Neema Shares the Water

Every day the women and children from our village where we live in Africa walk down the hill to a small ditch that runs through the banana trees to haul water up the hill to their homes. From our porch at Neema we can watch them carrying the water on their heads up the hill as they walk along our fence line.

It can’t be too hard, even small children can do this without spilling a precious drop!

Water really is life, especially when you live in a land with so little of it. Out in the Maasai villages there is no running water, not in the houses and not in the streams. It’s dry and dusty and overgrazed with cattle.

These little children are not able to take a bath every night in a tub full of water. Can you imagine how good that would feel for these two dusty little boys. Women walk 3 to 5 miles a day to get water to drink and make their food. Our trips out to the villages to check on babies who have returned home or to take food to our outreach babies like the twins (below) can make you long for a tall cool glass of water.

Neema hit water at 95 feet when we drilled our well last year and, Thank You God, we have clear, running water at the baby home. Can you imagine our nannies hauling water on their heads from a stream to wash diapers and clothes for 46 plus babies and to fix the endless supply of bottles our babies drink every day? Shivers the mind doesn’t it!

Most water in our part of Africa is full of E. coli and chloroform bacteria and the water from our well seems to have more than its share of those two ornery organisms. So we are trying to treat the water with two systems, one to purify the water and one to take out the excess Fluoride which would make our babies have brown teeth. For the tiny babies we still use bottled water that we order from the store in large 10 gallon jugs.
Since our well is located at the bottom of the hill in the banana grove and not on our fenced property, we had to buy a small plot of land in the middle of a neighbor’s banana field to drill the well.

Women wash clothes in the ditch close to our well site. You can just barely see the water in the ditch but its there and the woman in the picture to the right is getting her clothes amazingly clean.


Our new home is located inside the city limits of Arusha but there is no water delivery to homes in our area. There are a couple of spigots that stick up out of the ground at the bottom of the hill where the city turns on the water a few days a week. The women gather around with their buckets and haul water on their heads to their homes.
The newspaper reported that some women from the poorer areas of Arusha, like our Moivaro area, objected to the wealthy parts of town getting water every day while their area does not get water every day. So the women organized a protest and walked through the downtown streets with empty water buckets on their heads.
Neema comes to the rescue! We are now sharing our water from the well with the local villagers. We have placed two 2,000 liter tanks in the village and are so grateful to those of you who helped us get the well so that we could share the water with our neighbors. I know the village women are grateful too.

Two make that Three sets of twin girls!
Two sets of twin baby girls have come to Neema in the last few weeks.

Mercy and Mary and Alice and Anneth are living at Neema now. But nine month old twin girls who weigh only 8 pounds each are still in the hospital and not in good enough condition to come home to Neema. The two in the hospital were abandoned and their eight year old sister was trying to care for them. The babies were almost starved. They need your prayers and with all the new babies we certainly need your help to care for these six new babies.
Go to www.neemavillage.org and click on “Sponsor a Baby.” Sponsorships start at $30 a month but it takes $300 a month to keep a baby at Neema. We appreciate any amount that you can help.
May God bless you with cool clear water today!
Love,
Dorris and Michael