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Published: October 14th 2005
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Eli Helping
What you don't see is me lying on the ground gasping for breath after. Today I went out to dig tube wells. These are narrow wells (about 3”) that we dig for use with treadle pumps. We don’t dig them deeper than 10m because that is the maximum lift available with our pumps. And that’s a really good thing because they are hand dug and it’s really hard and dirty work. In this particular location, the soil is mostly compressed sand, so that’s why there is someone sitting up on the auger. It’s actually the only way we could get the tip to bite into the soil. The even more discouraging thing was that after 5 hours of digging, we hit 10 meters without getting any water. So all we got from the work was tired and dirty, and we had to start all over again the next morning.
I’m not very strong or in great shape, but back home I can do alright compared to most people I know when I am doing manual labour. Here, the only people who can’t out work me are the very very old or young. And I generally eat three times a day, drink clean water, and sleep 8 hours a night. Frankly it’s embarrassing.
For
The Pit
Tasty looking water isn't it? this farmer we dug three times, found water in two locations, but both quite deep. Even in the final one, the flow rate was quite low (the maximum for these pumps is 2 L/s and we got less than 0.5 L/s). The price tag for doing all of this is 60 000 tsh, 10 000 for the labour of digging each of the three wells and 30 000 for the material that stays in the successful well (2” plastic tubing and gravel pack). And if he didn’t already own a treadle pump, that would have cost him another 60 000 tsh.
Now the question should be, why would someone who makes around 300 000 tsh a year be willing to spend so much money? From what I understood through my broken Swahili and by observation there were two reasons. First, the picture of the pit is where they are currently getting water. That hole is about 5 meters deep and when I first went by there were a small child and a goat down in the water. What they pull out of there is used for all of their water needs from crops to animals to cooking and drinking. It’s actually better than what lots of people use because it is only about a ten minute walk from their house. The second reason is that about half an hour from his house is another tube well that we dug last year. This is the cleanest drinking water available for a long way in any direction, so people walk a significant distance to come use it, now I don’t know for sure because I couldn’t get an answer on this, but I think it has likely raised the owners status in the community. Not to mention allowing him to plant a vegetable garden in the dry season and start brick making as an alternative income source.
Some good things about the project. We don’t give away the pumps or wells, and we involve the farmers in the digging, so they know what was done and they had to put in some of the work. This way people are more likely to take care of the pump and well. Because it is a closed ground water source it is likely to be contaminant free thus providing families and/or communities with an improved water source. In cases where water is a long ways away, a tube well and treadle pump can easily irrigate an acre of land during the dry season. And compared to hand watering it reduces labour by an average of 70 %.
Some problems. We don’t provide health and sanitation education for people, and without that merely providing a clean water source won’t greatly help people’s health. We dig these wells on a cost recovery basis, so we don’t try and make any profit. This means they are more accessible to people, but it also means it is hard for an entrepreneur to get started doing this job. This becomes a problem for the dissemination of the technology as well as presenting a problem to the sustainability of the project. If we stop digging them, but haven’t established any other businesses to continue the work, it will stop being done.
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