Water. You need it to survive, but it’s dangerous enough to kill you.
Nearly a billion people in the developing world don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. And yet between 6 and 8 billion people die of water-related disasters and causes (according to the UN).
In northern rural Thailand, the scares are real. As is the case of much of the developing world, this remote area lacks the infrastructure, funding, and public awareness to adequately provide stable living conditions for the communities.
In March 2016, Yvonne of YR Architecture + Design spent 3 weeks helping underserved Thailand communities with 3 sustainable water projects – helping improve access to safe drinking water while also bolstering infrastructure to withstand the effects of disastrous torrential rains.
Here’s her story.
Thailand’s Mirror Foundation
In early 2016, I contacted International Volunteer Headquarters (IVHQ) to volunteer in Thailand. IVHQ finds partnering local non-profit organizations in various countries to facilitate volunteering opportunities in hard to reach locales. My previous humanitarian trips were with Habitat for Humanity but I wanted to try something different this time.
What I liked most about this method of volunteer enrollment was the flexibility I had in selecting the country, the type of volunteer work, the duration of stay, and the start date of the trip. I also appreciated how affordable, organized, and reputable the organization was.
As I learned, many of these hill tribes are immigrants from surrounding countries like China, Bangladesh, and Myanmar who fled their native countries fearing persecution and other humanitarian crimes over past generations.
Settling in these remote parts of Thailand illegally, they are now effectively stateless. They are treated as third-class people. They don’t have any of the basic rights that Thai citizens do. And they are cut off from any public assistance.
(I can’t really say why I was drawn to Thailand initially. I think the appeal of getting to work with the hill tribes really drew me in – to be able to work with such underserved communities in the world really touched a chord.)
So I spent 3 weeks volunteering with the local Mirror Foundation, taking 5 minute cold showers (because let’s be honest, who can take a longer cold shower?), sleeping on the floor under mosquito nets, waking with the roosters, and laboring day in and day out. And yet, I could never have been happier.
Monsoon Rains Wreak Havoc on Northern Thailand Infrastructure
This road provided the only means for the Foundation and its volunteers to come and go, to get access to food, supplies, and emergency services, and to get out and help the surrounding community who desperately need help.
The first project I helped with during the first week of my stay was helping to build a retaining wall on the low side of the access road that when finished would prevent future flash flooding from washing it away.
Building Retaining Walls in Rural Thailand
This was the case for our retaining wall. The main access road stretched approximately a half mile to the main road. Previous groups of volunteers started the remediation project and other future groups would continue it as volunteers became available.
To make the large half-mile long stretch of retaining wall more manageable for groups of inexperienced volunteers and to keep the project sizes within scale for the amount of time it took to do each task, the wall was built in smaller segments.
During my first week there, our portion of the retaining wall stretched about 30 feet long and was about 2 feet tall. The wall would eventually be much taller, but we were tasked with the lower portion of the wall.
Here’s what the construction process looked like.
To start, formwork was created from random boards of wood and bamboo.
Metal bars were cut, bent, and tied together by hand to form reinforcement inside the wall.
Many people may think this to be a small endeavor, but it’s quite a bit of work.
How much effort does it take to pour a concrete wall of this size? A lot.
Creating the formwork and rebar cage was actually the easy part of the process. The hard part was mixing batches of concrete by hand.
Concrete was mixed in a plastic tub adjacent to the retaining wall with shovels and hoes, then put into buckets and poured into the formwork. (Countless batches of concrete were mixed just for this small stretch of wall.)
Since the retaining wall was situated on the side of a creek, water was easily accessible. Bags of cement were also readily available. Gravel and sand were shoveled into old rice bags and hauled over to the retaining wall site from a pile down the road.
Previous volunteer groups had built other sections of the retaining wall to it’s full height so while some of us were mixing concrete, others were backfilling the finished retaining wall sections with mud to be level with the road.
When you’re trying to spend money wisely as an NGO, you look for ways to source materials for free, which was the case for the mud. The area we sourced the mud from was a depressed swampy area on the site that filled with water during the rainy season anyway. Why not just take some mud and turn this area into a pond?
So groups of us spent many hours digging in this swampy area, filling thousands of buckets of mud, forming an assembly line to get the buckets up to other volunteers who poured them into rice bags. The bags were then piled into the back of a pickup truck and hauled over to the retaining wall site and dumped.
Access to Clean, Safe, and Plentiful Water
The other two projects I work on related to providing safe, clean drinking water to the local community.
We often take for granted the fact that we have access to safe and plentiful drinking water. We often waste it taking long showers, frequently washing clothes, and letting the water run while we brush our teeth. But helping with projects like this really puts things into perspective just how scarce of a resource water is to many people around the world.
A New Water Filtration System Provides Safe Drinking Water
Many northern Thai communities get their water from ground water runoff coming from higher elevations.
Traditionally in this part of Thailand, water is purified by natural means: water gets absorbed into the soil where soil particles, organic matter, and microorganisms break down and decompose numerous chemical and biological contaminants in the water, creating water that is safe to consume.
As more and more human development occurs upstream to degrade the soil, contaminate storm water, and alter the composition of the soil, the natural filtration system that many inhabitants have relied on throughout history becomes strained. The purification process slows down and causes unfiltered water to enter the water supplies.
Water at the Mirror Foundation is collected and stored in water cisterns after it’s piped from higher elevations. For fear of imminent contamination from future development higher up the mountain, they are taking steps to install a simple bio-filtration system.
Currently, water is stored in various cisterns throughout the property for each building. We focused specifically on the cisterns supplying water to the canteen area which had 2 of the largest cisterns on the property.
Water from the mountain will be piped into these smaller cisterns in series before getting stored in the main larger water cisterns for later use.
Here’s the process:
The cisterns were made of precast concrete rings. Each ring was stacked on top of each other and held together with a cement mixture (with some added liquid sealer for basic waterproofing).
Again, this activity was all by hand. Cement was mixed in a (broken) plastic tub and applied with a trowel onto the precast rings.
Here’s what our finished product looked like – 3 rows of rings for the water filtration system. All that was left was the piping for the water and filling the cisterns with gravel, sand, and charcoal.
A New Check Dam Provides Water to Akha Hill Tribe
The most rewarding experiences of all my trips are when we get to meet and work side by side people from the villages who are in such desperate need of help.
For the second half of my trip, I actually had a homestay with the Akha Hill Tribe village. I stayed with one of the families, ate the same food they ate, and used the same facilities they used. (We used mostly hand gestures and miming to communicate which was a challenge with the language barrier especially with the uncommon dialect they spoke, but we managed OK.)
Many people in this tribe had never seen westerners before. My group was the first team of volunteers to help this tribe, but we wouldn’t be the last.
The village gets their water from a nearby stream 2 miles away. It’s piped from the stream to the village where it is stored and used for daily activities in cisterns similar to the ones at the Mirror Foundation.
Typically, during the rainy season, water gushes through the creek and onward to lower elevations. But in the dry season, there is barely a trickle in the stream, let alone in the pipes to the village.
Our task was to install the first of a series of small check dams in the creek. When the check dams are finished, water will be retained and hopefully alleviate some of the water scarcity issues the village faces. (Imagine a series of small dammed up water holding pools that would stay filled throughout the dry season.)
So how much effort does it take to build a small dam in a creek bed 2 miles upstream in the woods with only hand tools? Oh, and you have to trek up there with ALL your supplies – including buckets and buckets of gravel, bags of cement, long bars of rebar, and your own drinking water for the day.
So here’s how we did it:
The first day was spent actually forging a path through the woods to the location we would build the dam.
We spent a lot of time that day cutting away enough brush to form a small narrow path that we’d use to traverse back and forth on the rest of the week carrying buckets of gravel and cement up to the site. (After that first day of creating the path, it took 30 minutes one way to make the trip.)
And then we began building the dam.
The dam would consist of two parallel walls of rocks with the middle filled with rebar and lots of concrete.
The dam construction would consist of two parallel rock walls with the core filled with rebar and lots of concrete.
But first, we needed to install some piping.
Two pipes were installed through the bottom of the walls, both about 6 feet long.
The smaller pipe is held off the river bed a few inches and has an upturn elbow at the inlet. This is the water pipe that the tribespeople will connect their piping to during the dry season to get more water. Elevating it off the river bed helps prevent residual silt and debris at the bottom of the creek from getting into the pipe.
Here’s a few views of the in-progress check dam looking upstream and downstream. Both rock walls are built, rebar has been cut, tied together, and stood up inside the walls. You can see the blue PVC pipes cutting through the walls.
In the future, when multiple check dams are built, each retaining a pool of water, you can imagine how the tribespeople would start tapping into each holding pond in sequence. As the uppermost dam dries out, they move their pipe to the next dam downstream, and then the next, and the next.
Here’s a closeup of the check dam with its walls of rock. (And then comes the grueling part of mixing concrete… yes, by hand.)
We spent the rest of the week hauling buckets of gravel and cement from the village to the site, mixing the concrete, and pouring it into place. We threw in some small rocks as we poured (as larger aggregate, and to lessen the amount of concrete we had to make). Rocks were then placed on the top surface to give it a nice finished look.
Not the most glamourous of dams but definitely one the village is thankful for… and that’s really all that matters. :-)
