About the Blog

United Hearts Children Center is located in Bawjiase, Ghana. It is currently home to 25 children, who are excited to move into their NEW home in the next few months. We are continuing fundraising to complete the project and have just started to fundraise for the United Hearts Community School. Check them out in my links!

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Water, water.

Bawjiase is out of water. People are lined up at our well, which is currently covered with a cloth, waiting for yesterday's four minute rain to seep into the ground and into the dried up well. I just passed Agnus who was washing her clothes in dirty, bottom of the well water, a stack of bowls and buckets next to her ready for any water that magically shows up. Despite drinking pure water and failing to wash our dishes to a socially acceptable level of cleanliness (thus needing very little water), we go through buckets of the stuff everyday flushing our toilet.

The act of using our bathroom is surprisingly pleasant, due to both the real, indoor toilet and the calming pink tiles lining the wall. The frog that lives in the hole in the wall and the spider that apparently never dies take away from the experience, but overall the environment is a comfortable one. The problem is when business is finished and we need to flush all the little surprises, using as much as a full bucket of water each trip to the bathroom.

Our water storage container by the bathroom is full, thanks to the children who brought us water from an undisclosed source after the orphanage staff found out we had none. However, we have decided that flushing the toilet takes precedence over bathing, and so I am really very dirty. The well at the orphanage is in better shape than ours, so bathing, if I choose to do so, will be taking place there.

The lack of rain is only made worse by the fact that those pesky Harmattan Winds seem to be dying down and Bawjiase has been once again graced with blue sky, fluffy white clouds, and scorching heat. Luckily, we have found many hidden benefits of there being no rain, mainly that we now have an excuse not to clean the dishes and not to bathe. An actual benefit, however, is that dry weather is perfect for digging wells, and the well at the site of the new building is in the process of being dug. The drier it is, the longer it takes to hit water, meaning the deeper the well will be in the end. However, this process requires paying workers, and although we have received so many generous donations, we still need more to finish the project. If you haven't yet donated and feel up to the challenge of using your weekly Starbucks money to help dig a well, check out the links to the right of this post!

I will hopefully make it out to Kasoa on Monday, where it is safe to plug my camera in so I can upload some pictures and make another post. Like usual, I "haven't had the time" to formulate a post, really meaning that I am starting to lose perspective on how unique this experience really is and feeling as though anything I have to say is just boring. However, with a few lovely words from my mother, who may be one of a handful of people who are actually reading this, I have some ideas brewing in my head. So stay tuned.

1 comment:

  1. for me, daily updates of life in Bawjiase are unique enough! I miss Bawjiase and the children, especially when it is this cold! Good luck with the water situation, sounds much worse than last year this time already!

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