On my first day in Ganda Boya, I had the opportunity to meet
the people who will benefit from our work and your donations. Personally, I
didn’t expect to hear anything that our blog posts haven’t already said before:
the villagers are getting sick from the water, the villagers are missing school
and don’t have jobs because they have to get water, the work is very hard for
the villagers.
Until I met the people and shook their hands, I did not
realize the power of the first person over that of the third person.
Three young Ganda Boya villagers pointing to where they have to walk to fetch water – just before the hills in the background. |
Consider how different these words sound, coming from
someone with whom you have shaken hands:
“I am getting sick from the water I drink.”
“I miss school in the morning because I need to get water.”
“I am unable to work because my family will not have
anything to drink if I do not fetch them water.”
“This work is very, very hard for me.”
In four parts, I will post the stories of three individuals,
Fayo, Hindia, and Menuit, who carry five-gallon (20-liter) jerrycans of pond
water uphill a mile and a half (2km) every day, and one of myself when I
decided to evaluate just how difficult this chore was by trying it myself.
(Spoiler alert: it wasn’t a walk in the park.)
So without further ado, Part One: Fayo’s Story.
***
Fayo is what you might expect of any young girl in any country:
a little bashful, firm in the things she understands of the world and spooked
by those she does not, and with a strong heart to care for her baby brother.
When I arrived at the village, everyone ran out of their houses to see the
newcomer, and Fayo was the first person I picked out of the crowd of excited
children to tell me more about what it’s like for a kid to grow up in a village
with no electricity and no running water.
Fayo with her baby brother. |
She couldn't say exactly how long the chore of getting water every morning took, but one leader from the village estimated that the walk to the pool took about half an hour, and carrying the full containers uphill back to the village took a full hour.
The economic impact of this activity on her is clear: such
work cuts into her Grade 2 school day, and she reported that there were several
days per week when she missed some of her classes in the morning to get water.
The lasting effect of this will be that she will likely end up like many Ganda
Boya villagers, with a perforated education through her elementary years and a
return to subsistence agriculture in her teenage years. Not only that, but she
told me that this chore often prevents her from having anything to eat until
lunchtime at school.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about my short chat with
Fayo was that she didn’t seem to see anything extraordinary in the fact that she
carries water uphill twice per day every day, or that she had never in her life
had access to running water. She became even shyer when I told her that people
in America and all over the world would hear her story. Are things somehow
different there?
Together, we can prevent Fayo and all of her fellow
villagers from spending such valuable schooling and work hours collecting
unsafe water for their households. The world is becoming a smaller and smaller
place: it only takes one person like Fayo to speak and one to post on the web
for a story to come alive and to make an impact for a village of 2,000 people.
You can bring safe running water to Ganda Boya. We’re all in
this together.
Check back soon for
Part Two: Hindia’s Story.
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