Acqua pulita e servizi igienici per un trucco magico

Delivering medical care, water access, and solar energy to isolated communities in Sumba.

Acqua pulita e servizi igienici per un trucco magico

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 to complete this vast and vital project, “waterconnections -site de # sdmbinudita,” 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 consuming 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 helping people eat enough healthy food by growing their own vegetables.

#waterconnections also helps families 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 help offset the hardships 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: 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 at the sites of this #waterconnections project, we have seen absolute joy among the villagers, a renewed spirit, and strong motivation to keep improving things in 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, where we brought a machine weighing almost two tons, and where we lived for more than two weeks—time to drill more than 60 meters deep. The water we found is good, fresh, and healthy.

Noi also needed to bring electricity to the site to run the pumps that transport water from the bottom of the hill (site of the main borehole) to the summit (nearly 300m higher up the school). That’s unique, and it’s a challenge that made us ask ourselves many questions and do a lot of research. Indeed, here, nobody has access to electricity in the houses. We needed to build ten Ferro-cement tanks of about 6.000 litri each. On average, it takes a week to build one. But it takes hours to transport the material to the chosen places.

By using gravitational force, that is, by implanting a 6,000-litre tank in the right place, we had to connect the different components of this water network, 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, in Sumba Timur. This is the essence and soul of our foundations: getting personally involved in the field, our teams, and the rural communities we work with.

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.

So yes, the story is beautiful: 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. Families can eat healthy produce from their garden, cook it, and drink more. And take a “shower” more than once a week or a month.

Il Principi di funzionamento Un futuro giusto e Amici buoni apply in the field for all their projects are always the same.

We start from the code that we cannot do much alone. But above all, the people in these rural areas need to work and are eager to help, learn, and participate in creating and building 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 powerful when you make something and put your heart, a lot of time, and all your energy into it.

This principle is the very basis of the work of Un futuro giusto e Amici buoni on all the sites where we are involved. And we make many friends who have almost become family!

Casa Kambera, il 29.07.2022/fff/aw