Monday, August 22, 2011

Showergy 2.0

The past weeks here have been extremely exciting, and we have managed to secure some very interesting answers and tons of information regarding community life and sanitation in the slums. Having spoken to different stakeholders such as tenants (of all types, from the relatively well-off to those that barely manage to meet their daily expenses), caretakers, agents, landowners, youth groups, biocenter owners, special project engineers....the mix has been great!

One would ask: so how does that relate to shower design? It does! After our initial weeks of surveying, we came to the crux of some of the issues related to sanitation, particularly showers or bafus. Bathing at home seems to be the cultural norm for women, some of whom even run community showers themselves! Trust is a huge issue, and legitimately so, where it becomes difficult to be willing to shower around unknown people and places, which can get dangerous after dusk. Additionally, landowners aren't the most co-operative of people, or so it seems from the tenants' perspective. In any case, circumventing property rights would be immensely useful. But within the tiny over-populated house, space always seems to be the major issue. Cleaning up after bathing. Needing to send everyone, including children and visitors, out of the house is inconvenient. Showering outside is moreover expensive. Our shower needs to address all these issues: and more. Most importantly, it needs to be accepted. How do we make such a shower?

After much animated discussion, and inputs from many of the Sanergy team members such as Ani and Nathan, including very valuable contributions from Michelle's dad we decided to come up with a modular low-cost scalable shower model using low-cost materials we saw around the slums (read jerry cans, bike pumps, simple hoses and hand-held shower heads, tarp, wooden boxes) and are currently in the process of developing a prototype for the same. Here's a copy of what's currently on our google doc.

Showergy 2.0 Model Discussion

IndividualCentralized
Pros
  1. No issue of landrights with owners, caretakers, agents, etc.
  2. Responsibility of maintenance upon the user
  3. Re-use more accepted, since within the family.
  4. Also, re-use safer since germs/diseases (if at all) can only be transferred within the family.
  5. Compact design, easy to pack away in a box
  6. Women can shower at home, their comfort zone (yay!) without needing to venture out
  7. Screen allows children and other people to remain inside home while women are showering
  8. Encasement ensures that surrounding area doesn’t get wet
  9. Modular design allows shower to move with the tenants, eliminating cost of relocation (since people here seem to move around between plots a lot)
(I suppose these shall just be the natural collolarly of the points discussed in the previous 2 columns, but feel free to add more!)
Cons
  1. Maintenance harder for the individual owner, who may be inexperienced (?)
  2. Still doesn’t eliminate bathing inside the home (if that’s an issue)



Questions that will be answered with time:
  1. Cost
  2. Re-use methods / drainage
  3. Larger-scale manufacturing
  4. Exact structure of the encasement of the shower
  5. Maintenance

Progress on the actual prototype in the next blogpost. :) Keep commenting!
Kwa heri,
Jess

2 Comments:

At August 26, 2011 at 12:31 PM , Blogger TKC said...

I support the idea of the compact, portable shower, versus a shower module on a plot. It seems to suit the constraints and needs of the surveyed community much better than what we had originally envisioned. Also, this shifts the responsibility of water (how much, and from where) onto the family. Presumably, if they can reliably find the 5-10 L of water already on their own, then that's one less thing for us to worry about. I like that the option of chlorine tablets is included on the Google Doc that Jesika sent out; we can at least provide the users with some kind of method to cleanse the water, when it comes in, or when it is reused.

 
At August 26, 2011 at 12:56 PM , Blogger Blogger said...

Totally agree with TKC about the water issue - that was also one of the main reasons we thought this model would be better. People are spending that amount of water (atleast 5-10l) on showers daily, and as you said, it would be best to leave the actual water, amount to their personal preferences and capability.

We have yet to find the chlorine tablets, but we should be able to source them pretty easily. Also, there are some more issues with recycling water that need to be addressed by more than chlorine tablets, but we can talk about those and test out more stuff once we're back in the States.

Thanks for your comments, really appreciate that!

 

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