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Testimony

Global Aid Network (GAiN) drilled a water well in Segourou gah and the village life was transformed.

Toliko Sannon Tchabi Louis, the secretary for the borehole committee, said: “I thank God for the well He gave us through GAiN because it is doing a lot of good to the village. The water from the pump helps to fight against water-related diseases and illnesses that we used to suffer from – diarrhea, vomiting, and fever. We used to drink water from the stream that is 1.5 km from the village and our women wasted a lot of time fetching the water and then waiting for the dirt to settle. Unfortunately, we used to go to the same stream to fetch water for building and other uses. During wedding ceremonies or funerals, a lot of people would fall sick due to the quality of water we gave them. But, we suffer no more. We thank the Lord and thank GAiN.”

Shortly thereafter, the JESUS Film was shown and the village had an opportunity to hear about the Living Water. Fifty out of the 312 that attended decided to leave their worship of Voodoo and become followers of Jesus.
To help strengthen the existing believers as well as ensure growth and follow-up of the ones that made first-time commitments, an Assemblies of God church was planted in the village, allowing the Gospel to shine in the darkness of Voodoo.

Hygiene training

“It was exciting to see this reaction to Alfonses teaching happening and you could see in the faces of the villagers that they were fully engaged and learning”.

This was the enthusiastic report of a visiting colleague that attended a hygiene training in a rural village in Benin.

Alfonse had developed an approach that actively engaged the villagers in the learning process. The interaction between Alfonse and the villagers was really quite strikingly different from what previously happened in similar trainings. In those previous times the villagers politely listened to the lesson and rarely  responded. With Alfonse leading the training, the villagers spontaneously responded to his questions.

This hygiene training is a standard addition to the drilling of a well, together with a technical training for several members of the village that are assigned by the villagers to care for the well. To do so they gather a small contribution from those who use the well so that future repairs can be paid from that fund and the village is not dependant on GAiN any longer. Of course our teams do stay in touch with the villages for a long time and are always available to help in case the need is there for bigger operations.

Ensuring long-term disease-free water

It’s is a necessity for thousands of people in Northern Benin.
Throughout all of the 27 villages GAiN visited during a trip in late 2010, 92% of GAiN’s water wells were functional. All but two were working and those wells either just broke or the borehole committee hadn’t contacted the local team to fix it.
Dennis Fierbach, GAiN Canada’s Water for Life Director, was not surprised at the percentage. “Our goal is to create sustainable wells,” he comments. “In the last five years, we have had a very high retention of ongoing working wells.”
The key to this success has been creating an ongoing presence in each village where a well has been drilled. A borehole committee is set up, a small fee is collected by the committee to ensure that small repairs can be done, and a local GAiN team is made accessible for any major repairs.
“What we have noticed is that there have been some organizations throughout Africa that have drilled wells and then left. Instead, we want to ensure that people continue to stay healthy and disease-free, which requires creating water projects that are effective long-term,” explains Dennis.

In December 2010, Dennis saw a well that did just that!
Not too far from the Nigerian border is a deep-capped well that GAiN drilled in Sandilo village on November 22, 2007. Due to its remote location, GAiN had not been back in a while but the systems had been in place so that the well was still producing clean water. There is a woman in charge of maintaining it and collecting the money needed for any repairs.
Within the last few months of 2010, GAiN expanded the project to include rehabilitating wells drilled by other organizations that were either abandoned or had their pumps broken.
Since most of these wells used special pumps, a majority of the parts were too expensive for the villagers to purchase. Therefore, without an ongoing NGO presence in the area to ensure longevity, these wells were no longer usable.
As a result, instead of drilling a new well, GAiN worked with the government of Benin and created a list of 20 wells that could be rehabilitated, restoring the disease-free water it was once providing for thousands.
Peperkou and Tempegre were the first two villages on that list. Both had good wells but no working pumps. Dennis was able to witness the crew installing the new concrete pads and pump bodies. After revitalizing the well, GAiN setup a borehole committee for the villages, trained them to maintain it and then planned for other community development opportunities such as hygiene and sanitation trainings.

To date, GAiN has now drilled 250 wells in Benin, providing over 200,000 people with pure water.

GAiN Water for Life and education

•    An estimated 140 million children are out of school and among them 80% live in in Africa (UNESCO)
•    Girls and women spend an average of three hours per day collecting water from distant sources. (WTN, 2007)
•    Every year of education a woman receives increases the likelihood of survival for her children by 15% (UNICEF)

Education is of immense importance but for large groups in the third world also almost unreachably far away. Hundreds of millions of children live in houses and town without good facilities as clean water, toilets and schools.
And if there is a school, many of the kids have no time or energy to concentrate because they are sick or (in the case of the girls) have to help getting water and doing other chores to help the family.
Drilling a deepwater well in or near a village reduces these problems in several ways.
Because the water is not only clean, but also closer, the health of the villagers improves remarkably. More available water means better hygiene and a better life, especially for the children. As a result they have more energy and time to go to school.
Adding a well on the schoolgrounds – which are many time centrally located between villages makes the schools also a very effective place to teach about hygiene and other related issues. This kind of info actually spreads faster from the children to the parents then the other way around.
Also school are the center of other initiatives in the sphere of livelihood programs that help the children and the community. The next story is an example of this…

At a school in Tanzania, the students have developed a vegetable garden behind the school. Because of the presence of plenty of water from the well they can irrigate the plants well so they have a good harvest.
They cook the vegetables at school and eat them as part of their daily food.

Water and agriculture

Clean water has an enormous impact on the welfare of the whole surroundings. When GAiN staff met the Tanzanian pastor Jeremiah he showed with pride his garden and shed with 1100 chickens.
The success of this is only possible thanks to the well that was drilled by GAiN Water for Life.
His garden and chicken shed  in the village of Mkwajuni  are flourishing. With the proceeds he can provide for his family but also help those of his church members, even in the dry season.
“We were in a desert before this well,” Jeremiah expresses. “We had no water source in this village nor in the village that was closest to us. Instead we had to walk to ditches to retrieve some sort of water.” With the remaining proceeds, he also helped support a new church he had planted in a
village ten kilometers away where GAiN had drilled a water well.

GAiN’s impact has gone beyond providing clean water. It is also helping local people be
effective, resourceful and successful among other leaders within their own communities.

At Mtama Secondary, located in a village just a few kilometers from Jeremiah’s garden, were 530 students (some of which were boarders at the school) that initiated a similar idea. By using the excess water from the well, the students built a garden that allowed them to harvest vegetables, cook them and eat them as part of their daily meals. Not only had this well
brought health to the children and the community, but it had brought nourishment and
sustenance through food.

One visiting colleague notes: “More leaders are starting to catch the vision for how clean water can help with their economy. The deep-capped wells are really being utilized. Not only is each well constantly pumping clean water for thousands of people, but it is creating sustainable and profitable solutions for the local people.”