Imagine your schools without safe drinking water or bathrooms. Imagine a village whose borehole (well) is broken and the closest one is 3 miles away. Imagine struggling to pay 25 cents a month for your water. Imagine owning a single water container, one that's used for collecting drinking water from your village borehole and also for collecting river water for laundry.
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These challenges present formidable challenges to a healthy lifestyle. Our goal in the Ngenge water project is to involve the whole community and encourage healthy practices in addition to repairing broken boreholes. Water and sanitation hygiene (WASH) training and water management committee training was provided in each location where a borehole was repaired. WASH training explains safe practices for collecting, transporting, and storing drinking water, hand-washing, the use of latrines, and other similar topics. The water management training assists villagers in learning how to care for their borehole and to set up a fund to pay for maintenance and repairs.
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Both training programs used drama, poems, singing, and other participatory methods, as pictured in the top two photos. It is crucial to involve women, such as the five women of one of the village water committees who are shown in the bottom photo. Women shoulder the responsibility for collecting and using water.
I am going through your old posts and don't know if you will ever get this comment...but I am impressed in many of your pictures that it appears to be local people who are doing the work and the training. It is not a westerner swooping in and leaving, but those who have a vested interest and will be around to follow through. What a terrific project this is!
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