Blog

Opening Day in Gidanturu

Its only Tuesday, but our team has been so busy this week it feels like it should be Friday! We spent Sunday and Monday passing out safe storage containers to every family in Gidanturu, and training Mariam and Bariami (sp?), the two women who were nominated by their community to run the CWS water business. Then today, we opened for business! Over 90% of the village showed up to buy water, and we even saw a few more people headed to the center as we were leaving (unfortunately we had run out of water due to a leaky polytank, so we closed before those people were able to fetch. Have no worries, the polytank is fixed and more water will be ready tomorrow!) A big THANK YOU to Colleen and Jeff Clopeck for sponsoring this water business!

First batch of dirty water ready to be treated during our "water treatment training"
Miriam and Birami treating the water with alum during day 1 of water treatment training
Water treatment training day 2 - particles from the dugout water have settled at the bottom on the drum
Alum - in case you were wondering what it looked like
Water treatment training day 2 - scooping water into the polytank
Peter teaching a lovely Gidanturian (sp?) lady how to use the tap on her safe storage container
Opening day! Selling water at Gidanturu
Happy customers on opening day in Gidanturu
All set to go - safe storage container filled with clean water!
Recording the households that came to buy water

Gidanturu is home to many fun animals! They actually have crocodiles in their dugout and pet monkeys!

Can you spot the crocodile?
Monkey!

On our way home from Gidanturu we passed an overturned Coke truck – the road was COVERED in broken glass. I had to take a pic!

Hard at work at village number SIX!

Cute kids from Gidanturu who came to watch us build the polytank stand!

I am excited to announce that we have started setting up our SIXTH water business in the village of Gidanturu! This water business is sponsored by Colleen and Jeff Clopeck, who have been incredible CWS supporters over the past 1.5 years!

Gidanturu is located on the Salaga Rd (the same road as Jarigu, Cheko, Nyamaliga, and Gbong) about 90 minutes outside of Tamale. Before purchasing the truck, it would have been impossible for us to even consider a village this far away – the taxi fees would have been astronomical and the Salaga road turns to dirt shortly after passing Gbong which makes it very difficult to drive on without 4 wheel drive. This village is the home to ~650-700 people who were desperately in need of safe drinking water, so we are so glad that we have the truck and are able to partner with them!

We are planning to open the water business early next week. Here are some pictures from the past few days:

We LOVE our truck! We only had to take ONE trip out to Gidanturu with supplies for polytank stand!
Gidanturu Dugout
Gidanturu Dugout

One of the elders from Gidanturu hanging out at the future site of the CWS water business
Building the Gidanturu polytank stand
Me with the guys from Gidanturu who helped build the polytank stand (minus Peter who was taking the picture!)
Finishing up the polytank stand!

During our first visit to Gidanturu I noticed that many of the children were wearing funny looking hats. After looking closely, I noticed that the children were raising money for Haiti at their school! I thought that this was SO amazing! Back home, we have things like crowdfunding platforms which make raising money on a large scale so easy, and yet this tiny village in rural Ghana – that we have a hard time reaching in our 4 wheel-drive truck, where people live on less than $1 per day, were also raising money for Haiti! How cool is that?! (and they weren’t just wearing the hats, they were really taking donations!)

Hats that kids in Gidanturu were wearing to try to raise money for Haiti relief - pretty amazing!
Hope for Haiti!