Come to the Water by Fr Fons Eppink MHM

Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist whose literary reportage about Africa won him a global readership, famously describes sub-Saharan Africa as the continent of the ‘yellow jerry cans’ in one of his books. From Dakar to Lagos to Nairobi and beyond you will see straight backed women and children of all ages carrying yellow jerry cans, big and small, filled with water on their heads.

To me in some strange way they define the African rural landscape. Pumps and public taps invariably are surrounded by row upon row of the same conspicuously coloured plastic containers. Water is a precious commodity. The large majority of people in Africa have no direct access to clean running water in their homes and many have to walk for miles to the nearest stream or waterhole to fetch their daily ration of often less than salubrious water. One of the UN millennium goals is to dramatically increase access to clean drinking water by 2015:  to “Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation”.

What a delightful miracle it is when with the help of modern technology a local community is provided with easy access to clean water! I was the privileged witness of such an event recently when I followed at close quarters the drilling of a borehole in a village in the Kano plane some 40 kilometres from the town of Kisumu in Kenya.

Hubert Neumair, a Mill Hill brother from Tirol, had come to Kisumu to supervise the operation on behalf of the generous donor in his home country. Boreholes do not come cheap, I discovered, as the cost of drilling and installing just one of these is around £ 17,000. But the gains are enormous, not to mention the sheer joy of the people living in the area who are the prime beneficiaries. I couldn’t believe my eyes such was the general delight when I visited the site just at the time of a trial run when the first water was being pumped up.

Water, glorious water!

They came running from all around with their yellow jerry cans – and a few black ones too! – old women and young, boys and girls, with some water vendors thrown in for good measure. They filled up to their hearts’ content, not once, but twice, three times and more. Moreover, it was for free!.....Until after about an hour the water ran out.

The supervisor all the while had been busying himself taking measurements. He assured us that this borehole would yield  10 cubic metre of water an hour. More testing would need to be done, but the operation was already a run-away success. They had drilled to a level of 160m and had struck water in abundance. All that was left to do now was to install a pump and connect to the grid to provide the required power. That might still take some time, but eventually this rural community of some 200 or more families would have a steady supply of clean water - and realise the millennium goal well ahead of the 2015 target!

Two weeks earlier the prognosis had not been so optimistic. In fact Brother Hubert came back from visiting the site a few times clearly frustrated as he was told that the drilling team had hit a layer of hard rock or yet another piece of equipment had malfunctioned and work was at a standstill. Would they ever reach the required depth of 200 meters? Or more importantly, would they strike water in sufficient quantity?  An experienced surveyor had designated the site as appropriate for a borehole years earlier, but why did it take so long to strike water?  Mobile phone calls to the team at the site and occasionally to the company headquarters in Nairobi kept us informed of the hitches, the agonisingly slow progress, and the eventual success.

For me the whole experience brought home the incalculable value of (access to) healthy, sparkling clear drinking water. The exuberant joy written on the faces of the women who, at the first trial run, came to fill their yellow jerry cans till the water splashed all over will stay with me for a long time. The biblical invitation of the prophet Isaiah at once takes on a very concrete dimension: “Oh, come to the water all you who are thirsty, though you have no money, come!”