Bill Bryson's African Diary - Bill Bryson [13]
Ogongo Tir was a scattered village in a green valley, which, thanks to CARE, boasted a new well. It was this that we had come to see. The well, it must be said, wasn’t one of the wonders of the world. It was just a simple long-handled pump of the kind still commonly encountered at camp-grounds. My grandfather had one just like it, dating from about 1900, on his Iowa farm, so this was hardly cutting edge technology. But what a difference it has made to Ogongo Tir’s 32I households.
Before this, one of the village elders told me, during droughts and dry seasons women gathering water had to make a seven-hour round trip to a spring atop a steep and distant hill, setting out from the village at three in the morning in order to be back in time for the day’s other chores. Because of the distance, none could carry more than a single five-gallon jerry can.
Now villagers have only to stroll to a clearing on the village edge to get safe, clean, adequate supplies of water. This was such a big deal to the community that the entire village turned out to greet us. Children sang us songs and their elders made speeches. Long speeches. Impassioned speeches. Speeches in Kiswahile and speeches in English. These were seriously grateful people.
“There’s been a big change in how these things are done,” Nick told me as we were taken on a tour of a nearby vegetable garden, which blossoms even in the dry season thanks to water from the well. “It used to be that we’d build a well for a village or make some other improvement and then move on. Eventually, the pump would break or something would go wrong and the people wouldn’t know what to do. They’d come back to us and ask us to fix it because they thought of it as our well.
“So the idea now is that we help them build the well, but then the village takes complete responsibility for it. They form a committee and run it as a kind of business. They make a small charge for anyone who takes water so that they then have a reserve fund for when they need to make a repair or eventually dig a new well.”
“And has it worked?” I asked.
“Brilliantly, everywhere we’ve done it. It’s amazing how long it took aid agencies to figure out that people really, really don’t want dependency. They want to help themselves.”
“Only natural,” I observed wisely.
“Only natural,” he agreed.
We returned to our vehicles and plunged deeper into the broad and comely Lambwe Valley. At length we stopped at a small farm, where we met a sweet and eager young farmer named William Gumbo. Gumbo owns four acres of good but semi-arid land in the most gorgeous setting in the very heart of the valley. It was almost uncannily reminiscent of Tuscany or Provence—a place of dry, warm, shimmering beauty. I can’t tell you how much I wish you could have met William Gumbo, for he was an inspiration.
Until 1999 Gumbo scratched a living raising maize and millet and a few chickens. Then CARE stepped into his life. As part of its Dak Achana (Kiswahili for “healthy households”) programme, it introduced him to a couple of agricultural specialists, who showed him ways to increase his yields and diversify crops. Today he runs a model farm—a four-acre outburst of verdant plenty in the midst of a dry, bare valley. He grows peas, tomatoes, bananas, pineapples, passion fruit, mangos and much else. Only sweet potatoes have been a failure: some livestock broke through a fence