by Greg Buzek
James Carney has participated in many community events during his trips to Uganda over the past 14 years, but he has never seen the formal dedication of a well. But thanks to RetailROI he was able to see one this time. In truth, he expected a “well dedication” to be a relatively tame affair – a few school officials, a few student leaders, a formal speech or two, ribbon cutting and photo-op, and away we go. You can imagine his surprise, then, as they drove up to the school with hundreds of students lining the road, cheering, dancing and clapping. “Ekyo kya bulijjo”? Literally in Luganda, “does this happen every day?”
He soon learned that the reasons for such celebration went beyond typical Ugandan hospitality for foreign visitors. Namely, the 500 students at this school had been traveling by foot for upwards of 2 hours to fetch water from nearby streams. The water was often contaminated. To make matters worse, the long journeys exposed the students to great physical dangers, ranging from robbery to injury to sexual assault.
So a simple $5,000 pump well offers so much to this community. Below is a brief video of the kids singing “Water is Life” Thank you RetailROI and your gift of clean water to our community.
As the students sing in this video, “Water is Life!” A small sign of shalom, in a remote village in central Uganda.