It was with great celebration that Arkitrek Camp 2 came to an end last weekend after nearly a month of hard work in the scorching Mantanani sun. The camp is a partnership with our friends at Arkitrek to hold a camp for student and professional architects, designers, engineers and anyone with an interest in sustainable development, to explore methods of designing and building a structure to a live brief utilising local knowledge and modern insight.

The brief on this occasion was to use as much locally sourced material as possible to create a prototype accomodation block to replace our old Tented area in the camp. This finished block will be replicated behind the camp a further 6 times until we reach our maximum possible volume. The brief also required the structure to be part of a camp wide water catchment system allowing us to harvest as much rain water as possible to be used for showers, toilets, cleaning etc… which limits our use of the native water table. But harvesting rain water from a traditionl style thatch roof is no easy task, so the team had their work cut out.

Through a process of consultation, design and build, the team came up with an impressive solution utilising local materials inlcuding driftwood, as well as recycled materials that had washed up on the beach and left over parts of previous structures. The design is a simple driftwood and thatch structure, with overlapping hammocks to create a fascinating and, importantly, cool and ventilated accomodation area. Using plans drawn up by the group we will now be able to replicate this design across the rest of the camp creating a great place for our future volunteers, with the first groups to try out the new accomodation being our Summer 2012 UK Teams.

And excitingly the water catchment on the accomodation blocks is a step closer to our goal of making all of our camps as sustainable as possible and limiting our impact on the local environment. I can’t wait to see the camp upgraded over the coming weeks and it will be exciting to see the reaction of the first volunteers to see their new home Camp Mantanani.

A big thanks to the Arkitrek Team and our volunteers for making Camp 2 such a great success.

Providing Water Security for local communities has always been a core objective for Camps International and there is always some project ongoing across our locations. It’s World Water Day today and we would like to use this day to highlight some of the work we are doing in Borneo, Cambodia and Kenya. As part of our long term objectives for the Camps International Foundation, we have decided to committ ourselves to increasing our water conservation and security program across our locations. And like everything else, the first commitment is to ensure we are doing as much as we can within our camps and that everyone who travels with us understands the importance of conserving water. Everyone of us needs to do our bit. So to everyone out there, we would like to ask two things:

1. Please use water in camps conservatively and remember in our parts of the world, a flushing toilet or a shower everyday is a luxury. We will continue to do our best to put recycling systems in place as we have done in many of our camps but every single drop counts.

2. If anyone is interested in helping towards our various water security projects, please do make a donation through the Camps International Foundation and specify it is for water projects. We guarantee 100% of any donations through the foundation will be earmarked for projects.

CAMP BORNEO

There are serious issues with water on Mantanani due to the isolated and delicate nature of the island which has a unusually high water leading to both the benefit of close water access for the inhabitants but also the high than normal risk of the water table becoming contaminated by outside pollutants.

Our efforts at water conservation and protection on the island are twofold, and incorporate practical and educational elements.

At Camp Mantanani itself we already have a water catchment/rainwater harvesting system  which feeds our toilets and garden. We will soon be installing a grey water recycling system using a sand filter process that will both increase the available water storage and also limit the impact of gray water on the water table.

At our landmark project on the island, the Kindergarten next to the primary school, we will be installing a rain water harvesting system also and will be using this to help introduce water management and permaculture ideals to the local community alongside our other marine conservation and permaculture education programmes.

CAMP CAMBODIA

In Beng Mealea, our water management programme also encompasses both our own camp, in an effort to limit our own impact and be more sustainable and also live by the standards we teach, as well as the projects we are working on.

At the camp we have limited our water usage by constructing waterless composting toilets. Alongside these all other water use in the camp is fed into our grey water leech field which, recycles the grey water and uses the run off to feed our Permaculture orchard feeding papaya and banana trees.

Of our water management projects in Beng Mealea, the most urgent is at the local high school which has very little water storage despite having four large classroom blocks available for water capture. At the moment only one out of eight available sloping roofs is used for water capture, which is fed to a 15k litre concrete tank that we refurbished in 2011. Before this tank was repaired the only available water source for the entire school of 600 children was a large pond which was empty during the dry season and barely drinkable during the rainy season.

Roofs like this can catch A LOT of water

We aim to install water catchment on the remaining 7 sloping roofs and build a new ablutions block to replace the one current toilet they have to help limit the natural waste polluting the current pond.

CAMP KENYA

This year, we have just undertaken a technical assessment and plan (thank you GreenWater!) to recycle all shower water at our main camp in Muhaka to the proposed Trust House vocational school we are building. Water from the showers will go through a natural cleaning system and this july, we will be constructing a large pond which will act as the main water source for the farm. Additionally, we are starting the graywater recylcing system which will be ready for the summer at Camp Kaya. Water from your showers, will be recycled back to the toilets for flushing and extra water will go through a natural filter and be a reservoir for the new tree nursery at the forest

Plan for graywater at Camp Muhaka

This year alone in Kenya we have been very fortunate to receive additional donations that have allowed us to completely overhaul the water catchment system at Muhaka Dispensary. I

can’t thank the 2011 Nurse team (a.k.a Kenya Gappers) who raised approximately £2500 which was enough funds to change all the roofs at the dispensary, paint them with a special protective paint, put in new gutters, and put in two new tanks at the dispensary. The dispensary now has over 15,000lts of water storage facilities. We also recieved a small donation from the Herbert family which used to buy additional gutters and install one more 1000lt tank at Imani Women’s Group.

That’s just a snippet of what is happening at the moment and we know we can do so much more. We just received a video made by Vineel who travelled to Kenya for three months last year. He raised an additional fund which was used to provide a water source to a local nursery school at Muhaka. The video below really sums up how every little drop counts and yes, every penny will save another drop…

As if we aren’t busy enough here in Camps Asia with Gappers, International Schools and preparing for our busiest Summer Team Season so far, we still like to keep things interesting with other projects.

You may remember that we recently helped with Dr Nick Pilcher’s research into the affects of Blast Fishing on the marine habitat around Mantanani and you’ll be glad to learn that the experiment was a success in that it has tested the methodolgy and equipment, produced  interesting results and paves the way for further research in the coming year to help collect data that will make a big difference in the fight to ban the practice of Fish Bombing in Sabah.

And on a related note, below is a GPS log of the movements of some of the juvenile turtles Dr Nick has tagged off Mantanani in recent years and you can see one (Hello Wallace) has made a bid for a new life away from Mantanani, which is vitally important to understand as very little is know aout the period between hatching and adult life and Nick’s work is helping to fill that gap. That star in the middle of the coloured scrawls is Mantanani and Wallace is the green line heading North East.

Also on Mantanani in the coming days we will be hosting our second group of Architects taking part in Arkitrek 2, a three week expedition to bring together young and proffesional architects from across Malaysia, Europe and America to design and build an environmentally sustainable structure that promotes eco-tourism and supports community development. You may remember that last year the Arkitrek came up with this amazing structure below, our Marine Conservation Programme Centre. I can’t wait to see what happens this year.

Moving away from the island to the deep jungles across Southern Sabah, in the coming weeks we will be supporting the work of a scientist from Canada, Michael Galante, who will be running experiments and collecting research into the micro-ecosystems and carbon capacity of forest areas in various states of regeneration from Virgin through to primary and secondary jungle. It should be fascinating work as the groups live inside the jungle for periods of 2-3 weeks in three seperate areas.

Phew! I’m tired just thinking about all of that, and i didn’t even mention the work our Gappers did supporting an art installation as part of a week long celebration of the Heritage of Kota Kinabalu by helping to construct a huge bamboo monolith and cannon (I kid you not!) More on that and the ongoing projects above soon!