Bowser

If you’ll recall I’d talked a bit before about my village having water issues. Some of the issues are actually seasonal – each year during the dry seasons, the pumps stop giving water and people have to start getting it by digging in the riverbed. Eventually those parts of the riverbed dry out and they have to start traveling upstream/downstream to find water. When it gets really bad, my school’s students have to travel up to 2.5 km just to get water, and then they have to lug it back, uphill.

Aside from being physically exhausting, it takes up a lot of their time – both in the evenings, when they could be studying, but also oftentimes they must be sent to fetch water during class hours and miss class.

And to try to cut down on these issues, the school and students cut down on water use for purposes such as cleaning the facilities and washing eating utensils, so it’s bad for sanitation as well.

So I’ve been talking with the administration about the issue, and what we’ve concluded is that what would really help the school is a bowser. Peace Corps has a couple of different grant programs, so we applied to one for money to purchase a bowser. Just this week our application was fully accepted and now it’s ready to go.

But! The way this program works is that Peace Corps posts the project online and allows the general public to contribute funds. When enough funds are contributed to cover the requested money of the project, the money is released to the volunteer & community (me & my school) to conduct the project.

So I would like to kindly request that you please visit the bowser project’s web page, here, and contribute whatever you are able. This’ll be a huge help for my school on both they hygiene/health front and on the study time/academic front. Thanks everyone.

And thanks a ton to everyone who’s already donated!

(If the term “bowser” rings some bells for you but you hadn’t placed it as a water tank on wheels: you were probably thinking of Bowser, the bad guy from the Mario games and one of the worst characters in Super Smash Bros. Melee.)