water

3 March 2009
Finally the internet! It’s been a while since I was able to get online. And still I am sitting in the office typing hoping the internet will actually start working, as of right now there is nothing. Things are going really well. I had two meetings last Sunday. I decided maybe I would take a couple of blog posts to talk about the problems the people have mentioned. The big one is water. That tops the lists in both Moudawa and Gazal. So this is pretty much what I have learned from the meeting and my own experience.

In Moudawa, there are 3 deep wells, la forage en Francais. There is also an open well that is basically only usable during the rainy season. I think there is still a little in it right now, but its really dirty. One of the 3 good wells is broken right now. They just about have the money to repair it, and so hopefully that will happen soon. So right now the whole village, about 900 people, are using two wells. People wait in line for hours, and the actually pumping of the water gets really hard during the afternoon and into the evening. To avoid waiting, some women go in the middle of the night to get water. My friend Esther, woke up at 1:30 a few nights last week to go get water. I hear kids yelling and playing at the well until 11:00 or midnight. Yesterday, Esther and I needed to water the garden and so we needed 4 bindongues (water jugs, 20 liters each) of water. I went at 12:30 and at 3 we hauled the first load of 2 jugs back to the house. I finished watering my garden and trees at almost 5:30. I use about 1 jug a day in the house. When I wash clothes, that’s more. Now imagine you have 8 kids to cook for, wash dishes for, wash clothes, give baths. The time it takes to get the water for all of that adds up quickly. Gazal is a little smaller, but there is only one well that works all the time. The other one has broken twice in the last month. When that happens, some of the women come to Moudawa to get water, which means waiting even longer. The walk between the two villages is about a mile and a half. The women and girls carry the water on their heads back home, probably laughing about something the whole way.

I wish I could give them new wells tomorrow, but we are going to have to wait a little longer than that. They are really expensive and they are still trying to pay for their part of a new school. Taking at least 10 hours out of every week to get water is not something we would put up with in the states. Here it is part of life.

So that’s first on the to-do list. I wish it was that easy.