Let me introduce myself. My name is Joyce Tannian and I’m a native of Newark, Delaware. I have been living in Kenya for a year and a half. How did I get here and what on earth am I doing, you may well ask. Before I came to Kenya,

I was working at the entertainment company, HBO, in New York City and as a professional freelance singer. I left HBO in Dec. 2005 to come to Kenya to work as a volunteer for a year for a non-profit organization that administers sponsorships for girls’ education. My work in the community in the Amboseli region of Kajiado District, Rift Valley Province, coincided with a terrible drought that decimated livestock and brought famine in Kenya in ’05 and the first half of ‘06.

I communicated with people at home and we resolved to raise money to bring food relief in the areas where we were working, and through donations from individuals and organizations, including DEKA, we managed to feed nearly 10,000 people.

The great problem in the area is water. Sources are few, and during a drought when seasonal rains fail, those sources disappear. Underground aquifers exist and wells could be drilled. People could have water. I couldn’t see something so serious and so solvable and not try to do something. In partnership with DEKA and the contributions of concerned and generous donors from my home area of Delaware and former colleagues from HBO and my singing work, we got started.

We just finished drilling our first deep well in the region in a community called Imisigyio. It is 220 meters deep (720 feet). Together with community leaders we have helped the community organize themselves by forming a borehole committee. They have developed rules of operation, collected membership fees, opened an account and will be responsible for operation of the borehole, including maintaining the generator, purchasing diesel, making repairs.

Imisigyio is a community of 4500 people and their livestock, which include cows, sheep, goats, and donkeys, on the lower slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya. It is a rocky, semi-arid highland belt, with rocky, narrow dirt roads suitable only for a 4-wheel drive vehicle. When and if the seasonal rains come, and they didn’t this past April, people can use the water from the seasonal rivers, which is often dirty and can contain animal or human waste from the runoff. Otherwise, inhabitants have to spend an average of 11 hours each day fetching water. It’s more than a full time job. The nearest water source is over the border in Tanzania. There are often conflicts at the water source with Tanzanians, since the Kenyans don’t really have a right to the water.

From surveys given in the community, we know that 1-2 days a week people can go to fetch water and come back empty-handed because the line is too long and they need to make the trip back home before the elephants cross. This region is a major wildlife corridor for animals moving from the higher ground of Kilimanjaro to the swamp down in the Amboseli basin, home of the famous Amboseli National Park. But this great wildlife resource demands caution from its neighbors, and thus, for the Imisigyio population, it can mean a whole day’s effort spent, and still no water, which means they’ll be begging for water from neighbors.

It remains for the pump and generator to be installed at the well. The provider of this equipment is waiting for paperwork to clear before sending it to the site. So we wait. Patiently??? This borehole will cut the time and energy women spend getting water to a fraction of what they’ve been spending. This will give them more time to cultivate their land, on which they grow maize and beans, and hopefully, the seasonal rains will cooperate. In interviews the people also said with more time they would cultivate tomatoes, sukumawiki (a dark green leafy vegetable), onions, bananas, cabbage, and hot peppers to use at home and to sell. One thing moms especially were thrilled about was to be able to have more water to keep things clean – the house, the children, the family’s clothing. When we did the test pumping for the well, a period of 24 hour in which the drilling company pums the water out to record it’s quality and quantity, the first thing people did with the water pouring out of the tap was to wash everything! Feet, heads, legs, clothes. Splashing cool, cleansing water all around. And the way you get dusty when you’re moving around in that area. It makes you forget everything else except wanting to feel clean and human again.

People are looking forward with GREAT eagerness to this source of water, soon to be a permanent fixture in their community. Efforts are ongoing to complete the project and it demands work and perseverance by me and community leaders and members, and proper training and preparation of the community so that this valuable resource can be used by the community for the decades to come.

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