Urgently required repairs were completed this week in Bevehun, a village in the Barri Chiefdom of the Pujehun district. Bearings are a constant problem, good quality sealed versions are difficult to get ‘in-country’ consequently they easily become contaminated with grit and water and as you can see, can be susceptible to rust and excess wear. This is a photo of the maintenance team working to replace these at the Bevehun village well.
After just a few hours, the work was completed and the village was once again able to draw clean fresh water.
Because of the difficulty in raising sufficient funds to buy the necessary parts (even though in Western terms they may be cheap and plentifully available), sourcing parts of a suitable quality is often an issue. This combined with sometimes challenging access to villages can inevitably lead to delays in vital repairs. In this instance the people of Bevehun village had been surviving without a working well for several weeks.
Fortunately it has been the rainy season and some water was captured and stored to tie them over, but this is not a perfect solution. An irony of the region, is that during the rainy season, there is an abundance of water (too much in the monsoons!) but there is limited facility for safe storage in any quantity and containers soon become vulnerable to infestation by bacteria or disease and fall a long way short of providing sufficient water in the hot, dry summer months.
Maintaining the wells is therefore paramount. We have very limited financial resources and there is always more call on the funding we have than we are able to support. We therefore live from month to month spreading what funds we have and prioritising the needs of different villages. We could do so much more with even a few small additional donations. We make no profit, the trustees are all unpaid and work relentlessly to achieve more with what we have. Every donation is used 100% for keeping these wells running and we hope that at some point in the future, we will even be able to get back to drilling wells again in new villages that are desperate for them.
If you are able to assist us and help maintain one of the 80+ wells we now support, please take a minute and use any of the options on these pages to make a small donation.
Many thanks