Due to some technical difficulties this post is a few days late, but here is team 2 (“nothing but net”)’s story about training the women in Kushini to prepare for opening day (which happened on Thursday!)

Today, we performed our second day of training for the women. To this point, they have already fetched the water from the dugout and have used allum to separate the dirt from the water. Today, they moved the separated water into the polytank and added aquatabs (chlorine) to kill the bacteria and other harmful agents in the water. The women are not only exceptionally responsible, but catch on to the training extremely quickly. Often before we could finish explaining the process to them they were able to finish our sentences. After preparing the water in the polytank, they also refilled the blue drums and treated them with allum so that we could have even more clean water for tomorrow’s opening day.

We also performed our final round of distributing clean water storage buckets for households in the village. When we first arrived to the village it was monsooning (of course, we forgot our rain coats at home), but once the rain cleared the entire village was able to gather and be trained on the proper water safety requirements for the clean water buckets. Sharifa spent a lot of time giving advice to the women (with Shak translating) while Hudson, Chris, and Ianthe worked quickly to assemble buckets for the masses. Training the women was a detailed process – Sharifa went over everything from how and where to get clean water to proper placement of the buckets in the home to how to respond to contaminations. The women took the process very seriously and echoed what the Chief had already told us: “We know that the dugout water is unhealthy, but we have no other option for drinking water.” In all the experience was really touching to see how seriously the village is taking this process and we’re really excited for opening day tomorrow!