Seventeen-year-old Vu Thuy Ahn has already won her campaign to get water to her town, Hoa Ma Hai Noi in Viet Nam. And, as a result, girls there can now go to school all year round.
The problem for Vu Thuy Ahn and her friends was that for six months every year the town’s water supply dried up. The girls had to spend their days walking 30 kilometres to collect water for their families from the nearest source. Then she won a grant and sponsorship from her town to build a proper water tank and pipes to bring the water to the town. Now the girls get their education, and the town gets its water.
Catching and storing rainwater is the simplest of all methods of making sure you have water. In China, they have installed more than 5 million tanks to store rain collected from roofs, yards and fields. The tanks now supply an estimated 15 million people with drinking water and help irrigate over 1 million hectares of farmland.
Take the Ushindi youth group in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. They are 10 young people between the ages of 16 and 23. They are digging a well for their local community. Right now, people there have to walk 2 kilometres to get water. And in the dry season, water is in very short supply. When people don’t have enough water to wash, diseases quickly spread.
The new well should provide water all year round. The group still needs money to finish the job. But they say when it is done, they will maintain the well and sell the water cheaply to local residents, making life much easier for the people who collect water. They also want to start a large community garden to provide vegetables. The group don’t plan on failing in their task. Ushindi is Kiswahili for ‘victorious’.
During heavy rains in Nigeria, villagers collect water from the broad leaves on certain trees – banana leaves, for instance. They divert the water down hollow bamboo shoots into a pot for drinking, cooking and washing.
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