Tuesday, August 6, 2024
After our conference in Kakuma, Tim and Rob returned home and I stayed on for three day of bringing food and clean water to several villages in the bush. The first day was spent traveling 130 km out into the desert to reach two villages where George and Bonifice had just established churches. Bush travel can be problematic as there really are no roads as such and we are always prepared for flats, getting stuck in the deep sand, or in the dry riverbeds as happened on this trip. There had been a recent rain in the area and the river we were crossing still had a bit of water in it. Undeterred by the presence of standing water, our delivery truck promptly got stuck. We later found out that his four-wheel drive was not working, otherwise he might have made it to the other side.
We unloaded the contents, taking them to the other side on firm ground and went about excavating the truck. Unfortunately, he was in too deep.
We worked on extracting him for about three hours and finally gave up, but this spectacle soon gathered a large crowd of lookie loos, more interested in watching than helping. Some did appear to help every time the driver gunned the engine in an attempt to get out, but I later learned from Paul, our driver, that they were only pretending to push, because no one had payed them. After we left, the driver apparently broke down and payed them something and they pushed him out in no time! Such is life in Turkana.
I want to thank all of you who donated for our famine relief effort this trip. We were able to give a substantial amount of food to around 1,500 families. Along with the food, we also gave out bucket water filters provided to us by Surfing Servants to every village. We went through some basic training with each village on the use and cleaning of the filter and explanation on why they should drink only filtered water. Typhoid, dysentary and other water-borne diseases are a fact of life for these people, and a majority of deaths of children under 5, (80%) are from such diseases.
Very often, the same water used for bathing is collected for use back in the village for drinking as well. Water is life in this part of the world and in a land where water is scarce, sometimes you can"t be too picky.
Our demonstrations of the filter system we always highly entertaining (and I trust educational) for the people.
We would take some of the local water (this happened to be from the Turkwel River) and then filter it into a clean plastic bottle.
The transformation of the brown sludge into crystal clear water was always a highlight of the demonstration. However, any final reluctance was overcome when the mazungu (white man) drank the transformed water!
We did the demonstration in each village with my faithful interpreters, George and Boniface. That was my way of training these guys to hand out the rest of the filters to some other villages I was not able to visit. I would really like to see each family in Turkana have the means to have one of these filters for their own use. But the Turkana are a very community minded people, willing to share their resources with each other, so the village headman, or church pastor, would appoint ladies in each place to be the water filter guardians for the whole community.
These are the ladies responsible for the care and cleaning of the filter and making sure each village has clean drinking water.
At the conclusion of each visit, Boniface would teach the village some English.