Clean Water for Tokuroano

By Michael Wellborn

I owed this story to you.  It’s the cap to my last trip to Ghana, and was a major part of our mission there.  I wanted to tell this story so well it nearly crippled my ability to write at all, so here it is several months after the fact.  I want the words to be so compelling you would fall into the story, care for and love the villagers of Tokurano as I do.  Sadly, I can’t give you the experience I had.  I hope this story at least imparts the struggles these villagers have in their daily lives, and the life changing gift clean water really is for them.

As I bumped up and down in the front seat of our bus, I couldn’t help but enjoy the beauty of the vivid, thriving jungle beyond the harsh red dirt road.  With each bone jarring bash, I discovered a new appreciation for how far a place can seem if you can’t speed down a smooth blacktop road.  It also brought into sharp focus how hard it must be for this community of 4,000 villagers to import and export their supplies and goods.  Our drive from Tema to Tokuroano was many hours, perhaps 5 or 6, much of it through dense jungle.  The sandy, red clay road would sometimes go straight for kilometers, cut perfectly through the jungle, as if someone had drawn the road with a gigantic ruler, right into the green carpeted landscape.  Other times we hit winding switchbacks, snaking their way around the geological contours which have stood the test of Man for millennia.

Clean water, in large part, was our mission.  Digging a well, installing piping and pumping, installing a steel well head, installing a pump house, installing electrical, digging hundreds of yards of trenches, laying all the terminus piping, connecting standpipes for water service, and installing a 60 cubic foot elevated concrete storage tank, so this village could have 12 hours of water on hand all the time.  That was the mission, clean water.

When I say “Clean Water”, I’m sure you will picture any number of images in your mind.  Perhaps you see clean, clear water in various vessels, or perhaps children smiling as they enjoy the cool refreshing drink or play in a clear stream.  One might see an image of a flowing faucet, or perhaps sun shining through a beautiful glass full of clean water, or a condensation covered bottle of purified water.  However, I’m sure not many people picture a mother who can’t care for her children because she’s walking 6 or 10 kilometers for water, twice a day.  We don’t picture her children who can’t go to school because they spend the whole day walking to fetch water.  I tried to carry water on my head, and I ended up with half of it all over me.  A 7 year old girl was much better at carrying water than I was.  She seemed entertained by, and somewhat disappointed in my lack of water toting skills.  The children are unsupervised because the mother is providing for the basic needs of the family, and the father is away in the fields tending crops 12 hours a day.  Sitting at home, with cool clean water running from our faucets in our porcelain sinks, it’s hard to imagine “River Blindness”, the horrible disease caused by simply being in the polluted water, much less drinking it.   It’s so very difficult to picture a lifeless child lying on a river bank, with red puncture marks in her little leg.  She was simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time.  She was collecting water and had her little life taken by a viper.  

The odd thing was, we could use our cellular phones in Tukerano.  We could pick up our phone, punch in a few numbers, and talk with people back home about how we were bringing clean water to a rural village in Ghana.  However, before we came and put in the well, the technology didn’t exist for women and children to get clean water in that same village.  In this part of the world, technology for the most mundane of comforts trumps the adoption of technology for the most basic building block of life and civilization.  That struck me as strange.  1 in 6 people in the world don’t have access to clean water.  That’s hard for us to understand because 100% of Americans have access to clean water, even the homeless and rural or mountain people.  We have solved this issue in our society.  We can have clean water brought to our homes, schools or work, in a myriad of ways and for a relatively low cost.  This is so true of our society that we can’t begin to imagine how much we take it for granted.  I’m here to say, it would be very hard to overestimate the strength and vitality having access to clean water brings to our society.

It’s not enough to bring water to a village though.  The village must take that project on, own it, manage it, maintain and expand the system.  This was our task this trip, to see exactly how well all of that was coming along.  We had dug the well several years ago, and mechanized it in 2009.  Now it was time to verify the well was still operating to capacity, and capacity was being expanded to meet the growing needs of the community.  I excited to see how well the project had been adopted by the villagers and how the maintenance was going.  We were concerned it was just another White foreigner aid project that would melt away into the jungle, like so many rotting fallen leaves from a life giving tree.  However, the adoption of the well, the stories of prosperity because of it, and the reversal of the devastating stories of death and struggle have forever changed me.   

Bringing clean water to this village means children and women don’t need to carry it any more.  Now they can work, care for their young, or go to school.  They don’t get bitten by snakes and die fetching water any more. They don’t go down to get water, become distracted, wash away, and drown.  People don’t get River Blindness, or a dozen other horrible water born diseases.  Men can start new industry, like making cinder block bricks for the construction industry.  Women can make multicolored fabrics from beautiful dyes.  Plentiful water means better crops for famers and healthier animals for ranchers.  Clean water means, these villagers not only live, but flourish and thrive.  

I’ll close with one last story for you to consider.  We thought we were bringing clean water and a new way of life for these people.  Upon investigation though, they had done so much more with it than we ever expected.  Not only do they have more prosperity because of the time they now save in getting water, and better sanitation and health from clean, they are already creating jobs and public works projects from it.  Now there is a system where each of the water faucets has its own water administrator.  The administrator collects money each time a villager receives water.  That money is then collected by the water municipality agent (a chief) each day, but the administrator gets to keep 25% of the earnings as pay.  The remaining 75% of the money goes into the bank.  The prudent reserve fund is then debited to pay for the electricity for the municipal water pump used to pump the water from the well to the storage tank.  Any remaining money is used for maintenance, and is being saved to expand the system and pay for a new generator to be used to pump water even when the national utility is down.  

This-- is change!  This is innovation and prosperity on a level an outsider would have been hard pressed to develop, much less implement and manage.  This is a perfect example of a symbiotic and synergistic program which used missionaries to start the project and concerned villagers and elders to manage and maintain the project, transforming this project from simple concrete and pipes to a prosperous community.

God is good and we are blessed.  Thank you for your support, all of you.