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And then there was water...

Imagine you are a six, maybe seven year old girl. It is Saturday, you are probably out playing in the garden or in bad weather home entertained with a playstation or, at best, a Barbie. Not in Mangunze. Electricity does not even come here, even less playstations. A simple board game could be surprising over here. Even so, that is not the point, you would not be out in the garden or playing with anything anyway. You would be on your way to get water for your family, sometimes as far as 30km away. You may even do it twice a day, once in the morning, before the hour walk to school and another one in the afternoon.

This is the story of many girls in Mangunze and throughout Mozambique. The water well built two years ago has reduced the distance to many of them, but it is still a heavy burden. As we watched the little girls so swift with the pump that we had difficulty operating on our own we are not half as surprised as when they grab one of the buckets we could certainly not lift and put them in their heads. One by one, c. 200 buckets a day are taken out of the Water Well of Mangunze.

I could not resist the impulse of feeling the emotion of extracting water from more than 50 meters down the earth. And after some practice I could do it and it was fresh and it was pure. Moreover, it was more valuable than any taste of water I had before!



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