ISOLATED SCHOOL AND VILLAGE GET A RAIN-CATCHMENT TANK

By operat11 on February 24, 2010 in Messages

by Our OSDW Reporter

Go with us to a cut-off and rarely-visited group of indigenous people in desperate need of safe drinking water.

“You can’t get there from here,” we were told. And that was true, by land. Access is only by a long and risky open boat trip on the open ocean.

You load up the boat the day before and make sure it’s brimming full with fuel. There’s no place to get fuel where we’re going. You wake up long before dawn, get food and water for the day and wait for enough light to see the marker buoys to let you get out of the harbor. You take off in near-darkness and meet up with the second boat — two go together for safety in the open seas.

The second boat carries volunteers who have helped donate the water tank for Punta Nispero and who are coming along to help.

You and your “buddy boat” head past one island after another, until you are past all islands of the archipelago and in the open seas. You press on in the ocean swells until you come to Punta Valiente, where OSDW has installed rain catchment systems for 4 schools.

But you don’t pull into the sheltered water this time. You keep going into the open seas headed to place rarely visited by outsiders – Punta Nispero. The lead boat skillfully guides you through reefs and into the calm harbor where dozens of people wait for you. Local men eagerly pitch in and help unload the ladders, the wood for the base of the water tank, the long PVC tubes which make the rain-catchment gutters – and start hauling them up the steep steps to the school.

Then a man far from his Iowa home — Ken Eide – an OSDW volunteer, takes charge and puts OSDW staff and local volunteers to work on the rain-catchment system. The guttering is installed. Then a problem comes up. The water flows the wrong way. Shims are laboriously put in to raise a part of the guttering to feed the water to the end of the gutter and into the waiting tank below.

The work in the sun is hot and difficult, but in the end is worthwhile.

The school of more than a hundred students and the village of some 300 people have a rain-catchment system that is simple, easy-to –maintain, has only one moving part – the faucet, and will last for years. Best of all, it’ll refill every time it rains.

Schoolchilden and villagers of isolated Punta Nispero in front of their school's new rain-catchment system installed by Operation Safe Drinking Water and its partners. No more carrying buckets of water from a polluted well. There will be fewer sick kids and less absenteeism. The question is--- why should indigenous children be sick from bad water where it rains a lot?

Everyone senses it’s a new days for the kids and people of Punta Nispero. But there’s no time for celebrating. Time is passing and we have to shove off to get safely out of the open seas and back among the familiar islands before dark.

Another day for Operation Safe Drinking Water. Another school and village has safe drinking water. But there was nothing normal about this venture into the open seas to a distant, remote, rarely-visited people.

We thank the donors who not only gave, but went along to help install their tank.

But other schools are opening soon with no safe drinking water.

Please open your heart to indigenous kids who need safe drinking water just as much as your own kids.