Success stories in WASH
A village elder who once turned down a well explains why his community now drinks from one.
FSA is running two projects with Tearfund’s Horn of Africa regional office in Ethiopia. The first is about water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). The second gives humanitarian support to 875 households in Gewane district whose livelihoods were hit by the desert locust swarms.
Since 2020 we have been working with Tearfund to build two solar-powered borehole wells. The first pump is now installed, and the community has started drinking clean water from it.
Abobeker’s story
Abobeker Ali is 60 years old, with twelve children and twenty grandchildren. He is one of the village elders, and he now uses the well FSA built. I asked him what he thought of it.
“I never expected to have a solar-powered well here in my village. Our ancestors refused to drink any groundwater drilled by machine. They taught us to drink only from the river. They believed well water could do us great harm. They believed it came from hell.
“So no one in our village wanted a well. Twenty years ago the regional government offered to drill one for us, and all our leaders, including me, turned it down. For decades the whole village used water from the Kebena River. We walked four hours to fetch it, and our livestock drank from the same river.”