If you are a young village girl in east Africa, your chances of going to school can be limited by water. Or rather the lack of it. Clean water is a precious commodity in many developing countries, and sources are scarce, often causing young girls and women to walk many miles, containers balanced on their heads, to retrieve it each day for their families’ cooking and washing. During the dry season, when wells often dry up, many miles can magnify their task. If clean water is too difficult to obtain, they will collect polluted or standing water. Standing water is the most common source of dysentery, Cholera, and is a breeding ground for mosquitoes carrying the parasite that causes Malaria. These deadly three diseases are the causes of most child deaths in Africa; the next is AIDS.
In 1992, my wife and I traveled to the Uganda Gospel Rehabilitation Center, GLK’s orphanage in Uganda, where I got to see the new well GLK donors had built in action. Each day from sun rise until after dark, there was a constant flow of children, mostly pre-teen and teenaged girls, drawing water from the well. Unlike other wells in the area, this water was free for the pumping. The girls would arrive in small groups of five to eight on bare feet wearing banana leaves rolled into a doughnut-shaped hat on the top of their heads and old plastic jugs carried in each hand. The girls would take turns raising and lowering the handle of the pump, drawing out a blast of pure, cold water. Each stroke of the handle ended in a percussive thunk from the small logs erected to limit the handle’s travel and prolong its life. The sound became a constant metronome-like pulsing back beat to every activity, rarely stopping. When it did stop, the silence seemed odd.
In time, each large jug was filled to capacity. The smaller girls would hoist one can atop their heads, while the larger ones carried two in their hands in addition to the one balanced on their head. They would begin their trip home without delay. As each group left another would arrive. The temperature was well over 100 degrees and many of them were walking more than five miles of dusty, shadeless road.
Our host, missionary Rev. David Hatley, who helped found the Uganda Gospel Rehabilitation Centre, explained that the school location used to be considered the outskirts of town. Since the well had been put in many people have moved closer to the orphanage to be close to the free clean water source. The orphanage, school, and church have become the new center of the village.
A clean, close water source has many benefits to a community. The girls can spend less time gathering water and more time at home and school. Young girls who spend more time in school and at home close to watchful parents and teachers are less likely to become victims and carriers of AIDS. The general health of the community is improved, allowing more time for economic pursuits and establishing food security. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the girls get to go to school.
Recently, South African-based PlayPump.org, has developed a new kind of well, called the Playpump. The Playpump appears to be nothing more than a playground merry-go-round, or roundabout, as most Africans call it. In countries where playgrounds do not exist and most children have never seen a slide or swing set, a roundabout is like going to Disneyland. In villages where the Playpump has been installed over shallow, old, polluted wells, the villagers now have access to deeper-drawn clean water. Harnessing the kids’ free play-power energy, they draw water from deep underground into a sealed, clean water tank at the top of a high tower above. Clean water is now available to anyone at the turn of a spigot. Now old and young can collect water quickly with no strenuous pumping. The water towers are clad with AIDS awareness billboards to help local government efforts to stop the epidemic.
We are not just hoping to buy a Playpump for our kids in Uganda and Rwanda, but hoping to help expand the Playpump program into East Africa by finding a way to teach our kids how to manufacture and service the Playpump, making it readily available to all of East Africa. If the program works, we will look at exporting the program to our schools and orphanages in India.
