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I probably cannot add much to the fact sheet Brian has sent you on spring protection except to say that springs are generally pretty clean sources if they are captured when they emerge from ground and animals and people are kept from polluting it.

I do, however, have a little information and a question that I would like to ask about Yei having spent a couple of months there with Oxfam in 1998.

Surface Water - as far as I can remember the river that runs through the town is perennial and before the war there was a pumping station with perhaps some treatment at the point where the main road crosses the river. When I was there the pump house was in some disrepair and was occupied by SPLA soldiers. A lot of equipment had been taken and we scavenged a few more bits of pipe for the work that we were doing to install an emergency water supply at the hospital. It may be possible (though quite expensive) to bring this back into action for the whole town.

Ground water - There are quite a lot of wells/boreholes around the town and 20m sounds about the depth the pumps were set at though the static water level was much closer to the surface in the borehole that I rehabilitated (about 7m I think). Some had been filled in with stones by one or other sides during the fighting but others were still operational with hand pumps.

I would be really interested to know if my system is still operational though I would not be surprised if it is not as at the time the hospital was subject to frequent bombing from the north and I think mine was the third system that had been built there. We put a submersible pump powered by a generator in a borehole the other side of the road from the hospital. It pumped to a water tower which fed 6 Oxfam tap stands distributed around the hospital.

Regards

Martin Ager