Books for Africa Library Project, Inc.Establishing libraries in rural areas of West Africa |
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| Water Greetings friends, I want to talk about water today. It is a commodity that we usually take for granted in the USA. We open the tap and it runs. We turn it on in our backyards and it flows, often for hours while we water the grass. We pour gallons on our cars and turn gallons through our washing machines. Water is a blessing and also a necessity of life. Good and abundant water is a gift from God. We are blessed with it abundantly in the USA. In Hilda’s hometown we are also blesed with its abundance. We live in the forest region and there are streams and brooks and low lying marshes all about the town of Kukurantumi. There is no winter here. We are five degrees north of the equator. The seasons that we enjoy are divided into the rainy and dry seasons. The rainy seasons occur from April through July and a shorter one from September through early November. In the rainy season it rains daily. The day may dawn clear with high humidity and then in mid-afternoon a thunderstorm will roll in and dump a heavy rain on us. Then after it has passed, the day will clear again. The prevailing winds are off of the ocean and thus moisture laden. As these winds blow clouds into the interior they hit the raised lands of the Akim and Ashanti Regions and release some of their load. Even the northern lattitudes approaching the Sahara Desert get some of this rain. In the dry season the prevailing winds are from the north, which means off of the Sahara Desert. It rains much less often during the dry season; perhaps two or three times a month. However, since Kukurantumi is only sixty miles from the sea, the air is still quite humid. There is a kind of haze which settles over the hills in the morning as the heat of the sun starts to beat on the cool and damp forests. In the dry season the rivers and streams do not dry up and so year round there is water. The areas in the north of Ghana are less fortunate. They are further from the sea. The air is as dry as that of Arizona and the soil becomes parched. If you want water you need to rely on the large rivers and deep wells. We have a well for our house in Kukurantumi. We can get waater from it year round. And wonder of wonders we have running water. We dug the well by hand and lined it with cement. It goes down about twenty five feet. It is the kind of well that farmhouses had a hundred years ago. Into this well I put a submersible pump and then ran a line to a pressure tank so that in a mechanical sense our water system is just like the one that operates in the houses with wells in Copley, Ohio where we live the other six months of the year. When we turn on the wataer in Kukurantumi though, you can’t drink it. I do not trust the percolating system of the well sufficiently to be bacteria free. And there are some nasty water born diseases here. Aside from round worms which live in your stomach, there are the serious water born diseases of typhus, cholera and amoebic dysentry. Our septic system is only about seventy feet from the well. It’s all the room that we could obtain from our adjacent neighbors. According to US standards I believe the well should be at least a hundred feet from the septic tank, and typically the household wells in the US are deep. So is it water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink? Fortunately, we get around it. For the past five years a new industry has blossomed in Ghana; it is a cottage industry that produces "pure water." Sold in cheap plastic bags for about four cents a glass, they are available everywhere. There is profit in it. One buys a machine that takes a source of water, distills it and then packages it into these plastic bags. The water bags commonly are sold in a sack of about twenty-five for a total of fifty cents. There is profit then for the middle man to refrigerate the bags and then sell to the thirsty "man on the street." There is one such "cottage factory" in Kukurantumi that has one of these machines. We buy a couple of sacks a week and that is what we use to drink at our meals and brush our teeth with. We can wash our clothes, rinse our dishes and take a shower with our well water. It is a blessing. We turn the tap and it flows freely. We brought a washing machine over to Ghana four years ago. Before that time Hilda was washing the clothes by hand. It is hard to run a library program eight hours a day and wash clothes by hand, cook and take care of the family of our neice who live with us. In the morning Hilda cooks for eight people. House wives I hand it to you, you are courageous! So our washing machine was a boon for Hilda. When the books come, we will be busy re-boxing the 25,000 books so that all the books in a box have the same call number. I will be hiring someone to help Hilda with the cooking and housecleaning as well. Hilda is too busy. Yesterday she had her second meeting of her "youth group." This is a group of about twenty pre-teens that she calls together every Sunday afternoon for an hour and a half. She teaches them traditional dancing and about ecology. This afternoon, although it is Monday, she will be meeting with them and they will be going through some of the streets of the town and collecting plastic trash that has been carelessly tossed on the ground. This is the down side of the "pure waater" trade. The trash is ubiquitous. It is worse than Macdonalds trash can be in the States. Littering is a real problem now in Ghana. It didn’t used to matter if a chld ate a banana and threw the skin on the side of the road. Within days a banana peel would decompose. Not so the plastics. We are getting mounds and mounds of it. The local landfills are full of it and when it rains the streets run with plastic. It can be really gross to look at. A beautiful country town is terribly marred by black and clear plastic trash littered on the streets leading into and through it. I looked on the Internet when I was home for some kind of machine that recycles such plastic. I searched for an hour and couldn’t find anything. If any of you want to continue the search or know of such a machine, let me know. There is the potential to revolutionize the environment here if people would pick up plastic and carry it to a recycling machine for a refund. Although people are slow to pick up trash from an ecological motive they will do it from a profit motive. Getting back to the subject of our water. For years when we came to Ghana for a month or so, we would use the older dug well next to our present one. We would haul our bucket of water out of the well and then take it to a small stall where we would have our bath out of a bucket. It worked well. One gets very adept at reaching into the bucket with a wash cloth, scooping up a hand full of water and wetting oneself down. We cooked, washed ourselves and our clothes through this bucket brigade. Our life is easier now with the submersible pump. I am grateful for the small things in life. Addendum: this note is written a week later. We just finished celebrating the funeral of Hilda's uncle. It was a four day affair. Starting Friday afternoon we hosted the out of town family. In Ghana this means all cousins, uncles and aunts who are related in anyway to you going back to your great grandmother. The wake was Friday night; Hilda was up all night with the relatives keeping watch. I snuck off to bed between one and 4 am. We buried the uncle Saturday morning and entertained hundreds of people who came to through the house over the following two days. It is Tuesday, November 30th. We are finished with the funeral and we will be going to the capital to check on the progress of the container full of books. God bless your Advent spiritual journey and your families, Kirt and Hilda
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