Water Tower for a school -- Taom village, CAMBODIA
For almost half a year, the Taom Primary School has had no running water. And although they do have well water for immediate use, having no running water for their two restrooms, 200 meters away, is causing serious hygienic problems. Their lack of running water was caused by an aging water tower that had major structural support issues. Unfortunately, due to lack of funds the village has been unable to rebuild the tower.
During a local community meeting, six months ago, it was agreed upon that the tower could possibly collapse and hurt someone if it would to remained in service. As a result, the tower was decommissioned and later demolished.
After a couple of important meetings of our own, we managed to commit the help of eight fathers and a couple of teachers to help us design and build a new water tower. However, things quickly got complicated because of the necessity to complete this project in just two days. Both the fathers couldn’t afford to work more days and we had other project commitments. As a result, we could only dedicate one day to buying supplies and one day to construction.
For this project we gave all the materials to build the new water tower using local materials: four long poles/logs, different size boards, cement, sand, shovel, nails, special paint for the wood, and several paintbrushes. Additionally, we gave them: a custom made portable hygiene station with a water tank and it's stand, bars of soap for a year, 1 plastic bin to keep some of the soap nearby, 2 large trash cans, two water buckets for the hygiene station. Noticing they lacked school supplies we also gave them: 65 textbooks, 20 boxes of educational card sets, 5 staplers, lots of boxes of staples, 2 large calculators for the teachers, 400 notebooks, 400 red and blue pens, 360 pencils, 2 boxes of white correction pens, one volleyball net, two volleyballs, one air pump, and two soccer balls.
The total project cost was $992, directly helping 175 students. Update… the tower was completely painted several days after it got built. Unfortunately, we don’t have any pictures of the paint job.
