Rehabilitation Project
This project is a part of our shared program with Western Water and Sanitation Forum (WEWASAFO). Our team is pleased to directly share the below report (edited for clarity, as needed).
Welcome to the Community
The people from Luyeshe Village wake up very early in the morning to work on their farms and prepare their children to go to school. The community keeps dairy cattle and grows maize, sugarcane, ground nuts, bananas and vegetables. Some members of the community are involved in making bricks to earn extra income, since there are many construction projects going on in the area. Because of these activities, the people are better able to educate their children and provide for their own needs.
There are around 700 people from 100 different households living in Luyeshe. (Editor’s Note: While this many people may have access on any given day, we believe a single water source can only support a population of 350-500 people. That’s why we continue to work with communities until they have clean water that is both adequate and accessible. To learn more, click here.)
Water Situation
One of the main water sources in Luyeshe Community is Simwa Spring. Underground water bubbles up into the waterhole, and jerrycans and other plastic containers must be dunked in the water to collect it. Surface runoff from storms runs into the waterhole, carrying with it anything and everything that is on the ground uphill.
For these reasons, its users contract waterborne diseases such as typhoid, diarrhea, amoebiasis, stomachache and malaria. One resident further stated that the spring is contaminated because some people urinate nearby.
“During the dry seasons all other people come to draw water from the unprotected spring. This brings congestion at the spring. In addition, the containers that the people use to draw water from the unprotected spring contribute to contamination,” said Mrs. Loice Simwa, a leader of the community.
Sanitation Situation
Less than half of the households here have pit latrines which are made of wood floors, polyethylene or mud walls, banana leaf roofs and doors made of old bedsheets or old iron sheeting. They are often rickety structures that offer little privacy, and become unsafe after years of use. The wood floors cannot be easily cleaned and end up decaying to the point of collapsing – oftentimes while in use. The fear of this happening often causes many potential users to seek privacy amongst bushes or behind buildings instead.
Some households have dish racks and clotheslines, although most are of a rudimentary nature. Many people heap up their solid garbage and allow it to decompose in their kitchen gardens. Few know about composting, and none of the households have hand-washing stations.
This is about to change!
Plans: Hygiene and Sanitation Training
Community members will participate in a 2-day hygiene and sanitation training.
This training will ensure participants are no longer ignorant about healthy practices and their importance. The facilitator plans to use PHAST (Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation), CLTS (Community-Led Total Sanitation), ABCD (Asset-Based Community Development), group discussions, handouts and demonstrations at the spring. The training objectives specific to this community include: To empower the community to be able to protect, preserve and manage water resources in the community; To mobilize the community to attain “open-defecation-free” status; To enable people to practice good environmental hygiene and ultimately to enable the community to continually have access to safe, adequate and clean water.
Plans: Sanitation Platforms
On the final day of training, the Luyeshe Village members will select five of their families to benefit from new latrines. The five families must prepare by sinking a 2’ x 3’ pit over which our concrete sanitation platforms will be placed. When that new floor is installed, they will build a superstructure over it according to their means. Selecting five of the neediest families will help decrease open defecation, protecting the entire community from this dangerous contamination.
Plans: Spring Protection
The spring was identified during one of our routine monitoring visits to Matsakha Primary School, which benefited from 30,000-liter rainwater collection tank. We visited the spring for ourselves and found it viable for protection because it has a good discharge rate, serves more than 350 people, and does not dry up at all during the year.
The community will provide local materials such as: ballast, bricks, hardcore, clean sand and poles for fencing. Community members will participate in spring construction by providing unskilled labour to fence off the spring and plant the grass around it, supervise and monitor the progress of the construction work, and feed and house our artisan.
This community is ready for a new chapter of life that will begin once Simwa Spring is protected to provide adequate clean water.
