Planning and vision can nourish hunger and quench thirst

For 33 years, Willy Cheres walked through gridlock and grasslands serving with Kenya’s Police force, keeping the peace with a combination of authority and compassion. Even now in retirement, the 59-year-old father of nine commands respect among his neighbours living in the Rift Valley district of Narok.

So when this reputable, rational man approached his neighbours with what seemed like a crazy idea, they were conflicted.

Cheres explained to his fellow Kipsigis that when he policed in Nairobi, Mombasa, Central Province and Eastern Province, he saw boreholes reach water in the depths of the earth. Even where no rain fell, even in drought, they had water. Meanwhile, at home, he drove his children to the hospital in the dead of night when they awoke feverish from water borne illness.

“My parents were farmers on this land before me,” Cheres tells us in Swahili through a translator. “The little money we would get from farming we spent on hospital fees from Mara River’s disease.” The Mara, the community’s water source, was flooded with wastewater, pollution from mines and large-scale agricultural run off.

Drilling, digging trenches, laying pipes and building water kiosks would take four months, and costs (an estimated $100,000 for the borehole alone) seemed exorbitant. But Cheres was convincing; he asked the doubtful how often they’d been hospitalized from drinking polluted water. Among families, most counted more than ten times.

With support from a non-profit, a massive drill was hauled in from Nairobi to churn violently through the earth. Tensions ran high during the first days of digging — would they hit water? Everyone prayed. After three long days, at a depth of 200 metres, the first brown water gushed from the hole. Kipsigis rejoiced and danced as dry soil turned to mud beneath their feet.Now Cheres and his family have clean water and beautiful green gardens. The borehole produces 25,000 litres of water per hour for five kiosks that support three schools and a medical clinic, and will sustain about 12,000 people for three generations.

He says “if everyone in Kenya had a borehole, there would be no hunger.”

Meanwhile, throughout the Horn of Africa, people are succumbing to the worst drought in 60 years. Tens of thousands of Somali children are dead, and according to the World Food Programme, an estimate 2.6 million Kenyans suffer severe food shortages.

Death from drought and famine is not inevitable. It’s no secret that this region is already vulnerable, and its people live on a razor's edge between life and death, on less than $2 a day. In addition to short-term handouts when crisis hits, planning and vision, of people such as Cheres, leads to infrastructure and drought-resistant irrigation, like boreholes, that can nourish hunger and quench thirst for generations.

This long-term vision is vitally important in Kenya, especially vulnerable to drought and to the effects of climate change, with its large proportion of arid land mass and reliance on agriculture, pastoral livestock and tourism, all at the mercy of a fragile ecosystem. With a rising population and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, global warming threatens Kenya’s food security. Boreholes appear to be part of an emerging solution.

Grant Ferguson, hydrogeologist and chair of the department of earth sciences at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., says groundwater research in Africa isn’t as extensive as it is in North America, and it’s not certain how much stress boreholes will have on water tables in the future. But a borehole at a depth of 200 metres in that region of Africa, he explains, could be a water resource that’s existed “potentially thousands or millions of years.” The ancient water supply is drought-resistant, because it isn’t affected by surface climate. Though deep groundwater is finite, Ferguson says it could last for generations. At those depths, sustainability depends on carefully conserving the resource.

Sadly, many of Kenya’s water development projects fail to consider conservation or maintenance — boreholes run dry from overuse. Or pipes burst and no one in the area has the technical skills to fix them. Cheres succeeded with unwavering support from his peers, and with strategic planning. Families pay two shillings, just pennies, for a 20-litre jerry can of water from one of the borehole’s five kiosks, and funds saved for repairs. Fees were established by consensus.

Still, projects need funding from governments and non-profits. An estimated $200,000 for a borehole and basic irrigation for surrounding communities seems like a hefty capital investment, until you consider that the cost per use of 12,000 community members over three generations works out to about $5 per person.

Famine hasn’t been officially declared in Kenya, but the country suffered its first hunger-related deaths last week — 14 people in the northern Turkana region. Millions of Kenyans are now food insecure, and one million in a state of emergency, unable to meet their most basic needs.

Cheres and his neighbours aren’t among them.

“Water is life. Everyone sees that.”