For the past couple of weeks we have been working in a village called Manguli II (don’t forget the II). After spending time training our three elected entrepreneurs, Moshi, Sharatu, and Latifa,  we finally opened their water business this morning! We planned to start at 10 o’clock but the day got off to a slow start which worried us a little bit.  Forty five minutes later however, we saw people approaching the center with their blue buckets in hand. There were about 6 people who all arrived at once so we quickly informed them of how it would all pan out.They would first mark their buckets with their family name, then wash them and after that they would be ready to buy some clean water! The first sale made was to buy water for cleaning the safe storage container which was really exciting for both us and the women. Danya was in charge of marking buckets, Ana handled the cleaning process and Remy took charge whenever we came upon a leaky tap. Our translator, Simplicia aka Simply, played many roles as she tried to clean and translate all at once. Although the first to show came in a bit of a cluster, the rest of the day was pretty steady with people showing up one after another. At the end of the day, the women counted their sales and found that they filled 30 safe storage containers which amounted to a profit of 3 Ghanaian Cedis! Only three households in the community did not come to fetch water but it was only because they were traveling and are expected to come to the business as soon as they come back.

After two weeks of hard work, opening day showed how it all paid off. The process of bringing clean water to people in need is much more difficult than it seems. We definitely ran into a few speed bumps throughout the entire training and implementation process but after speaking with people and understanding their knowledge on the issue, it helped to bring us to our outcome today. We could see that the people who once seemed skeptical of our work were actually excited when they tasted the water and it was truly an amazing experience to watch. We really look forward to watching how everything plays out from here on and seeing how much of an impact our work has made on the people of Manguli II.

-Danya, Remy & Ana B.