Barak Bruerd

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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“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” ~ Aldo Leopold

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5:30 am start up a 2,800 ascent and what would become a 14-mile race against the clock.  Pausing at this glade on the trail my brother and I  failed to realize we were heading down the wrong side of the mountain… which meant we would be coming back through here about 45 minutes later.  Brilliant eh?  Our 14-mile run ended in a 3hr, class 5 white water rafting trip followed by 18 holes of put-put golf followed by a 5hr drive home arriving at 4am in the morning.  Yeah, we were intent on packing it all in on the last day.

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A storm on our Smokies vacation swept through and knocked out electricity for 6 hours. It’s always fascinated me how a loss of electricity takes the busy, largely antisocial atmosphere of modern American homes and magically transforms it into an intimate gathering of family who take pleasure of a cup of coffee around candles, and engage in relational conversation. Sometime I wish the power would go out more often. Araella, normally scared of the dark, became distracted with a spinning-light-up-toy and I captured this shot.

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