Vunikura Hiking/ It’s Black!

There are multiple religions in this area and with that two Sabbaths are observed – Saturday for the Seventh Day Adventists (SDAs) and Sunday for the Catholics and Methodists. This actually works to our advantage as we can work with whoever is not observing their Sabbath. Vunikura is all Catholic and therefore today we headed there to sample the source and tank. Seewah was observing the sabbath, so we were joined by Ana, Arone and Pele. Ana is a primary school teacher in Vunikura who is very warm, friendly and speaks English well. She is close with Roger and is very excited that we are here to help her village.

The source (which we had seen the day before) is a dammed spring which appears to have adequate flow, even in the dry season. The inlet pipe has a screened entrance, but we were told that there is a problem with sediments clogging the pipe; the entrance is cleaned out approximately once a month.

From there we were taken to a potential second source, which turned out to be a river very far from the village, with a hill in between. We don’t think this is a possible source, plus from further conversations it appears that the original source has sufficient flow, but needs improvements to prevent sediment clogging and leaks along the distribution pipe.

We interrupted the hot, sweaty morning with a fresh coconut break. Arone and Pele climbed trees to harvest the fruit, and Ana used one of the men’s machetes to hack it open for us. A delicious treat! Next we observed the storage tank, located at the side of the road. The tank appeared half full, with adequate flow coming in.

Throughout the day we queried Ana on family life and health in Vunikura, and her opinions of their water system. By the end of the morning she invited us to attend Sunday mass in Vunikura and promised to help us find families who were willing to be interviewed for our baseline health survey.

In the afternoon we came back to the Mission with our source and tank water samples to our makeshift ‘laboratory’ in Deborah’s room. We opened our sample incubator, excited like kids at Christmas to see the results of our tap samples from the previous day, and were surprised to see four solid black bottles. This indicates the presence of salmonella in the water, which is an indicator for Typhoid. Yikes! We also saw small bubbles in some of the total coliform MPN tests. Double Yikes!

We spent the remainder of the afternoon discussing and reviewing our Vunikura data. Tomorrow we plan to return to Vunikura for church (Deborah’s first time!) and to administer health surveys. We’re looking forward to more time spent getting to know the Vunikura villagers who seem very friendly and welcoming.