After 10 hours of work in the bright sun in 35°C the irrigation system is complete. And we are dead tired. I drank 9l of water today and I’m still thirsty.

The people of Mambourke are happy, they have started watering their gardens already, and put a fence around the solar panels to protect them from the animals.

The trip back home starts tomorrow at 5am, its 7500km and we plan to finish it in 5 days.

We left Bamako at 6am today and came back to Mambourke, around 450km north, to install the irrigation system. All the components seem to have arrived in one piece.

In Mambourke we immediately realized that the well just beside the community garden was neither deep enough, nor would it deliver the required amount of water. In the first moment we were very disappointed that the information we received upfront was that inaccurate, but soon we understood that it is impossible to find out any data about the wells there. The local people don’t know how deep the wells are, most of them probably don’t even know what one meter is. All you can get are answers of the kind “there is a lot of water in there” (what “a lot of” means remains undefined) or “that one is not good”.

After the fist shock that we ran into a showstopper before we even started the installation we began to analyze the wells of the village. There are many of them. Only a few are being used, some of them are dry or have never been completed, some of them are private property of one family, some of them are dedicated to one type of use (e.g. drinking water, for the animals, …). Finally we ended up with only two options left, both with water levels acceptable for our pump but far away from the garden. We measured the amount of water in the well closer to the garden (around 260m) and found it OK: 7m water column in a well with 3m diameter, water level 6m below the surface. The next step was to ask the village chief for permission to use that well. After a short discussion between the village chief and his advisors we got our OK. The well is almost 300m from the community garden, we have to find some more 32mm pipes tomorrow to get there, but we are confident to have found a good solution.

The people of Mambourke are among the poorest we have seen in Africa, but they are very friendly. They invited us for dinner (chicken, potatoes and rice, everything boiled in water) and tea.

The rack of the solar panels has already been assembled and painted (we had a lot of helping hands, but many of them have never seen nuts and bolts before and we had to show how to use them) and we rolled out 200m of pipe from the well toward the garden. By the time we get back tomorrow in the morning the village inhabitants should have made a ditch for the pipe.

It was a real African experience today: everything is very very basic, information is plain wrong or at least inaccurate, and there is always something unexpected you have to cope with.

We arrived in Bamako a few minutes ago! The better hotels are fully booked, but we managed to get the junior suite in one of the smaller hotels. Nothing really fancy, but there is a bathroom and hot water.