Rehabilitation Project
"The most unbearable time was when I got to the spring one day and found soil [had] flooded the drawing point and closed up the discharge pipe," said Edith, a 29-year-old farmer in Makhwabuye Community (in the below picture). "This was so heartbreaking and made me hate this community."
The 210 people in Makhwabuye have a seemingly endless list of problems with Machanja Vihembo Spring, and rightfully so. The area is muddy and slippery so people often fall while trying to fetch water. The discharge pipe is far too low, so normal jerrycans won't fit underneath it unless they're embedded in the spring's muddy floor. As Edith said, sometimes the discharge pipe becomes clogged with sediment, producing only a small stream of brown water. And the water itself is contaminated.
"Coming to fetch water from this water point is very tiresome," said Marvin V., who is 12 years old (pictured below at the spring).
"This makes me skip bathing on a daily basis. Accessibility is very poor, thus most of the time I get home with a dirty container. If only we can receive help, then our lives would change for the best."
Because the water is so difficult to fetch and makes people sick, a lot of time is wasted that could be spent farming or in other, more productive ways.
"Lucky us when people walked in the compound and said they had come to survey the water points that are not protected," Edith said.
Makhwabuye's people have already begun to gather local materials to aid in the construction of a protected spring. They are so eager for their lives to change.
What We Can Do:
Spring Protection
Protecting the spring will help provide access to cleaner and safer water and reduce the time people have to spend to fetch it. Construction will keep surface runoff and other contaminants out of the water. With the community’s high involvement in the process, there should be a good sense of responsibility and ownership for the new clean water source.
Fetching water is a task predominantly carried out by women and young girls. Protecting the spring and offering training and support will, therefore, help empower the female members of the community by freeing up more of their time and energy to engage and invest in income-generating activities and their education.
Training on Health, Hygiene, COVID-19, and More
To hold trainings during the pandemic, we work closely with both community leaders and the local government to approve small groups to attend training. We ask community leaders to invite a select yet representative group of people to attend training who will then act as ambassadors to the rest of the community to share what they learn. We also communicate our expectations of physical distancing and wearing masks for all who choose to attend.
The training will focus on improved hygiene, health, and sanitation habits in this community. We will also have a dedicated session on COVID-19 symptoms, transmission routes, and prevention best practices.
With the community’s input, we will identify key leverage points where they can alter their practices at the personal, household, and community levels to affect change. This training will help to ensure participants have the knowledge they need about healthy practices and their importance to make the most of their water point as soon as water is flowing.
Our team of facilitators will use a variety of methods to train community members. Some of these methods include participatory hygiene and sanitation transformation, asset-based community development, group discussions, handouts, and demonstrations at the spring.
One of the most important issues we plan to cover is the handling, storage, and treatment of water. Having a clean water source will be extremely helpful, but it is useless if water gets contaminated by the time it is consumed. We and the community strongly believe that all of these components will work together to improve living standards here, which will help to unlock the potential for these community members to live better, healthier lives.
We will then conduct a small series of follow-up trainings before transitioning to our regularly scheduled support visits throughout the year.
Training will result in the formation of a water user committee, elected by their peers, that will oversee the operations and maintenance of the spring. The committee will enforce proper behavior around the spring and delegate tasks that will help preserve the site, such as building a fence and digging proper drainage channels. The fence will keep out destructive animals and unwanted waste, and the drainage will keep the area’s mosquito population at a minimum.
The final stage of construction is backfilling the reservoir box behind the discharge pipe. We cleared the collection box of any debris that may have fallen during construction. Then we redirected the temporary diversion channels back into the reservoir box, channeling water into this area for the first time. We close all other exits to force water through only the discharge pipe.
