Hand-dug well part 3 - finished!

Thanks to those of you who expressed interest in this project!

At the end of the part 2 post (see below), I listed the work remaining on the well.  Those last things were completed in less than a week after I wrote the last post, because the people were so motivated to get the pump running so that they could have clean water in their village.

The finished product looks like this:

All the digging equipment is gone, the well is sealed and the lid has a chain and padlock to prevent tampering.  The electric lines to the pump are all buried, as is the pipe that runs up to the village.  At the other end of the pipe is this reservoir:

This cement reservoir was actually built by Oxfam in 2008, at the tail-end of a mountain spring project they did for this village.  Unfortunately that mountain spring dried up, and this reservoir had been unused for years.  We are glad to build on the foundations of work done by other groups, after all, these projects are for the good of the people, not the NGOs!  Before putting this reservoir back into use we fully disinfected the inside, added a chain and padlock to the lid on top, and made the single output pipe into a split so that 2 people could fill their buckets simultaneously.

I was back in this village today and the people had great things to say about what this water source has done for them: they spend much less time collecting water, and the water is safe for drinking.  In the mix with the statements of gratitude however, the community members also had further requests from this project.  They would like us to build another reservoir like this one, but to build it above the village, and then run gravity pipes down from it to a system of taps, one near each cluster of 4-5 houses.  They would also like a backup generator, to continue to pump water when the hydro-power supplied electricity cuts out.

A person cannot blame a community for dreaming big and pushing the envelope with groups that come to partner with them.  However for these requested extensions to this water project, we will have to wait a little bit further into the year to see if we have budget for these, after we get planned projects in other villages rolling.