With no more wells to drill, our start this morning was a little more relaxed than normal. After the familiar breakfast of eggs and potatoes, our team split up to tackle two important issues that had yet to be addressed. First was organizing water quality testing. In years past, we were able to perform experiments at Chancellor College, a university in Malawi that graciously worked with us to collect high quality data about our wells. Since our last trip, we had some difficulty reaching our contact at the college, so we sent a few team members to meet him in person. Thankfully, we were able to set up everything successfully, and we plan to work with the college again this year!
Our other team travelled to Chilimani once again. Our first task was to meet with the village water committee once again, to report our success with the boreholes and to outline the next steps in our partnership. The committee was pleased with what we all had accomplished, and everyone left the meeting with a smile. We then took off to the site of a local bridge to take some measurements. The bridge has fallen into disrepair after years of use, and in bad weather it is often completely impassable. We have our eyes on it as a potential future project, and wanted to take the opportunity to collect as much information as we could so we could discuss the problem at home. We took measurements two ways: the first was with a tape measure, the old fashioned way. The next was more high-tech. Before embarking on the trip, we reached out to Bentley Systems with interest in a truly impressive piece of software: ContextCapture. With the proper photos, ContextCapture can generate a detailed, 3d model of almost any object. Over the course of that morning, our team carefully took thousands of photos of Chilimani’s bridge from all angles so that we could fully model it back home.
Both teams having finished their work for the day, we all reunited at Steers, a restaurant in the city. There we got a rare taste of American style food. After a delicious meal of burgers, sandwiches, fries (“chips” as they were called here) and ice cream, we headed home for the day. After some dutiful planning, we’re ready to face the rest of our trip and finish strong!
-Alec Agee