Hydraulic ram pumps and Sling Pumps

http://www.gvanv.com/compass/arch/v1305/schemenr.htmlThe villagers now have their own water authority, charge for the water consumed and maintain the lowerpart of the water system. Periodic surveys of the villagers have shown that they prefer the taste andavailability of the fog water to the more expensive trucked-in water they depended on before.The Chungungo project was a joint Chilean-Canadian effort, involving the Pontifical Catholic Universityof Chile, the University of Chile and the Chilean National Forestry Corporation. Most of the funding forthe project came from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa, withsubstantial support also from Environment Canada and the Canadian Embassy in Santiago. Theknowledge gained in this project fed into my work in Canada on acidic deposition from fog. In turn therewas a flow of knowledge and instrumentation into Chile and other countries. I have subsequently workedon fog projects in Oman, Peru and Ecuador. Funding sources have varied, but IDRC and the CanadianInternational Development Agency (CIDA) have been involved in many of them.A fog collection project has just been completed in Ecuador at Pululahua north of Quito, and a newproject is underway at Pachamama Grande, an indigenous community in the south of Ecuador at anelevation of 3,700 metres. The local people are participating in the project from the beginning and aredelighted at the prospect of having a clean water supply. This is the first project where private-sectordonations have played a major role in funding the fog water supply for a village. Volunteers from aCanadian NGO, the Centre Canadien d'Étude et de Coopération Internationale, are working with thevillagers and will implement the project. IDRC is funding the initial technical evaluation of the site.In the complexity of a project, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the simplicity of the water source andhow basic water is to the needs of the people. But there are moments when the villagers themselves bringone back to reality--when they call the spinning cups of the anemometers "butterflies" or when they tellyou that even the animals get sick from drinking from the little canal by the village.Fog collection will not be the total answer to the world's water shortages. However, it is an example ofhow we can work with what nature gives us and of how developing and developed countries can pooltheir skills to initiate low-technology water projects that are sustainable over periods of hundreds ofyears.Robert Schemenauer is a research scientist with Environment Canada in Toronto.http://www.gvanv.com/compass/arch/v1305/schemenr.html (2 of 3) [1/13/2005 12:49:14 PM]