Photos

This picture has been taken in Gabon in 1983.
I spend two years in Gabon in the middle of nowhere involved in Rural Water Supply Projects. I worked in the South-East of Gabon in the Nyanga, Ngounie, and Ogooue Maritime provinces.

This water supply program took place during the ‘International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981-1990)’ when the water demand in countries of Western and Central Africa was considerable. The most optimistic statistics established that drinking water is still not available to more than 80% of the rural population in developing countries. The problem of water prospecting is more than ever a crucial objective. The 1976 estimations leads to 100.000 water points to be carried out by 1990. To meet the water demand in developing countries, thousands of water points remained to be created within the scope village water supply programs.

To make a long story short, geologically speaking it was discovered that it was feasible to find water in hard rocks (i.e. granites, gneiss which represent 80% of the continent’s basement in Africa and India) under specific hydrogeological environments. Then a new drilling technique was put in place using compressed air. That drilling technique made it feasible to drill quickly in hard rocks. Before that the people in remote location use to get their water from unsafe surface holes generally very fare from the village . As water was a great cause of waterborne diseases rural water supply projects where launched to bring safe water to people leaving in remote small communities.

I was leading a team of water well drillers and we where leaving in containers (the one you see in the picture).

This picture is one of the first I took. I find it like a painting where you can get the flavor of the sky and the forest in Africa. I took it using my Nikon F2 and a Kodachrome 64. I scanned the picture with a Nikon coolscan V.