Barak Bruerd

There are simple things we take for granted, and things we are taught from a young age that we never even think about.  Here, community members have been taught basic things about hygiene and how diseases are transmitted – ideas we consider common sense, but in terms of the global majority, actually aren’t all that common.  In a place where families expect to lose at least one or two children to sickness, these people for the first time understand how to keep themselves healthy.  This elderly gentleman is repeating back a portion of the lesson on disease transmission.  When he finished, there was applause.

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Sorry, I can’t help it.  These kids are awesome.  This little girl was laughing at me from across the drill site and then laughing at my friend who was goofing off beside her.  Believe it on not, for as young as she is, she was carrying around her baby brother on her back earlier in the day.  Responsibility comes at a young age in this part of the world and children are expected to play key roles in daily life.  Earlier today we carried water in 5-gallon jerry cans from a river half a mile away; the same place where this community goes in the dry season when their hand-dug wells run dry.  It was exhausting.  Putting my own daughter in this girl’s shoes, carrying containers of water several hours a day from river to home, with no way to purify it before drinking, helps me realize the real miracle this well represents in the eyes of this little girl.

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The statistics vary, but most seem to agree that women and children in Africa walk somewhere between 2 and 5 miles a day to get water – a task that can take up to 70% of the day. Though words can be used to describe a 5 gallon jerry can weighing 40lbs there’s nothing quite like trying to carry one yourself – an activity we often use to help first-time visitors to the continent gain perspective on exactly how impacting a well can be in a community. We drew quite a crowd as we carried jerry cans through this village in Zambia and one local woman asked why we were carrying water. When told it was so we could better understand the challenges of living without running water her laughing response was “but they are only carrying one bucket?!”

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There are a thousand smiles that could be photographed in a single community.  Today there were even more.  A new well is being drilled.

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I love watching kids playing together.  Perhaps your experience is different, but in mine, young children do not conceptualize differences in race until later in life, and usually the concept has to be taught.  Differences in skin color are taken in the same stride as differences in hair color or height or favorite flavor of ice cream.  Even language seems to pose little  barrier as children easily slip into gestures or simply drag one another around by the hand from one game to another.  The conflicts of childhood are, of course, ever present, but they remain isolated to those things that historically plague humankind; learning to share, say sorry, and act in consideration for one another.

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It is amazing to consider that over the last 50 years over $2.3 trillion dollars in Aid money has been poured into Africa.  Most of us can’t even conceptualize what a trillion looks like.  To put it into perspective, a trillion seconds is just over 31,000 years.  That’s a lot of money; a lot of activity; and yet progress seems inexplicably slow.  We American’s tend to define poverty according to the measure we use to quantify wealth – i.e. the presence of material goods.  Therefore poverty must be the absence thereof.  Yet poverty is so much more complex, so much deeper than the just the material; even as wealth can be defined by stuff much deeper than money.  As my Rwandan friend and director of AEE Rwanda says so pointedly ”We don’t need a ministry of projects.  We need a ministry of presence.” ~ Antoine Rutayisire

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A group of kids in Twapia, another peri-urban community in Ndola, Zambia. They were gathered around a pump that had just been installed on a new borehole. This is 1 of 17 wells, and while a well with a hand pump can technically provide water for a couple thousand people, long lines and wear and tear on the pump dictate a functional maximum of 750 to 1000 people per well. With 65,000 people living in Twapia, there’s a lot that still needs to be done.

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Julias Mpepa, one of Seeds of Hope’s lead drillers, is setting up to add another section of drill stem. This well in Misaka will probably hit the 50 meter mark. While shallow groundwater exists in this region, high population densities cause rapid contamination, necessitating the drilling of deeper boreholes. Depending on the rig and geology, this process can take a few days to a few weeks.

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Misaka is a small peri-urban community outside Ndola Zambia with about 8,000 people, a few hand dug wells, and a muddy river. A government run school with 3 unpaid teachers provide education to 350 of the community’s children, grades 1-5. 3 wells have just been drilled in the past few weeks. This will be the 4th. A hand pump may not appear much in a landscape as harsh as this, but one smiling man shook my hand and said “our land is fertile and this water brings us hope.”

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In areas with shallow (and sometimes not so shallow) ground water, hand dug wells are a an access technology that dates back to the dawn of man.  But as ancient and quaint as they may seem, hand dug wells are more or less disease-in-a-pit, especially when dry season concentrates the pathogens living in the well (kind of like reducing a soup to concentrate the flavor).  Latrine proximity is also a significant issue – not only because of leeching human waste, but because too often, the pits are dug all the way down to the water table (hey, if you’re going to go to the effort, dig once really big right?).  Hand dug wells like this also presents a significant safety issue b/c they are unlined and uncapped.  Stories of animals and even children falling down wells are far from uncommon, and well-collapse has caused more than one death.

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