Update: Project Clean Water!

After one of the best vacations of our lives, James and I were a bit worried about the emotional toll our readjustment back to site would take on us. It was going to be sad, not exactly difficult, just sad going back to bucket baths, a limited diet, and inexplicable heat. However, we were lucky that we had so much work waiting for us in our village that we were thrown right back into the swing of things.

With our pump proposal approved while we were gone, we got to village only to turn around 2 days later and come back to the big city with our village counterparts for pump replacement parts. We arranged for the transportation back to site and within the next 6 days, (thanks to our pump repairman’s speed!) we had 4 working pumps in the village! It was so exciting to walk around and see people gathered around the pumps for the first time in over 8 years. We hope this project will have a widespread effect on the health of our village, reducing diarrheal diseases (which are one of the main causes of death for children under 5 here).

 

So now our job is to make this temporary fix into a sustainable solution. Before we left we had taken the initial steps in setting up a Water and Sanitation committee. So this past week, we gathered the committee for basic sanitation and pump maintenance. There role in the village will be as follows : 1) To educate the rest of the village on basic sanitation and pump care practices 2) To enforce rules that will allow the pumps to last longer without breaking 3.) to establish a monthly dues collection mechanism so the village will have money to fix the pumps when they break in the future. Our initial trainings with the committee seemed successful as the village established that each household would pay 50 cents/month. So we will continue to meet with them monthly until we leave to ensure that the money is being collected and the pumps are being cared for.

 

The last thing we did was Pump Awareness presentations for the 5th and 6th grade. Since many parents send their kids for water, we thought it was important to educate the kids in the village about pump usage, the dangers of standing water (aka a breeding ground for mosquitoes and thus malaria), etc. We charged them with being the enforcers of these rules for all the younger kids and so far we seen a noteable change in the way that kids have been behaving around the pumps.

So the most important part of the project—making sure its sustainable—is yet to be done, but it feels good to finally have the main labor intensive tasks of a larger project completed! The unending thanks and happy faces of women in our village have been so encouraging. Its made the adjustment back to Mali so much smoother and hopefully will be a source of encouragement as our villagers get very busy working in their fields for Rainy Season (as soon as June roles around, villagers are often too busy to work with volunteers on a project).

In other news, we recently bought tickets back to America at the end of September as Joye will be in her cousin’s wedding :) We’re already getting excited and its 4 months away!

~Joye (and James)