, the crops can wither and die. I believe that I have heard that the rains during the rainy season are even more intense, but the biggest issue is the timing of the seasons is harder to determine. This made me realize how sensitive the earth is, particularly around the poles and the equator, where change will happen at a much faster rate than in the temperate climate of the United States.

Farming here is an interesting subject all in itself, and I will elaborate on it more another date.

I hope everyone enjoyed the 4th of July back in the States. While I’m guessing most were chowing down on hamburgers from the grill… I instead chopped on some delicious boiled plantains and fish! Although to make up for it, I did have a Coca-Cola…

Geoff Holmes, Civil Engineer, FE, University of Dayton '10 graduate