Kaasuvi Primary School Well
Our first well was installed adjacent to the Kaasuvi Primary School and provides about 1,900 gallons (7,200 liters) of clean, fresh drinking water every day, which is enough to give about 600 people (400 children and 200 adults) the drinking water they so desperately need! The community requested that we install a solar pump in the well; this solar pump produces approximately 3.5 gallons per minute (gpm) and should provide this pumping rate about 9 hours per day.
From the second day of drilling, community members kept asking if the water would be fresh or salty. All the water in the area is salty. The two boreholes south of Kiboko that we based our drilling endeavor on are located a little over 4 miles from our well and did not indicate salty water, but we became concerned. It tasted muddy when we reached the water, but the water blown out of the borehole by the air compressor was fresh.
The Kaasuvi Primary School is a rural school about 3 miles northeast of Kiboko. When I was in Kenya they only had just over 100 students, down from the 200+ students it had three years earlier. The head-master told us that the student enrollment had dropped over the last three years because more and more students could not attend school because they needed to trek nearly 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) one way to the Kiboko River to fetch water for their families.
Onesimus, the chairman of the school board, told us that they selected the Kaasuvi Primary School for our first well location to help boost enrollment in the school by providing a water source closer to the homes of the potential pupil population. In fact, the Kaasuvi Primary School was closed for the May through July (2021) semester due to the poor enrollment and the students at Kaasuvi had to walk to the Kiboko Primary School each day – over three miles away – until the enrollment had a minimum of 15 eighth grade students, a federal Kenyan requirement (they had nine the previous semester). The headmaster and Onesimus said that with our well Kaasuvi Primary School was able to reopen for the September 2021 semester with an additional 10 students because there is water available at the school for the students to take home!
What Our First Two Wells Mean
WftW was able to accomplish incredible things in 2021 including training our drilling team in Kenya (Clifford spent 6 weeks in Kenya from February 12 to March 28, 2021), purchasing a SUV to tow the drilling rig, our drilling team, and other equipment and supplies to our drilling locations, and most important of all installing the first two wells in Kiboko, Kenya, which supply enough water to provide as many as 1,900 people (about 1,300 children and 600 adults) with clean sustainable drinking water every day!This will save about 650 people from the back breaking work of walking up to 6.2 miles each day (greater than the world average distance of 3.7 miles per day), some possibly twice a day, carrying 50 pounds of water back from the local Kiboko River. Astonishingly this will save at least 3,380 miles of walking and 1,138 hours of labor collectively each and every day! Just imagine how that time could be put to better use!
We have had many difficulties while drilling our first three wells, but our Enkare Nasila Drilling Company LTD is so grateful that we were able to install these inaugural wells in Kenya! Enkare Nasila is Maa, the Maasai tribal language, and it means Water Clean, but in Maa, the adjective always follows the noun, so it translates into Clean Water. So, we are the Clean Water Drilling Company in Kenya!
