Water!

Yes, it took almost three weeks, over thirty visits to possible sources, and countless hills climbed, but we’ve now finally found a water source sufficient to fulfill the criteria for a CIDA proposal. Even better, we’ve probably got enough water for two full separate projects, and possibly one more that we just haven’t had the chance to see yet. I can’t tell you how elated we were when we arrived at the source on Thursday to see (and hear) the water that we’d been searching for since the beginning of the month. The picture above shows the valley that we are hoping to serve with one of the water sources.

To give you a little background, a typical ACTS project aims to serve about ten thousand people with a source that yields 3 litres per second. Until Thursday, none of the sources that we had seen had even come to half of our desired amount of water. So it was quite the event to finally find an adequate source, and one that actually gives 5 litres per second. Now Yona, who is actually the one who deserves the credit for finding the source, has ambitious plans to serve twenty thousand people, essentially everyone in the valley down from the source. And while we’re not as optimistic that we’ll be able to do complete such a large project, at least all in one go, the problem of how many people we’ll be able to bring water to is much more enticing than trying to figure out when/if we’d ever find water. So for those of you who have been praying for our work, this is definitely a HUGE prayer answered.

Next week, we’ll be staying at the diocese guesthouse in Kagando, and maybe even camping out in the hills, as we’ll be much closer to the sources than the guesthouse in Kasese. Now that we have sources, the next step is to meet with the local community leaders to begin gathering information about the local population that we’ll be aiming to serve. We’ll also be mapping out the topography of the area to be able to do calculations. Once we’ve got all the information, the actual design of the pipeline is actual the quick and easy part and we’re hoping that, if all goes well, our hopes are to have at least one complete design by the end of this week.