Muvai’s Story: A Mother’s Long Walk for Water in Kenya

It’s the same long walk every day, and it begins before the sun rises.

Muvai wakes up early. She straps one water container to her back and four to her donkey. Then, she sets out across the rocky hills between her home and the nearest source of water.

“Water is a very big challenge for us because we have to fetch it from far away,” Muvai explains. “We have to wake up at dawn and return home towards midday.”

But distance is only the beginning of Muvai’s challenges.

Technically, Muvai has two water options. Her first choice would be a protected dug well, but to reach it, Muvai would need to walk around three hours one way. As a mother with crops, livestock, and household work waiting, Muvai can’t spare that precious time.

Instead, Muvai resorts to the second option: unsafe water from the riverbed. To get there, Muvai only needs to walk one hour in each direction.

But choosing the riverbed doesn’t make life easier; it simply makes the walk shorter. The dusty land of Southeast Kenya offers little shade, making Muvai’s long journeys to fetch water dangerous due to the sun’s intense heat. During droughts, some community members collapse on the way, unable to stay hydrated long enough to collect water after rationing the previous day’s serving.

Those long, dry months mean that Muvai’s river only flows with water for a few months each year. When the river disappears, she and her neighbors must dig down into the sand to reach brown, salty water left over from the last rains. 

And when locals all fetch water around the same time, as it often happens, people end up waiting to fill up their own water containers — often for around an hour, but sometimes longer. Then, collecting the actual water, one scoop at a time, eats up even more daylight.

Every day, as she walks to the river, stands in line, or kneels beside the scoop hole, Muvai wishes to be doing other things.

“If I didn’t have to spend so much time fetching water, I would conduct household chores, work on my farm, or seek casual jobs so that I could earn some money,” Muvai says.

And the time she loses is only part of the cost of water scarcity in Kasyalani.

Because these scoop holes are open to the elements and shared with animals, the water looks, smells, and tastes bad. Drinking it often makes Muvai and her fellow community members sick, affecting children and elderly community members the most. 

Unfortunately, it’s not only drinking the dirty water that hurts Muvai and her family’s health. When water is scarce, everything from hygiene to farming suffers.

Because the trip takes so long, she and her donkey can only collect water once each day. Five containers just isn’t enough water for her family, livestock, and crops. With so little water, staying clean is nearly impossible — and sickness spreads quickly when hands, dishes, and clothes go unwashed.

“Water is very crucial for me because I need it to conduct both personal and environmental hygiene,” Muvai says. “I also need it to irrigate fruit trees that I have planted at my home.”

But even making every drop count isn’t enough anymore. And as the climate shifts, even those few drops become harder to find.

The rains that used to come every year at predictable times have been late or missing in recent years. Sometimes, even the riverbed has no water. This level of scarcity severely limits the crops she is able to plant, water, tend, and harvest to feed her family. 

The lack of water in Muvai’s community steals her time and energy, hurts her farm and food supply, wastes her money on treatments for water-related illnesses, and sends her out searching day after day when there may not even be water to collect. 

Muvai has made this journey for her family every day without complaint for years. She and her farm have persevered through intense drought. But your help means she won’t have to work so hard in the future just to survive.

Together, we can bring a new water system to Muvai’s community — one especially tailored to keep water available through long dry seasons.

For Kasyalani and Muvai, we plan to build both a sand dam and a protected dug well. These two projects will work together to revitalize the local water supply and landscape. First, the sand dam will trap sand in the riverbed. The sand will hold water and store it safely underground, where it can’t evaporate.

Over time, the dam will build up more layers of sand to contain millions of liters of clean water. Our protected dug well will then tap into that reservoir. As more water stays in the area and seeps into the soil, new vegetation will grow and reinvigorate the water cycle and invite more rain. In turn, farms will revive, and the once-dry landscape will slowly transform into a lush, green stretch of life.

That future isn’t theoretical to Muvai. She’s already imagining what life could be like with water nearby.

Muvai’s Hope for the Future

By bringing water closer to Muvai, you’ll give her the time, water, energy, and good health she needs to feed herself and her family through her farm.

“I will be able to plant more trees, especially fruit trees, which will add to my family’s diet,” Muvai says. “I will also plant vegetables, and I will no longer have to go to the market to purchase vegetables.”

Let’s imagine for a moment what Muvai’s community, Kasyalani, could look like one day soon.

Your generosity would bring Muvai peaceful mornings on her farm, sipping tea and listening to birdsong. It would give her time to plant and sell tree seedlings and relief about the futures of her children and grandchildren. It would ease the strain on her body, improve her family’s nutrition, and free up money once spent on hospital visits.

That bright future starts with you. And it is more powerful, more needed, than anything you could fit under a tree this holiday season. 

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