Water Testing

Hello! My name is Danny, and I am one of the three students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who are interning with Raising the Village this summer. My project has been water quality testing; we've been going to different villages that RTV has partnered with and testing the water for bacteria. Essentially what I do is hike to each village's major water sources with a community member as my guide and then collect 2-3 small samples of water from each. I then add PathoScreen media, which detects the presence of different types of bacteria. The media turns the sample yellow, and then I check the color of the samples after 24 hours and after 48 hours. If the color changes to black, the water is positive for bacteria; if it stays yellow, then the water is safe to drink. Some of the sources have been protected by RTV, while others are still unprotected, so I've been finding pure and impure water sources.

            Testing the water quality has made me very appreciative that I have the luxury to drink water straight from my sink at home. I've never had to think about what goes into water treatment--I've never had to imagine my life without access to clean water until I started working here. By hiking to all of the water sources, we have to hike all over the village, which is incredibly exhausting. We plan to go early in the day so that the sun isn't too hot during our hike, but if villagers are thirsty during the day, they still have to make that journey when it is even hotter. I've asked repeatedly asked the local guides if villagers really do make the same trek that we are making, and they always tell me that the villagers' houses are even farther away than where we started, so their hikes are much worse than ours. Because RTV partners specifically with remote villages that are hard to access, many villages are very mountainous and the houses are very far apart. It's hard to believe that people need to climb up and down a mountain just to get a drink of water!

This point really hit me when we were in Murole. At one point, our guide told us that we needed to be careful because we needed to literally climb alongside a mountain. We all had to pass one at a time along the mountain, desperately grabbing for footholds, and the guide ultimately had to help most of us find the final steps back to the path; one of the members of our team was even screaming for help because he was afraid of heights! I thought that that was difficult while holding my water testing supplies. Just imagine trying to cross that alone while holding an entire jerry can of water! I have so much respect for the villagers who do that on a daily basis for themselves and for their families.

        

    I've really had a great time visiting each village, and the guides and locals have been incredibly friendly. The locals who take me to the water sources seem genuinely interested in what I am doing because they care about their water, and they are appreciative of what I am doing. However, I can't help but feel bad that I'm not actually doing much to help; my job is just to let them know that their water may or may not be safe. I wish that I could do more, but RTV is implementing projects to continue to protect these water sources. At the meeting at Murole, the RTV project officers discussed with the community different options for how to improve the quality of the water. They made plans to not only protect a source but to make water more accessible to people so that they will not  have to spend so much time and energy each day collecting water. I really understand how important these efforts are now, and the villagers were clearly invested in purifying their water as well. It's clear that RTV's work is important, and hearing these discussions gives me faith that RTV will continue its efforts so that more villages in Uganda will have access to clean water.

            As much as I admire the villagers, it's disheartening for me to see them go through so much effort to collect impure water. In Kagezi, there are four springs that were either reconstructed or repaired by RTV. Although all of these springs looked clean, I found out that one of the springs had been contaminated. The villagers couldn't have had any idea that this was the case; I saw a child collect water from that spring while I was collecting my samples! They are going through so much effort just to get water that they think is clean. In Murole, neither of their two water source have been protected. Although the first one looked fine, the second was a little bit shocking. It was a very small, stagnant pool of water, and in the water were tadpoles and a blue solo cup for the villagers to collect water with. It couldn't have been more than a meter in diameter and a few inches deep, and yet people rely on this pond as a source of water for their families. It's devastating to see that people are so in need of water that they are willing to use a clearly contaminated source.