The Sludge Men Cometh

Wednesday 28th August, 10pm - 3am

After dinner, our first stop was a mosque/ school in Faridpur, with a now disused septic tank (their new latrine block had been completed two or three months earlier).  We caused a lot of interest and many boys stopped by to see what we were doing.

Mosque Collection

 The sweepers who completed the training last time were back, and kitted out in their aprons, masks, gloves and wellies.  Unfortunately, while they normally sleep during the day and work at night, today they had been pressed into service to dig drainage ditches for a nearby community that had been flooded.  This meant they were pretty tired, and I really felt for them.

The Sweeper Team

Collection and loading onto the truck

 

Overseeing the sludge collection

 We collected about 13 barrels (about 700L), but unfortunately it was quite liquid due to rain soaking through into the tank.  After delivering it to site, we then went on to a school.  This had suffered more than the mosque, and it was just dirty water in the tank.

The truck arrives on site

You can see the different consistencies we have to deal with in the photos below - it varies enormously, barrel to barrel, tank to tank, latrine to latrine.

The waste-trap mesh worked pretty well, although my feeling is that it is too fine - we had someone raking over it continuously to persuade the 'right' stuff to go through.  It did prevent a lot of the plastic detritus from getting into the drying beds though, so that was good.

We end up with quite a big team on site during delivery!

A filled bed

After the first delivery, and abortive trip to the school, we went back to the bus station we visited on our first collection trip.  Here it turned out two ladies (sisters/ mother and daughter) were living in a shack built on top of the septic tank.  We ended up in this strange situation of waking them up at 1:30am, and turning them out of their house, while our sweepers went in and started bucketing out FS from what was essentially the middle of their living room floor. 

Negotiating to bucket poo out of the middle of their house at 1:30am....

Eventually we’d filled the requisite barrels, and we headed over to the exit.  Unfortunately, despite the drivers best attempts at a run-up, the truck got stuck in a giant muddy rut/puddle.  I was keen on using our car to tow it out so we could all finish up and go to bed, but the guys weren’t keen.

Wheelspinning in a bus station

45mins later, at about 2:45am, they’d unloaded enough of the barrels to unweight the truck sufficiently to get it out - with a lot of pushing and shouting.

We ended up with about 700L in each drying bed, and then went to bed ourselves.