Back to Ulu Papar - Day Two

Day 2 – Thursday 24th November 2016

I’m feeling lazy to write too much today after a busy day so I’ve made a list of things that happened. It’s 8pm and the house is now full of children who (I think) returned from school at about 7pm. The adults (and some of the children) are drinking tapai and playing cards. I’m not sure how to describe tapai, the home-brew that gets served up at any occasion…  it’s a milky white-yellow drink, which can be sweet and/or sour with a distinctive taste - kind of a thick version of scrumpy perhaps! Everyone is also chewing on betel nut and leaves.

Here’s what we achieved today:

• Fixed the grounding (the cable had just been accidentally cut while they are replacing the concrete at the side of the house).
• Discovered that the PC monitor is faulty. Luckily I’d brought the spare ruggedized laptop so I set that up to be used in Pongobonon and we’ll collect it on the next site visit when we bring a new monitor. 
• Successfully installed a meter and showed Henry (one of the residents) how it needs to be installed so that he can install the others.
• Used a test set-up to check all the other meters are working correctly. This had multiple benefits because Henry did it with my support - it both checked none of these cards were corrupted (we only found one this time) but also made sure he could wire up each meter and add value to the cards.*
• Hiked up to the powerhouse and higher to look for a location to put a water filter system. I identified a few places and made some very crude estimates of how high each place is. The height is important because it dictates the pressure of the water at that point. With that type of system we would need sufficient pressure to pass the water through the filter into an accumulator tank and then that will need sufficient pressure to be able to distribute the water to all of the houses in the village.
• Ate lunch of rice and fish, and tinned fish, some fishy snacks and then dinner was rice and (you guessed it) fish.

*The last site visit to Kalanggaan to install the meters had not been successful because the cards were corrupted and gave error codes when they were inserted into the meters. I’ve been in contact with the supplier in between the visits and they sent us some replacement cards which, in theory, should be fine.