Pump it up

Back in town for a trip to the bank and some provisions (as well as an obvious visit to the internet).

I'm four weeks away from a visit to America, which is turning out to be incredibly distracting and mind-occupying. Understandably so, I guess. So I'm working on keeping myself busy so that I don't let my mind get too far ahead of itself. I’m working on a project in my village with my postmate to repair all of the broken water pumps in the village. They were dug like 20 years ago, and have all fallen into disrepair to a level that the local community groups that pooled their money together for previous problems could never meet the amount of money that’s necessary.

It’s nearly all of the pumps in the village, a total of 12, so people have resorted to drinking water directly from the two rivers that flow on both sides of the village. As you can imagine, this brings huge risks for cholera and other bacterial disease, and therefore an inexcusable number of children dying from diarrhea. Not okay.

The good news is that there’s a new mayor in town, who is not nearly as corrupt as the old one, who was putting nearly ALL of the budget in his pocket. So we brought the problem to the mayor’s office, complete with the results of a local NGO’s diagnosis on each of the pump’s problems and prices to fix it, and he was SUPER impressed and excited, and wants to (if possible) finance A LOT of it, if not all. It’s really exciting. I’m meeting with him on Tuesday to find out how things are coming with an official figure. Either way, I’m keeping busy getting the community groups re-organized, motivated, and prepared to hear some presentations on hygiene and water sanitation from Sarah (above-referenced postmate and Health volunteer).

So this will certainly change things when the pumps are repaired. The necessity really hit home last week when my friend/neighbor's two year old baby died. I honestly don't even know what he died from, but it's more than likely that it was because of something as simple as diarrhea or malaria. This is, as I said above, inexcuseable. It really makes you realize what all of the statistics on "infant mortality" are actually talking about, and it's really discouraging that it's caused by problems that haven't affected most Americans for a very long time. So it's about time that we actually did something, and this project is a good start.

So that will keep me occupied for the time being, and I'm incredibly excited, albeit a little anxious about my trip to America. I'll just focus on things a day at a time. Tomorrow: meeting.