Well, Well, Well ...

When we visited Quilters Junior School last term to see their end of year presentation of their achievements, their Eco Group wanted to talk to us about plans they were developing to provide clean fresh water supplies to people in Africa, and especially in Kenya.  Why Kenya?  Because one team member’s father, now sadly passed away two years ago, had been born in Kenya, so this seemed very appropriate.

Borewells Success

We had told them about our Borewells project which built water wells to provide clean water for 10 Primary Schools in Kenya.  When they heard what we had achieved, and the low cost at which we were able to build each well compared with charities like WaterAid, they were even more interested and asked for more information and a presentation about the project. 

On October 17, five members of the club - president Roger, vice-president Patrick, youth officers Stephen and Peter, and Rev. Margaret joined the school for their School Assembly.

Presenting to an enthusiastic audience

Margaret gave a half hour presentation about the project, it’s successes and the outstanding issues. Why Margaret? Because she was a member of our club and had been travelling to Kenya to this area of Embu for over 12 years and has promoted projects to improve life in that area throughout this time.  She was the principle liaison between the Rotary Club of Billericay and local schools for this project, visiting the area, every one of the schools and forging links with the local Rotary Club of Embu to manage the project locally on our behalf.

Margaret discussed the history of the project, the strategy of building one well first at Ciamanda Primary school as a pilot to establish best practices and potential costs, and subsequent fundraising strategies which raised not only the money for the planned further five schools but enough in the end to build a total of ten wells.

Remedial work

All the wells had been completed, reaching down to the aquifer and water table in all locations, but some locations were suffering.  The climate continued to present problems and a longer drought meant that the water table had dropped and some wells in three locations had run dry.  More digging was required to get back down to the water table again, and in some cases this meant digging through extremely hard rock strata.

Margaret is visiting the sites this month to evaluate what was needed to resolve the issues in the three problem wells.

The children listened in rapt attention throughout and offered to help fund-raise either to remedy the problems in the existing “dry” wells, or potentially dig additional new wells.