Clean water & sanitation solutions for families in the setting of Mbinudita village, Praipaha – Nggaha Ori Angu. Sumba Timur.

For more than two months, we have been on the sites, building, caring for, helping, laughing, discussing, planning and providing access to better health for thousands of people. It’s such a joy and relief to see that everything is going well.

Ayu, Atha, Gogon, Annisa, Primus, Elthon, Ino, Bobi, Alex, Elisa and all our two foundations’ good friends are there now. We’re all working very hard so that this vast and vital project that is “waterconnections -site de # sdmbinudita” can be completed on time. We firmly believe that this project cannot end. The purpose, in short, is not to build sanitary installations, 6000-litre tanks or to bury kilometres of pipes in the ground…

No, no, no, not at all! The goal of #waterconnections is to reduce mortality and serious illnesses linked to the consumption of dirty water. But also to ensure that no more children are put in the category of “malnourished and suffering from starvation”, which is far from won, as the number of these children is so high here, in East Sumba. #waterconnections is also about getting people to eat healthy, enough to eat, by producing their own vegetables.

#waterconnections is also so that families can generate income.

A source of income for families, communities and all the villagers of these poor and rural villages. This will allow them to buy rice and seeds for the fields. This will also make it possible to compensate for the hardness of their lives and the injuries that strike them regularly, like the systematic destruction of fields, crops and gardens by pests.

The story is beautiful! It deserves to be told simply like this: Water Connections aims to provide access to safe drinking water and sanitation to villages & families who have never had access to it. We have been working on it for months, in the field, with the villagers.

Since clean water has been flowing on the sites of this #waterconnections project, we have seen absolute joy from the villagers, a spirit and a great motivation to continue to improve things for their ultra-rural region. People are happy, and above all, they are much healthier. This can be seen.

Fair Future Foundation and Kawan Baik Indonesia needed to drill a deep well to find clean water in quantity and quality. We searched and found the best possible location. A place impossible to access, on which we brought a machine weighing almost two tons, and on which we lived for more than two weeks. Time to drill more than 60 meters deep. The found water is good, fresh, and healthy.

The goal of #waterconnections is to reduce mortality and serious illnesses linked to the consumption of dirty water. But also to ensure that no more children are put in the category of “malnourished and suffering from starvation”…

It was also essential to bring electricity to the site for the pumps linked to transporting water from the bottom of the hill (site of the main borehole) to its summit (nearly 300m higher up the school). That’s unique, and it’s a challenge that made us ask ourselves so many questions and asked to do a lot of research. Indeed here, nobody has access to electricity in the houses.

The construction of ten Ferro-cement tanks of about 6,000 litres each was necessary. It takes, on average, a week to build one. But hours to transport the material to the chosen places.

By using gravitational force, that is, by implanting a 6000-litre tank in the right place, we had to connect the different components of this water network to each other, using kilometres of buried pipes.

It took us time, energy and a lot of courage too. And we still need it at the time of writing from Sumba Timur. This is the essence and soul of our foundations: to get personally involved in the field, our teams, and the rural communities who work with us.

But before all that, we had to build the #sdmbinudita school, an adventure of nearly two years during the Covid-19 pandemic. What an incredible challenge, time spent on site, all of us together.

According to our model, we have started to build healthy sanitary facilities, i.e. ten units each comprising: Two toilets, two showers, a clean water collection point and a laundry washing point. These facilities are currently being built at the #mbinudita site.

Families start to generate income by selling the vegetables from their garden, which they water with their own water, which they did not have before

So yes, where the story is so beautiful is that people are healthier.

Families start to generate income by selling the vegetables from their garden, which they water with their own water, which they did not have before. It also has a real and significant impact on the problems of malnutrition and malnourished children – there are many of them here. Sumba Timur has the highest rate of malnourished children in the country-. Because families can eat healthy produce from their garden, cook it, and drink much more. And take a “shower” more than once a week or a month.

The working principles applied by Fair Future and Kawan Baik in the field for all of its projects are always the same.

We start from the code that we cannot do much alone. But also and above all, the people of these rural areas need to work and are all eager to help, learn and participate in creating or constructing their own facilities. For the #sdmbinuduta school, the many boreholes already drilled, or the #waterconnections project, the villagers have built their own infrastructure, along with teams from our two organisations.

It’s an excellent craze. Sometimes we find ourselves with more than fifty people working from morning until late evening. We share meals, talk together, and give the courage to carry, dig, and build what is now theirs. The feeling of belonging is excellent when you make something when you put your heart, a lot of time and all your energy into it.

This principle is the very basis of the work of Fair Future and Kawan Baik on all the sites where we are involved. And we make many friends who have almost become our family members!

Rumah Kambera, the 29.07.2022/fff/aw

Dates of Photos and videos: July 2022 | Location: SD Mbinudita, Sumba Timur, NTT