Living Water

INDIA – The village of Kakkudamon is a cluster of homes that perch on a rocky hill near the edge of a national forest in the south Indian state of Kerala.

The families who make up these households live here because the land is cheap—they can’t afford to live anywhere else. This community didn’t come together because they share a religion or culture; Muslims, Christians, and Hindus from a variety of sects live together here. What has brought this community together is their lack of options.

Part of the reason for the cheap land in Kakkudamon is the lack of water. The community attempted more than once to dig a well by hand, but the the hill where Kakkudamon sits is so rocky that digging always ended with shovels scraping granite.

For years, the nearest source of water was a contaminated, hand-dug well in the floor of the valley—more than a half mile away. The rocky path to the well slopes steeply away from Kakkudamon; when it rains, the path becomes treacherous. Almost everyone I talked to in the village had a story about twisting an ankle or breaking a bone on the slippery downhill slope.

Meet Kunjumol
“It was terrible. We were afraid to walk to the well, especially during the rainy season.” Kunjumol lives in a one-room concrete block house in the middle of Kakkudamon with her husband Babu and their young son.

Babu and Kunjumol are Christians, along with three other households in the village. “We thought we were stuck. We didn’t know what to do,” she says.

A local pastor who learned about the community’s desperate need for water put Kunjumol in touch with Living Water International’s South India team. She and Babu decided to donate a small plot of their land for the well, if LWI would agree to drill it. When the team arrived, the whole community turned out to help—Hindu, Muslim, and Christains alike.

The drilling crew had to park several hundred meters downhill from the Kakkudamon, and had to carry drilling equipment, pipes, and pump up the path to the village. The men and women of the village worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the LWI team members to get the work done. “When they came,” Kunjumol said, “we were all so happy—everyone worked together.”

The project was not an easy one. More than once, the drillers thought they were going to fail—but eventually, after slowly drilling through several layers of rock, they finally struck water. Too deep for a hand-pump, the water could only be drawn to the surface with an electric pump, and would be stored in a tank for distribution and use.

Today, a village that once had nothing in common shares not only a water well, but the experience of working together to help it become a reality. It has become a real community.

And people of diverse religious backgrounds have experienced the love of Jesus.

“We can talk to our neighbors about Jesus now… about why we follow him,” Kunjumol says. Babu, standing nearby with their son, nods emphatically, then puts his hand on the boy’s head. “And this one will grow up without getting sick.”

It’s a beautiful thing.

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