Water

"Water is life.” On our first day in the northern village of Ngurunit, our host, Stephen Labarakwe, made this simple yet profound statement. We were in his village in early August which is winter. Many days were cloudy, but we never had one drop of rain in our two weeks there. This area of Kenya gets less than 10 inches of rain in a typical year, and much of that comes in March through April in deluges that run off too quickly to be captured. We saw many river beds but almost all were completely dry. There was a well near the camp where we stayed, and we saw three young warriors (moran) in the well bringing out buckets of water on a day the water was flowing, and cows, goats, and camels soon took turns at the trough.

Our hosts always made sure we had bottled water, and, on the one day that we ran low, we did get a little nervous. I cannot imagine what it would be like to face days when water was not available. Our hosts had set up a shower for us to use, a barrel with water attached to a shower head. When we saw the lack of water our hosts faced, we chose to forgo the shower as it seemed like an unnecessary luxury. We saw a dam that a German company had constructed to capture more of the rainy season flow. Also, some of the schools we saw had 10,000 liter barrels attached to gutters on the roof to store the precious rain that did fall. I hope I never again take for granted the water that we are blessed to always have available to us.

Muddy

The singing well: Moran below hoists bucket of water to his peer who fills the trough,
both singing a call-and-response chant.


Photos:
Steven, Laurel, and Muddy at a dam and dry riverbed (Claudia Daggett)
Large water tanks at WorldVision (Claudia Daggett)
Schoolyard water tank (Muddy Waters)

Video:
Singing well (Muddy Waters)