On the way home from the water source, it’s even harder, because you are easily carrying 44 pounds on your head. Facts!
Why am I telling you all this? This is the everyday life for the women and young daughters in Gal-Barwaaqo, this is how far and what they need to carry just to meet their everyday needs.
The entire village of 8,000 nomads have no access to clean water. Can you imagine what that is like?
Everyday women and young daughters walk these miles in bristling hot weather to gather water for their daily needs.
How far is 6 kilimotres?
Five times the number of steps to climb the Empire State Building
15 laps around a football field
Almost 4 miles
Most of us like to think we are pretty healthy and can do this, right? Well, now imagine doing it 31°c hot weather, unpaved and uneven roads with very inadequate footwear. Yes, your Nikes and Asics are very hard to come by in this region.
Surely it can’t be that bad? What about rain?
Here is another fun fact for you, in 2015 the UN announced an emergency crisis. For the past few years, a severe drought affected the entire East African region due to back to back poor/non-excitant rainy seasons, almost pushing the region to the brink of famine.
For the nomads of the village this is a reality. The number one human need, Water, is a very long, heavy and sometimes unsafe journey away.
We know this because it's exactly what we witnessed while we're building the Ahmed Saeed Nalayeh School in the city of Gal-Barwaaqo, which opened its doors in May 2019.
We asked ourselves what we do? With your help we sprang into action right away and for a few months were able to distribute aid, medicine and water.
But the biggest question for us was how can the community sustain itself long-term?
Why not build a water well in the village? That’s pretty simple, right?
During inception, everyone we asked said it was virtually impossible. How can we bring engineers; workers and equipment when the nearest town is over 5 hours’ drive, even then we couldn’t guarantee we would find what we need for this project.
As you can imagine building, implementing and sustaining a water well is not as simple or easy to accomplish in this region. It is certainly not as straightforward as digging a hole in the ground.
It has taken many months, finding the engineers, workers and equipment to get this project off the ground but for the sake of our school children, their families and the entire community of over eight thousand nomads, we persevered and the water well be opening very soon.
Truly, we could not have accomplished this without our supporters and donors.
As the late great Muhammad Ali said,
“Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion”
