Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Well, Well, Well

9:36 pm | Edit Post
Water, one of the basic essentials for life but often taken for grated. For most people coming from the UK the thought of rain doesn't fill one with excitement, in fact some may argue that the British Isles has too much of the stuff especially during the holiday period. Some even consider emigrating to warmer climates because of it. We, however, have come to appreciate its value in day to day living. In the north of Burkina it hasn't rained since mid September and we don't expect it to again until around mid June. In Djibo itself it isn't to hard to find clean drinking water, we ourselves are fortunate enough to have the liquid gold on tap, but out of the town is a different story all together. It's not that there are no wells in the surrounding villages, there are, though not in all, it's just that many of the existing wells are broken.


A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine came to visit and shared with me how his village now had no water supply. There were actually three deep wells in this community of about 1500 people but their final well broke the previous day leaving them with a five km walk to the nearest supply. Don't ask me why folk wait for the situation to get so desperate, it's a question I frequently ask, and never seem to receive a reasonable answer. Ho hum.

I agreed to help him on the condition that the village folk contributed some of the finance needed to get one of the wells pumping water again. One week later I went out to see how the work was going and to chat with some of the villagers about how they may put in place a system of putting aside funds each month for future repairs. The discussions seemed to go well and were met with a lot of nods of agreement at some of the ideas put forward. We will just have to see if they put any of the ideas into practice.



I head out there tomorrow to hopefully find a village with clean drinking water.

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