Improving sanitation in floating communities along the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia. Preparing for/building in the floating village. August 16th - 18th, 2016. By: Joanne Wu

"Do you have this?" I ask acutely aware of the language barrier between me and the grocery store representative as I point, earnestly, to a picture of corn kernels on my phone.

He looks at my screen, furrows his eyebrows, and shakes his head no.

We're in the middle of Aeon supermarket buying ingredients to make a thank you treat for Hakley and his family, who will be hosting us during our stay at the floating village. We were planning on making kettle corn but no corn kernels means no kettle corn. Ok, that's fine. What's another no bake treat that we can make? (We don't have an oven at the Airbnb that we're staying at). I glance around and spot some corn flakes.

"Ah-ha! What about peanut buttery cornflake clusters?" I propose. "We'll need peanut butter, corn syrup, and corn flakes." I pace up and down the bakery aisle looking for corn syrup and let out a little sigh: Aeon doesn't carry it. My mouth twists and I take a second to think. Then, lightbulb: honey! (as a corn syrup substitute)  

As I place the corn flakes, peanut butter, and honey on the conveyer belt I muse on how this experience is illustrative of the type of flexibility we'll need to demonstrate as we move forward with prototyping our designs in Cambodia.

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We leave Wednesday, August 17th at 8 am for the floating villages. We'll be taking a 3 hour van ride to Chhnok Tru, where we'll then take a 30 minute boat ride into the floating community of Phat Sanday. There we'll be implementing two ideas to adapt the HandyPod system for use with stilted houses along the lake: (1) a stand alone stilted support structure for the HandyPod system and (2) a hand crank that will allow residents to reel in and extend the corrugated tubing in the system.

We'll be at the lake Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and leave Sunday morning. The plan is to buy materials on Wednesday afternoon, construct the stand alone stilted support structure on Thursday, and then build the hand crank on Friday and Saturday. With breaks every afternoon for a siesta… you can't beat the afternoon heat here folks:

Sietsta Time

Taking siestas wasn't the only instance when we modified our plans to accommodate local conditions:

After dimensioning and CADing up a stilted support structure for 6m high water levels, Hakley told us that historically the water level only rises to ~3-4m. So we did some quick back of the envelope calculations to scale our stilted support design down from a height of 6m to 3m. It felt strange spending so much time entrenched in details in CAD only to leave the success of the structure up to a few back of the envelope calculations but we built in some buffer, crossed our fingers, and sent Yao off to procure some materials.

While Yao, Hakley, and Virak were out buying materials, Rachel and I brainstormed how we were going to construct the support structure. “Does it make more sense to construct this part or that part first..?” We made some somewhat arbitrary decisions and drafted up a plan. Luckily Hakley and Virak have quite a bit of experience installing these systems for various types of houses along the lake. We were able to go over our construction plans with them, discuss the pros and cons of certain choices, and refine the process so that we were pre-fabricating parts of the structure in a way that enabled easy transportation to the installation site.

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My major take-away from day 1 of construction was this: plan, plan, plan, but also plan to change your plans. All of the thought that goes into planning is important and germane, but it’s also important to be receptive to new information and suggestions.

Here are a few of my favorite photos from our first day of construction:

The gang. From left to right: Chandy, Rachel, Yao, Hakley, Virak 

Constructing the stilted support

Moving the stilted support the the boat for transport to the installation site

Stilted support on the boat for transport

With Hakley, Virak, and Chandy’s help we were able to finish constructing the stilted support structure in one day. I’d say we were 90% successful! To achieve that remaining 10% we’re planning on making two changes: (1) modifying the dimensions so that the blue plastic containers are more tightly constrained (less wiggling will likely equal less breakage) and (2) optimizing the design so that it’s easier to build from the bottom up (vs. the top down like we did at the lake).

The next two days of construction will be focused on the hand crank. Until then, take care!

- Joanne