Tuesday Hanna Hemmink visited Demotech. Picture Hanna: a Dutch woman deeply involved in rural life in Senegal, engaged in projects to improve life in these rural conditions. She speaks the local language, has lived there a long part of her life, and is now travelling between Senegal, France and Holland while organising support for her project.
Hanna's project concentrates on improving gardening in and around her home village Sangalcam. To this end her project aims at getting more water from existing wells in the area. She works mainly with local means while adding better technology to it. She is currently working on a local project in the area of Sangalcam. The aim of which is to spread better methods of accessing water more effectively and rapidly in rural Senegal.

Hanna already came across the idea of the rope pump many years ago. She got instructions from people of the WOT and had these worked out in in a metal workshop in Senegal, where she knows the people well. Her introduction resulted in many good functioning rope pumps. However, she was not satisfied with the idea of the manually driven rope pump and promoted the use of pedal power. Such pedal driven rope pumps are now produced in that workshop. Now she hopes to introduce real progress in pumping water with the use of solar power. She has got the first one (see picture below) working!

It is a great and inspiring event to meet a person who does the things I am involved in myself, who uses the technology I have taken part in creating, and who wants to move further in the same direction as I want Demotech to move in. I hope she will extend her use of Demotech designs, such as that of the WindDrive, with which she is pictured above.

In order to get more people behind her project, yesterday Hanna made the first steps in the setup of her foundation "ATA, support for rural life in West Africa". As a gesture to express hope on future cooperation Demotech donated our DAF-truck to this new ATA foundation. I hope ATA can use this sturdy truck for the same purpose that Demotech originally intended it for: as a Mobile Training Unit

I was fascinated by the photographs Hanna showed me. They show the rope pump integrated in rural life just as it should be. I hope Hanna allows me to use these pictures for a presentation on Demotech's website.