In our effort to determine the demand or need for clean drinking water, some time was spent with the Ghana Water Company billing agent and meter reader. From their records of customers, we are able to determine the amount of use by domestic, commercial, government and stand pipe use. One would think, great, our task is done! However, "domestic" in their terms could be a compound of several families and "standpipe" could involve 100's of people. Alas, the job is more challenging as there is no map that shows the locations of these uses. We went around town by a combination of car and walking and located the majority of the standpipes on the map that we brought. As for usage, they have "attendants" that collect money for people's use, but they do not keep track about the number of people. Probably the most exciting part of the field trip was the discovery that much of the area we thought needed additional distribution actually has a system. Unfortunately, however, many people use the shallow wells even when the public water is there because they don't have to pay for it. Ah, I guess if the solution was easy, we wouldn't be here....
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