Thousands of Ugandan villagers risk their lives fetching dirty water from a collapsing borehole. One woman is determined to make that stop.A filthy ditch surrounds the borehole that is the only source of drinking water for Kalagi’s 3,000 residents. The borehole fills their buckets with a murky liquid.
MUKONO, UGANDA — Getting a drink of water in Kalagi requires courage and caution.
Since 2017, erosion has collapsed its 20-year-old borehole, a hand-pump well that serves as the only source of drinking water for 3,000 people in this central Ugandan village. To access it today, residents wade through a muddy trench filled with fruit peels and empty plastic bottles. Their reward? A bucket of liquid that is murky, rather than clear.
The next nearest borehole is 10 kilometers (6 miles) away — and doesn’t work, either.
“It has now become a matter of life and death,” says Nalule Pauline Mary, a lifelong resident. “Two children have died.”
A community advocate with the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights, a national nonprofit human rights organization, Nalule has made it her mission to restore Kalagi’s clean water. Walking door to door between August and November, she collected more than 1,200 signatures calling on the local government to fix this borehole — if not all of them.
Uganda has more than 37,000 boreholes. Each takes three to five days to drill and is supposed to last at least 20 years when properly maintained. More than one-third of Ugandans overall — close to half in rural areas — rely on boreholes for water, according to the most recent household survey conducted by the national statistics office in 2016. One-third of those had experienced service interruptions in the past two weeks.
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