Pictured here is an example of the current water situation in rural Uganda. It is very common for boys and girls leave their homes 2 hours before sunrise to go fetch water from nearby streams using these 20-liter “Jerricans”. This ensures they will be back in time to get to school in the morning. As the picture indicates, often children will need to go back at mid-day to go fetch more.
This picture is probably close to what you have in your head when you think of water in rural Uganda, and for the most part, it’s the situation you would find. In this case, the water is a little closer than it would otherwise be because the source is a borehole well and not a stream or lake. As dry season continues (it started in early June), water becomes more and more difficult to find unless there is access to a well like this one.
Maranatha’s Kigalama (pronounced Chee-ga-la-’ma) Primary School, roughly 15 kilometers from Maranatha’s central school in Mityana, uses this well as its main water source. It is over 1 km away from the school, and to get enough water for all the 260 students, they hire a man on a bicycle who gets paid 500 shillings (roughly 30 cents) for each Jerrican of water he brings to the school. He can put 4 Jerricans on the back of his bike for each jaunt down to the well. In total, he brings the school 14 Jerricans a day (I’m not sure why this is not a multiple of 4; Maranatha is willing to pay for up to 30 Jerricans a day). So, he makes 7,000 shillings (the equivalent of about $4.50), which is considered a decent living in his community, where people are mostly surviving on subsistence agriculture. Meanwhile, the students, teachers, and staff receive a grand total of 280 liters of water. That’s about 1 liter per person per day for cooking, cleaning, handwashing, and drinking. Of course, the water is boiled to make it suitable for drinking.
