Students hope to have clean, safe water in her villages after O&P Tech Camp

Mercy is a 16 year- old Student of St. Catherine Secondary School in Lira District, who dreams of the day her village will drink clean, safe water.

It is sickening. Every school holiday, which she spends in her mother’s village in Mucwini in Kitgum district, she walks 2 kilometers to fetch water from Aringa river, which they drink and use for all other domestic work. Animals in her village also drink from the same water source.

The majority of people based in rural areas, including Mercy’s home, do not boil drinking water, because many are involved in tedious tasks to make ends meet. Boiling water is therefore considered time wasting as many families are large.

“It has always been like that. The community always suffers from water-borne diseases such as typhoid and bilharzia because of drinking dirty which is not boiled,” she says.

To achieve the dream for a community with safe water, Mercy has joined a group of 50 other students in this year’s O&P Tech Camp at Gulu High School in Uganda, where they are being trained how to decontaminate water. Other areas of training are in prototyping, and game design.

“I want to train the community how to make their water safe for drinking. We spend a lot of money treating preventable infections caused by dirty water. Many have died of such infections,” Mercy says.

All the students in the Tech Camp have joined the Water Class designed to help them realize their dreams of having clean, safe water for their communities. This shows how grave the water challenge is.

Although there is a common slogan in Uganda that Water is Life, statistics show that 51 percent of the population, approximately 23,000 people, including 19,700 children under 5, die each year from diarrhea – nearly 90% of which is directly attributed to poor water, sanitation and hygiene.

In Mercy’s home district for instance, the district water department last year revealed that 88 villages were challenged by inadequate safe water sources, with many being forced to walk to neighboring villages with a proximity of between 5 to 10 kilometers in search of water for drinking.

It is on the above basis that Oysters & Pearls- Uganda decided to incorporate the water project in this year’s Tech Camp curriculum, to train the students from the various schools in the country on the various ways they can purity water.

Jude, the medical laboratory technologist, said through the water project, students are being shown that crystal-clear water might not be necessarily safe for drinking.

We believe our effort will give a wider impact, as the students will in turn teach their various communities how to decontaminate their water and make it free from disease-causing organisms.