 Jean-Yves, who works for the Water and Sanitation Department. Change of subject, complete change of subject. A bit random this, but it's much more fun that way. And we're getting serious. We brought stuff with us now to show you. I'm not mucking around anymore. Good afternoon. I'm here to share with you a new way of thinking regarding aging water bubbles. So it's called the Niger Refresh Project, paradigm change. Actually, to be honest, since we talk about bow holes, we hesitate a lot to call it boring in debt, but we have thought that you just escaped running away for coffee, so we kept paradigm. So it's not easy for me to pronounce it paradigm. Okay, so as you know, water is one of the main health determinants, and it's a necessity for every single MSF intervention. So fortunately, most of the time, or very frequently, we find this water as a groundwater resource. So we pump this water from bow holes. So for those who are not accustomed with bow holes, imagine that you have geological formation acting as a porous media. So you have a rain, water falls on the ground, by gravity infiltrates all the pores of the ground until it meets the bedrock and then starts saturating all the pores and you have your water table. Now you drill a long hole, you install a long pipe that we call casing, and at the bottom you have a pipe with holes that we call slotted casing, and then you have your bow holes. And the water will enter by the slots and will balance inside and outside of the pipe. So if you pump, water will be attracted all around to refill the bow holes. That's the process. So now if you come with a camera and you insert a camera, you should see normally the inside of a smooth pipe, and when you reach the bottom, you see the slots. So it's quite a boring video that you will get. Actually we experimented and we went in many MSF contexts and so it's borehole that supply hospitals and population and it was not so boring. So here you have Afghanistan, for example. It's corroded steel casing, possibly collapsing after a few years. Afghanistan again. So it's a calcium deposit, little by little you have the slots which are clocked and decreasing yield. Haiti Tabar Hospital, famous. So 56 meters, you have organic growing materials. Bokina Faso, borehole in the middle of a village. So you have at the school break the kids coming and throw stones in the borehole. So it's filled until 16 meters. Another borehole in Bokina, so it's full of sand. So when you pump, the sand is lifted and the pump damaged. Niger, Manganese oxide deposit until you have the slots completely clocked. No more yield, abandoned well. Clay with iron oxide deposit. Bacteria growing until it's completely clocked as well. Abandoned. Tubidity. Growing roots. Alive worms, a lot of them there. And then broken casing. So you see that everywhere we go, we face aging boreholes. So normally in such a situation, people go for a new borehole. They pay 15,000 euros for one borehole and they proceed. First, we try a new approach based on diagnosis and based on regeneration of performances. The equipment that we use are hanging tools in the boreholes. Like here we have a hanging camera and we can follow the investigation in the car on the screen. Inside the car you have first the winch where you can operate until 150 meters deep. And we have equipment to, we record data and we record videos. We have also data logging equipment. We record parameters that we transform into Excel graphs. Here for example you have a zoom between 40 and 80 meters deep. With the camera we saw that we have two slotted casing. The first one supplies 14% of the total yield and the second one supplies 86% of the total yield. And here you see that there is no water at all coming from this slotted casing. So you should refer to the video. You should refer to the geology. You should refer to the Driller logbook. All this information that helps you to decide if we proceed to a regeneration process or it's just maybe a borehole badly constructed and you have no water behind the slots. So just to tell you that the technical equipment that we have is only a part of this huge investigation puzzle. We should be concerned with all these points. So to take two case studies, the first one is Bokinafaso-Unde, recent borehole, 70 meters deep, 40,000 euros abandoned for blockage at 35 meters. So we proceed with the first inspection. 9 meters we see the casing. 20 meters we see the water level with a piece of wood. 35 meters we see bags of cement. So the workers that came to complete the surrounding wall, they thrown their rubbish in the borehole and they blocked the borehole. So we came with a custom made and very cheap device for airless pumping. So we blow compressed air and we pump water, mud, sand, gravel and we succeed to unblock the borehole and recover until 67 meters. So here before you had the wood now you remain with the water level. You had the bags of cement. It's clear. We have dirty slotted casing and we have the main stone that fell in the bottom. So we still remain with a dirty borehole. So we decided to clean this borehole with appropriate cleaning agent. Here it's acid based. We have custom made toothbrush for borehole for scrubbing activities and we proceed with rinsing and flushing to complete the work. So we have a small video of the first well that we tried because we were quite happy. When we flushed the well to finish to complete the work. So it's really happy to see that. Okay, we can stop. I don't lose minutes, huh? It's not finished. Okay. So before you had the dirty casing. Now you have a very clean casing. You had the dirty slots. Now you have a very clean slotted casing. So a success. A second case study. Boquina Faso again. Borehole abandoned because it's filled with sand. Investigation, 10 meters of the casing. 35 meters. We see a non-screwed casing. That's where the sand enters inside the borehole. So the casing and at the end you have the accumulated sand. So we came back with our airlift pumping device. We remove all the sand from the borehole and we recovered the bore until 51 meters. But we still remain with our openings, permanent opening and the sand still enters the borehole. We recycled a piece of PVC, a piece of pipe coming from hand pumps. We add a rubber seal. And we insert in the borehole and then we patch the borehole at 35 meters. Full-rate pumping, no more sand. Success again. So in Niger we had two years' field activities. 40 boreholes diagnosed. 12 boreholes regenerated. In terms of cost, we have two visions. The one we choose for diagnosis, we invest 80,000 euros and we have a workshop ready to be operated during 10 years. Or you just outsource and you pay 2,500 euros or 3,000 euros per borehole. Regeneration, we always remain under 3,000 boreholes so far. Sometimes it's much lower according to the treatment. And many constraints, security and broken engine that delayed work. So we believe that we increase the speed of intervention. The efficiency also with a lower cost. We reuse rather than discard. Important, we have overall understanding of the hydrogeological context. For example in Niger, you have a multi-layer supplying aquifer. One of these layers has a high concentration of fluoride and surrounding population, a part of it has dental fluorosis. So with our workshop we are able to exactly to study this situation and to really investigate and to define exactly what layer is contaminant. So we believe we can come back with the Ministry of Water on the drill and make recommendations on their way to construct boreholes. So for us we believe it's a high impact in terms of public health. Oh, I'm sorry. Hydrogeology is a profession so it's not easy to access. We have a high expat turnover with a basic Watson knowledge. Difficult to hand over to national actors and we are not always possible. So until now we have an emergency camera kit, hand carried, 70 kgs. It just came back from Malawi. We have in development a full investigation kit. So lighter but very mobile, 100 kilos for people. We want to start after some of the study on fluoride in Nigeria and deploy early next year in Zimbabwe for cholera and typhoid recurrent outbreak. And here we believe really that this workshop is really appropriate for borehole maintenance, regeneration, rehabilitation. But it's also for us an open door for deep study and we believe we can have a huge potential in terms of impact on public health that we want to take advantage of. But then we still remain with our before mentioned constraint and then we consider for the moment if we keep it internal or if we would create an external service provider as a technical interface. So here is the small emergency camera. So actually it's just a small camera, very basic. And we have, if I can break it, the video recorder so we can go anywhere to make some videos quickly for the first phase of emergency. That's all. So thanks to all these people that helped the project to be alive. And thanks to you to listen to them. Thank you very much. Technical questions and please state your name, organization and stand up if possible because it's easy to see you. My name's Kirillian from the Institute of Topical Medicine and Antwerp. This doesn't mean to be a negative question but what do you then do afterwards to make sure the kids aren't throwing stones back into the well that people aren't going to come and fix it and put more cement in? Is there sort of a way to follow up and I guess maintain them? But I guess, I mean in every village there in Burkina you have a chief of the Ministry of Water so you're supposed to have a borehole with a lid with bolts and to have a surrounding wall with a closed door. So this didn't exist. So I don't know what happened with this responsible because we were with the main director from the capital so possibly he got some serious problems. The point to make is perhaps the collaboration with the local authorities, the local ministry of water. We always collaborate with the Ministry of Water because here we touch boreholes which doesn't belong to the authorities so we are not allowed to touch these boreholes. We need agreements with them so that's what we proceed all the time. Perhaps on a local level you could comment on the relationship with the local population who benefit from the borehole and the relationship developed with them some kind of education surrounding the... Yeah, possibly yes. But anyway, normally in terms of borehole protection all boreholes should be well closed and protected otherwise it would get contamination very soon. Time for one more question. So I'm just going to ask a question about if there's any monitoring of the quality of the water so there's been problems reported with arsenic and salamization around the world. Do you monitor the quality of the water that's coming out? For us, as I said, the investigation is like a big puzzle. So to monitor or to follow the water quality is really a pillar of the project as well. So we cannot just go and take measurements or videos. The quality of water is one of the main issues. For example, in Niger we have an agreement with the Ministry of Water. So we have someone from the Ministry always with us on the field and they keep the heart of the Ministry when we open the borehole and we take samples that we bring in the National Lab and they provide the analysis and we provide the consumable. So it's a good win-win situation. So we really collaborate with the Ministry of Water. It's a part of the project. Thank you very much.