My amazing WASH team!

So I'm back at work after a lovely week off. I really enjoyed my break, but I was also happy to come back to work. A week is a good amount of time as you don't completely forget everything that you were in the middle of when you left, and only so many crises can occur while you are away :-) Plus there's the added bonus of less emails and skype messages to catch up on when you return.

One of the activities that one of my Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) teams manage is the operation and maintenance of the WASH facilities in a couple of camps for internally displaced people. The biggest operation is the Qayyarah Airstrip camp which is housing 10,000 families - just over 50,000 people. The camp was built on an old, disused army airstrip, and the land alongside it. Therefore it has no access to any water network or other services. I thought I'd try and give you a flavour of what this team has to do in order to ensure that everyone living in the camp can access safe drinking water, toilets and showers; and that we don't end up with disease epidemics caused by dirty facilities and garbage piling up.

Water
In order to ensure that the residents have access to sufficient safe drinking water and sufficient clean water for washing and cooking etc; the team has had to split the provision in to two separate activities. To provide safe drinking water we have installed a huge water filter system in to our on-site compound. This machine filters around 6,000 litres of water an hour and we currently run it for 20 hours a day, which is it's maximum level. A water truck brings water from the nearest water pump out at the river and this water is then pumped in to a massive storage tank which looks like a very, very big paddling pool. The water is fed through the filter in to a different storage tank and then a different water truck loads up and delivers the safe water to designated drinking water points around the camp. As water provision is critical, we then have local staff positioned at the water points to ensure that families only take water from these points for drinking, and only use their 'drinking water' jerry cans so that there is no contamination of the water at household level. An average week sees the filter machine produce over 600,000 litres of drinking water used by both the residents and the workers in the camp.

The provision of clean water for washing and cooking (clean in this sense is not as safe to drink) is currently done through water trucking directly to large water storage tanks which are positioned in each section of the camp - every 20 tents shares 2 20,000 litre water tanks. On an average week we are trucking 12.5 million litres of water in to the camp. That's over 1,000 trips by water trucks. It's a fairly constant process as you can imagine! And not only do we have to receive and log every truck, but we also have to ensure the quality of the water by testing every truck load, as well as regularly testing water in our tanks. We have a team of 9 people working on water quality control and operation of the filter unit.

Separately we are also working on rehabilitating a large water treatment plant outside the city which ISIS destroyed when they retreated; and on upgrading the pipe network so that this will directly serve the camp with safe water.

Sanitation
Each 20 tents share two sets of sanitation facilities - each one has 2 toilets and 2 showers. There is of course no running water, so the toilets are squatties and the showers are jug style. In each tented community we provide cleaning materials and training on keeping the site clean. Most residents have come from areas where they had full sanitation like we would, and so it is an adjustment to living in this way and does require some training in order for things to stay clean and to therefore keep disease at bay. We have a team of 30 'hygiene promoters' who spend their days doing this training and spot checking facilities. They are also setting up 'sanitation committees' who will be responsible for sharing messages around hygiene in their designated areas. This becomes particularly important when the weather gets warmer and families struggle to keep food fresh leading to health issues.

We also have a smaller technical team who monitor and respond to any issues with the maintenance of facilities - replacing toilet locks, issuing new equipment, getting taps replaced etc, etc. We have a small warehouse on-site that is stocked with all the most common items they may need to use. On an average week the team will respond to over 250 issues.

Solid Waste Management
A camp the size of a town generates a lot of rubbish! And all of that has to be collected and disposed of. We have bins around the camp of course, but there is still a lot of litter. There is a weekly team of 37 people per day working on garbage collection as well as 7 trucks that do 14 trips per day each between the camp and the municipality disposal site.

Distributions
Periodically the team will distribute hygiene items such as soap to all camp residents, as well as cleaning item top ups to the nominated families in each community.

Most of the work we do in the camp on this project is done by camp residents who work on rotations - we hire them for a set number of days and then we select someone else so that everyone gets a fair chance to earn a small amount doing menial work. We then have our full DRC staff who are highly qualified and experienced technicians who oversee it all, including timesheets and payments for all those temporary camp staff. They are always looking at ways to improve the facilities such as putting in privacy screens, designating a single tap at each tap station as a hand-washing tap, providing hygiene education in the children's education centres etc.

So as you can see this is a very, very busy team! They work on a shift pattern 7 days a week and are led by a brilliant Project Manager who even if he isn't setting off for the camp at 7.30am as he's having an office day still turns up to send them off and encourage them. I couldn't be prouder of this team.