Today was odd in that it was the first day of the trip that we woke up without a clear idea of what the day held. We had a leisurely breakfast at the farm as usual and waited for our driver Joe to tell us what meetings he was able to secure for us.

Much to our delight, Joe informed us that we were going to meet with a man named Chimpeni, who owns two borehole wells powered by solar panels. He used these to pump water into huge dams that are used for irrigation nearby. We were able to visit the site, see them in action and ask all the questions we could think of about the system. This was a really cool experience for the team because we are investigating the idea of putting a solar powered pump in our new partner community, Chilimani.

After we soaked up all the knowledge we could from Chimpeni, we headed to another meeting with a man named Vincent, who is a solar pump expert that we were connected with through VIP, our partner non-governmental organization. Again, we asked many questions about his project and learned as much as we could about the upsides and downsides of using a solar system for water. From our two meetings today, we have lots of information to take home use in our discussions to decide what we will implement in Chilimani.

After a very long wait for lunch at the restaurant we went to, our last activity of the day was to go to Chilimani to look at the sites that we learned were the best target sites to drill. Courtesy of our friend Clifford from Zambia who did the resistivity testing, we learned there were four potential sites to drill in our target areas. We will go back to Chilimani tomorrow to mark these in a more permanent way, but for today we just wanted to get a look at what was around the sites and about how far away they were from housing clusters. On the way out of Chilimani we even saw Martha, our translator from the village!

Today was pretty calm, but tomorrow will be our last day in the field before we take a fun day off and then head to Blantyre for more meetings, so it is jam packed from 6am-5pm. I can’t believe we are nearing the end of the trip, but I am ready to make these last few days count!

-Ashley