Repairing Zambian Hand Pumps

And she’s off again! Last you heard from me I was in Nepal… I never got around to a final blog closing up my journey to Nepal, and didn’t even tell you about Cambodia (I was there for a week to co-facilitate a learning exchange with CAWST’s WET Centres from around the world – it was pretty spectacular.  You can catch the excitement and inspiration by watching this video I put together) and now I am about to land in beautiful Zambia.  It’s been a few fairly busy months and by busy I mean AWESOME!

http://sohip.org/water/ - not my photo because I haven't got there yet... 

• What now? HAND PUMP REPAIR! 
• Why hand pump repair? It is estimated that at any given time 1/3 of all hand pumps in Africa are broken.  Think of the neighbors on either side of your house – one of you will not have any water. You did at one point, but now your tap is broken and nobody knows how to fix it.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could just call up one of those neighbors to fix it or better yet fix it yourself?  This is the state for WAY too many communities and is endemic to most drilling projects (33% percent failure seems like a lot don’t you think?) .  Drilling a well and putting in a pump is not a silver bullet. So next time you get asked to give to a program that is drilling wells, I challenge you to look at the full program – if they don’t have adequate local training in place you might want to think about putting your money into a more sustainable project that is going to give someone more water for your dollars – or better yet fund the knowledge and skills for them to get their own clean water! (How about CAWST?! – shameless, I know, and you might get more of it in the coming months as we go into a big fundraising push).
• What am I doing? For the next 3 weeks I will be with SOHIP (Seeds of Hope International Partnerships) working with their trainers and pump repair team.  Together we will re-develop their hand pump repair program to make it more effective and longer lasting. It’s going to busy and it’s going to be intense and it’s going to be wonderful.  Hopefully I will find a little bit of time to keep you updated with some of the fun from the field and get some pictures up!

Lots of love from the Johannesburg airport!
Taryn