Where's Water?

A total of fifty-four new pumps will be installed throughout Androy over the course of our project. Village-level water associations have chosen potential sites for the pumps: convenient locations that can be protected from vandalism. My co-worker Harline and I trekked out to about a dozen sites around Beloha to gauge whether or not it would be realistic to expect water to be within easy reach below the surface.

The trails out of town are too sandy for bicycles or motorcycles, so we traveled either by foot or zebu cart. Association members led us to existing wells within a half-kilometer radius of the proposed sites, and answered questions about water quantity and quality throughout the year. The Malagasy use the word miteraka, literally “to give birth,” to mean “to produce water.” Some of the wells are shallow, dug by hand, without any wall reinforcement. Others are small-diameter boreholes which were drilled by machine during an earlier UNICEF project. At each well we lowered a rope with a hollow PVC tube tied at one end to measure the static water level and the total depth of the well. The tube makes a “boing” sound when it hits the surface of the water, and the rope slackens when it reaches the solid bottom.

We try to use the simplest, lowest-tech methods possible. Because of the history of French colonization, the Malagasy tend to regard gear and infrastructure as vazaha, “foreign.” There is a tendency to believe that design is outside of their capability, and maintenance outside of their responsibility. Therefore, we hoped to make our job look straightforward, to invoke “These guys aren’t so smart…I could do that,” in local imaginations.

A pattern began to emerge from our survey. Wells shallower than about nine meters tend to have brackish water, and to deplete toward the end of the dry season in September or October. Wells deeper than about twelve meters, on the other hand, give fresh water consistently throughout the year. Therefore, there must be an impermeable clay layer between the two that protects a fresh aquifer. We’ll discuss this information with the boring crews, and create a detailed soil profile as we drill the new wells.

On our hike back to town, we met a man with a wagon full of juicy, refreshing cactus fruit. Perfect.