Day 3: Aug 18, 2017. Friday Today we conducted 16 interviews of different families in Solomoni, dividing into groups of 2 with myself and Naomi accompanied by Joseph and Rory and Liz accompanies by Joshua worker/interpreter Steve. From 10:00 we began travelling throughout the village looking for willing families to participate in our interviews. We quickly found a volunteer in Patricia Tobias, a woman of about 35 with 3 kids and a husband. She described to us how her main concerns in the village were the long queues to wait for water every day, which she recounted to be at least an hour. As we would come to find out Patricia had a comparatively light experience collecting water since she only used up her 60L of water (40L and 20L buckets) on cooking, drinking and bathing every 2 days. She walked roughly 5 minutes to get water from the only reliable borehole next to the CBCC.
Our next interviewee was a 65-year-old man and former borehole repairmen named Davidson Kawisa, who lived next door to his brother (both of who’s spouses were deceased). Davidson had a large house compared to other residents and explained to us how part of it had been damaged by the heavy rain in 2014-15, but most was still intact. Davidson has a similar commute to the CBCC borehole but also walked 500m to the Likhubula River to bath and occasionally wash clothes. He recounted how he used to have a working borehole nearby but it has since been abandoned due to difficulties repairing it. He brought out parts of it and explained why they were broken beyond repair. Finally, he told us about stomach upsets he and his brother would get in the rainy season, since neither of them treated their water. We left each of them 2 cups and our water jug, which he accepted clearly overjoyed.
Over the next 6 interviews we met multiple families living in close proximity and nearly all with kids in school aged 2-12, although many went irregularly due to illness or hunger. All of them experience stomach sicknesses more common during the rainy season than any other, and most walk a minimum of 1km and a maximum of 5km to get water. Many wait up to 3 hours in line and also make multiple trips given their lack of storage. It seems clear that when we assess the communities water needs we must keep in mind that a borehole placed anywhere will help everyone since swelling queues will shrink.