By Elizabeth Buhungiro
Manuella, age 9, is a little star. We arrive at her home at 3:30 pm on a Monday to find her seated on a locally made chair, looking spotlessly clean and dressed to the nines. This is in high contrast to her siblings and peers, who have evidently played in the dirt or done work around the home. When we ask to take pictures of her family, she shrieks with excitement, quickly jumps up off her chair and runs to stand in position. She strikes confident poses – very clearly the star of the show.
To understand how this little star came to be, we have to start at the beginning, back to when Manuella’s father was little. Her father’s childhood experiences with a lack of reliable safe water access made his childhood so unbearable that he made himself a promise that his children would not struggle like he did.
His name is Edson Odong Kara. He is 43. Until he was 25, his village had no safe water source. The nearest water source was a swamp five kilometers away from home. Kara recalls being four years old and waking up with hunger pangs, but he did not bother to cry because he already knew that it would be at least seven hours before his first meal of the day. His mother had always left at the crack of dawn to collect water from the swamp. She would be back at around noon, which is when she would start cooking. The family’s first and only meal of the day would be served at 3 pm, at the earliest.
When Kara was nine, he started joining his siblings for the long walk to collect dirty water.
“We used to wake up at 4 am to go to the swamp because we had to go to school afterward. There were so many mosquitoes biting us, and we suffered from malaria very many times,” Kara recalls.
When he was not sick from malaria, Kara was fighting off diarrhea, bilharzia, and a slew of other waterborne diseases. Sometimes, Kara and his siblings would find a long line at the water collection point and consequently arrive late for school. For that, they would receive several thrashes on the backside
Kara would go on to spend the rest of the school day dozing off from waking up too early, being hungry, and being tired from carrying a 22-pound jerrycan over a long distance. All of this before he was 14 years old. Kara eventually dropped out of school and a few years later, started a family.
In 2004, Kara’s village, Acandyang, finally got a borehole. He was relieved, but that feeling didn’t last long. The water source would break down and stay nonfunctional for days or weeks on end, and Kara’s family would be forced to revert to collecting dirty water from the swamp.
They lived in this state until International Lifeline Fund introduced EverFlow, a subscription-based rural waterpoint preventative maintenance initiative, to Acandyang village in 2017. Kara was one of the first people to jump at the opportunity. He became an advocate, mobilizing people to pay.
“I told everyone; this is the best thing for us!” Kara says. “And people support this program, I tell you. The borehole has never been down for more than one day because they [EverFlow] always check to make sure it’s working, and if it stops, they repair it immediately,” He reports.
Kara takes so much pride in paying for reliable water access because, he says, “It has given my children a much better childhood than I had. My children are clean. They can even bathe three times a day. They can wash their clothes. They eat breakfast, lunch, and supper. They can go to school and study well. I stopped in Primary Seven but I’m pushing them to go all the way.”
Kara’s home is 300 meters away from the borehole maintained by EverFlow, making it easy for his family to collect as much water as they need for home consumption and for commercial farming. Kara is now a franchisee of EverFlow’s pilot drip irrigation scheme, whose purpose is to help rural communities generate income to pay for water source maintenance.
Kara has a spring in his step as he walks around the neighborhood showing us his maize, soya bean, and cassava gardens. He introduces us to his brother, mother and, finally, we go to his home to meet his wife and children. His wife is still on the way back from work.
He calls his children for a photo op and one thing is immediately clear-Kara has kept his promise; his children are all healthy and thriving. And because of that, they can choose how to spend their afternoon. The two older children are just back from tending to the family garden. The youngest has been playing. And Manuella has been seated, looking neat and pretty because she chooses to be a star.
This is what reliable clean water access does. It gives back the time that would have been spent in the struggle for survival, looking for water or treating waterborne diseases, so rural communities have the opportunity to lift themselves out of dire circumstances.
To learn more about EverFlow, Lifeline’s rural waterpoint preventative maintenance initiative, click here.