Living Water

MALAWI—Chamba 2 Village, Nkhotakota District

GPS: 12 56.155 S, 034 14.470 E

At first, it seems you have three choices: get your family’s drinking water from a mud hole swirling with dirt and bacteria, risk life and limb drawing water from a crocodile-infested river, or pay to use the well at a nearby mosque.

Unfortunately, you don’t have enough money to pay the 50 MWK (about 36 cents) for a single bucket of water from the mosque’s well—and you really need five or six buckets of water for your family—so you’re left with the mud hole or the crocodiles. Any way you look at it, you’re up against an impossible decision. You have to have water, so what will it be? Crocodiles or mud hole? Mud hole or mosque?

For years, the people of Chamba 2 Village in East Central Malawi faced this decision every single day. It wasn’t always this way. Once, they had a working well. When the well stopped working, the people weren’t sure how to fix it—so they found other sources for water. Costly sources. This problem wasn’t just costing money; people were literally risking their health and their lives every time they needed a drink of water, and all because of some cracked PVC piping and broken valve clips.

LWI performs hundreds of well repairs every year. In fact, for every new well drilled, two existing wells are repaired. We try to make sure the repairs are done alongside the community, training them so that they will have the tools and instructions to do repairs when the need arises. It’s all about community ownership, and this empowerment is at the heart of sustainable change. It means that the people of Chamba 2 Village won’t have to choose between the crocodiles, the mosque, or the mud hole if the well ever breaks again.