Hydraulic Ram Pump Video for Guatemala

In the early eighties, I traveled in Maroc with a bulky Polaroid projection screen to Casablanca, coming from a farm near Al Hoseima where I recorded our donkey on Polaroid instant movie film doing its rounds while driving the water pump we had build. With this -at that time- ultra modern equipment I wanted to link experts from the Casablanca university to their own rural reality. Nothing much came out of it.

This time, preparing for Guatemala Bram and I do it the other way round. What we did in Maastricht, at out lab, has been videod by Bram. He made a short movie, showing out test set-up of the hydraulic ram pump. To see is that the ram pump sprouts water jets and higher up indeed some water stream out. How a ram pumps actually works is almost impossible to explain to laymen. However we want farmers in the mountains to explain precisely this: how and why it works, notwithstanding the language barrier, notwithstanding that they are totally new to this pumping principle. Then how could we create this understanding, how to create curiosity and later enthousiasm?

Here you can find the video that Bram made.

Bram takes along to Guatemala a video beamer working on a battery, also a DVD-diskman with a little screen to see the movie. What you, reader can see, these farmers will see also. Having seen that, will they come to the workshops where the hydraulic ram pump will be build together with them?

If so, we have created a tool to get a complicated technial message accross.
If not we will do it as we did it up to now: demonstrate, invite pariticipation, show them how to make best use of Appropriate Technology. No doubt the useual way will work, as it has always worked.
But imagine! imagine that video will speed up the process of learning. Imagine a little DVD-disk will do most of the work of explaining, without us being there too, Image this to happen not on one place only but where ever needed ...