The Water Saga, Part I: The Death of the Well

Remember when I wrote about water over a year ago?  About how the director of the health center suggested we dig a well the casa maternal could have water?  There begins a saga that just reached its conclusion this August, and that I’ve just had the strength to write about now (I had to take a major mental break from the whole thing for a while, don’t worry you’ll find out why).  So here begins the first in a series of chapters detailing the whole epic, if you will.

Our water system before, fill up garbage bin, fill up smaller bucket, carry it to fill the barrels.

In retrospect, the second that the director mentioned the well we should’ve started writing up our proposal.  Paperwork for USAID, or any other federal funds, is extensive and requires much more time than you’d think.  I let it go for the moment, knowing that I couldn’t apply for funds until six months into my service, but it would’ve saved a lot of trouble if we’d had the whole thing planned and written out at my six month mark so we could’ve just sent it in then.  Instead, we waited until last November to begin the planning stage, which I thought would be fine.  A well is just a hole in the ground.  How complicated could it be?  Life was about to show me just how complicated it could be.

And then sometimes we would get down to just one gallon of water.

First, the director wanted the well to supply both the casa maternal and the health center, and to have an electric pump so that no one would have to spend time and energy hauling water.  That meant though, that the well would have to be deep, about sixty feet, so that we wouldn’t suck up all the water in one go.  From there came the problems since the deeper the well, the more expensive the project, and more difficult for our volunteers who would be helping us to dig, as the farther down you go, the more difficult it becomes just to breathe.  Not to mention that we would have to install piping from the well in the casa maternal to the health center, and build two giant water tanks, or pilas, in both places to store the water.  And, as people continually told me, there was no guarantee that we would be able to secure a reliable water source; we could hit an impassable rock, or the ground could collapse in on itself, ruining the structure or injuring one of our diggers.  We could have tried to prevent this by digging during the dry season, but since we had waited so long, there was no way we would get the funds in time to do that.

Our water system for the health center before.

I was quickly losing enthusiasm for the well, and trying to think of easier alternatives.  The health center staff wasn’t letting go of the well idea, though, in spite of the compiling complications.  In fact, one day the director called in the supposed well expert in town to do a revised estimate of the well, but not before he showed me his own well in his yard.  It did not inspire my confidence.  Nor when he brushed off my concerns about the ground caving in, even when I mentioned I had seen one of his wells that had collapsed before he finished it.

So I was in a foul mood as I watched him search the area around the casa maternal for water with two metal rods, and when an unknown number called my cell phone, I answered tersely, and when a friendly male voice said hello, and asked how I was, I responded even more shortly, asking who it was I was speaking to.  It was Marcial, the president of the water committee.  I immediately regretted my rudeness, and tried to remedy the awkward situation.  We had met a few months earlier after I was invited to a water committee meeting with a nearby NGO, and they were some of the first to point out the problems when next Marcial said, “I hear you’re still trying to build a well, how’s that going for you?”

I looked out at the well digger with his forked metal rods, and was suddenly reminded of how in cartoons the characters always look for water with a forked stick.

“Not well, Don Marcial.  It’s not going well at all,” I answered.

He told me that he had an idea that he’d like to run by me.  It would take our water project in a new, and eventually, better direction.