Game water

    I used to be a teacher. Though I left the profession years ago I’ve never really left at all and Sue often mutters the ‘P’ word (pedant) when I’m at my most pompous and, well, pedantic I suppose. She is away in Bulawayo at the moment but I could hear her in my imagination, whispering the word when I read through the first couple of paragraphs I had written for this blog post so I deleted the lot, apart from the heading and I’m starting again.

   One of the things that takes up a lot of time in the dry season is game water. That’s water for animals, pumped from underground into a variety of troughs, pans and dams. If we had money to pay extra staff, if we had good equipment, plenty of spare parts and no elephants it would all be easy but this is Zimbabwe – so it isn’t! With a minimum of staff plus help from volunteers, with Mr Mafa’s skill at keeping decrepit machinery running, with a bit of ingenuity, we manage – and then the elephants come along and break whatever we have just fixed.

    Shumba wind pump is one of our nightmares. It is perfectly placed in open grassland…….

There’s good wind through most of the year but the elephants have discovered that they can easily break the outlet pipe either at the pump or at the pan. When that happens, the first thing to do is stop the pump. Someone has to climb up and attach a rope to the chain that controls the tail and then a bit of brute strength is needed to pull the tail round. I don’t have brute strength so I climb……..

  

And whoever we have persuaded to help us, pulls……

   With the pump stopped we can repair whatever was damaged…..

   Then go away and wait for the elephants to break it again.

   Not all the pumps are such a nuisance. Thanks to Michel Buenerd, Le Pic Vert and Le Pal Foundation we have three solar pumps. One of them was only installed this year – at Tshompani. It came with clear instructions for the electrical installation but the instructions for building the panel frame were vague to say the least. We looked at all the pieces, looked at the instructions, looked at the pieces again, and applied simple logic – but still had no idea what the diagrams were supposed to mean so we used good old trial and error and in fact it was all very simple – though we did have to cut the ends off some of the pieces and there was nothing about that in the instructions.

    Anyway, having got the whole thing worked out at Sinamatella we took all the pieces to Tshompani and started work. First the site needed clearing and everyone did a bit…..

Mr Mafa and Shamiso……

Me……..

And Sue.

The frame went up pretty easily………

And even the electrics weren’t too bad….

A herd of elephants came to the dam to see how we were getting on (and no doubt to check if there was anything they could break at a later stage)..

 And that was it, job done. Well it wasn’t really quite that simple and actually took three days but not much went wrong and shortly after we finally switched on, water flowed into the trough for the first time in a couple of years..

 Last time we were there the elephants hadn’t broken anything. They were probably too busy working on the wind pump at Shumba.