(Image courtesy of PlayPumps International.)

The PlayPump water system works like so:

While children have fun spinning on the PlayPump merry-go-round (1), clean water is pumped (2) from underground (3) into a 2,500-liter tank (4), standing seven meters above the ground.

A simple tap (5) makes it easy for women and children to draw water. Excess water is diverted from the storage tank back down into the borehole (6).

The water storage tank (7) provides a rare opportunity to advertise in outlaying communities. All four sides of the tank are leased as billboards, with two sides for consumer advertising and the other two sides for health and educational messages. The revenue generated by this unique model pays for pump maintenance.

(Photo courtesy of PlayPumps International.)


(Photo courtesy of PlayPumps International.)

Not surprisingly, trying to assess the design and application of the PlayPump system took us on an emotional roller coaster ride. One minute we were giddy with enthusiasm (“Fucking brilliant!”), but the next minute, completely raving with skepticism (how long do the children have to twirl and twirl around to fill the tank; and is the water any safer?), only to return back to unbridled enthusiasm (well, it's not as if the goal is to provide communities with daily showers, car washes, and indoor toilet flushes; and surely groundwater is reliably safer than the surface water sources to which the PlayPump offers an alternative).

Back and forth.

Convinced how cool the whole thing is, we soon found yet more reasons to doubt the viability of this earnest endeavor: aren't there better options, such as these? Well, of course. The PlayPump isn't meant to be the singular solution for every possible situation. Aggregation is a good strategy.

Counterproductive as we sometimes are with our privileged ironic asides, we asked ourselves: don't you find the ads a bit troubling, even comical? (Advertising in economically depressed areas? Is this like Colors by Benetton or something?) To which we replied: Yes, we are indeed privileged.

Back and so forth.

But before we reverted back to our usual default position of enthusiastic interest, we asked one last question: wouldn't it be better to just slice off a sizable chunk of what we in the United States spend on public water services — for instance, to recreate some sort of Edenic fantasies in the desert Southwest with water diverted from severely depleted sources — and allocate that portion to sub-Saharan African nations where the money will be used to improve their hydrological infrastructure, and we are the ones who get to install the PlayPumps in our school grounds, parks and backyards, where a growing population of obese, diabetic, allergic children — the ones inured to the hardship of suburban domesticity — are forced to trim a little bit of the fat, reduce their susceptibility to diabetes and prevent future addictions to Allegra® and Claritin® while simultaneously teaching them about the incredibly, wonderfully awesome subject of hydrology and imparting a life long commitment to water conservation?

Yes.


POSTSCRIPT #1: PBS Frontline has a follow up on the PlayPumps, and most of it isn't good news. (9 July 2010)