Water is life for villagers in Darfur
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Authors
Hameed Bakheet
Issue Date
23/03/2018
Type
Language
en
Keywords
Development , Water and Sanitation
Alternative Title
Abstract
“We were at the margin of survival. Most of the villagers have moved elsewhere to find water. It’s really hard to leave your homeland but the even harder to survive without water. We used to travel for about three hours on our donkeys to seek water for our families. You can imagine what that means. Going for water every other day meant you could only work fifteen days a month reducing our income. The amount of water we could transport was not great. At best we had enough to shower three times a week but usually only once a week. Now through this work with Practical Action everything has changed. Our solar water pump has changed our life dramatically. Now it is the easiest thing to get water, even the children can go alone to bring water for their families. “Believe it or not when I saw water coming out from the pump for the first time I felt something like a cloud covering my eyes. It was tears of happiness, although it is shaming for a Darfurian man to show tears!” said Altayeb from Kweim village, North Darfur. Hawaa from Mugabil village also expresses her joy at the new facility. “In the past when there was no water in our village, pastoralists and farmers often came to blows. Now it’s very rare to hear that a conflict has happened. We women were usually exhausted because we had to go for about four kilometres to bring a small amount of water for all our needs, drinking, cooking, washing and showering. When we had a guest and there was no water, we used to borrow water from our neighbours! And it was not good for our donkeys to carry water all that distance. A donkey might be expected to live for twenty years but the lives of our donkeys were reduced to only about five years. We also faced the risk of gender based violence on those long water gathering trips, but now with water available here, we are safe. We now use the time we were spending in going to fetch water for other domestic, economic and personal activities. “We have even become more beautiful because we can wash and shower every day,” laughed Hawaa! This project was designed by Practical Action and financed by the Swedish Postcode Foundation to provide water for both settled and pastoralist communities in the villages of Mugabil and Kweim in North Darfur. It benefits more than 8,000 individuals who live in the areas surrounding Mugabil and Kweim as well as 2,000 pastoralists. The most obvious impacts of this project are an increase in water access and quality in the area. Now clean water for drinking and cooking is available for the whole community and for pastoralists and their livestock. This will have a significant benefit to the health of the community. The community water management committee is taking responsibility for managing the water supply to ensure its sustainability. And the pump is operated by clean, renewable solar power so it is helping keep both people and the environment safe.