The drought has badly affected the district which completely depends on rain water. Most of the villages in this district have run out of drinking water and are asking the government and NGOs to help them.
I have travelled to the Shashkhana village in Charkent two weeks ago with the head of Men Support Groups (we have established in the village). The villagers had a little reserve of dirty water which was not enough even for drinking.
The village’s water supply
Haider a villager in Shashkhana was saying “ Two of my children got diarrhoea and vomiting last week and we tried herbal medicine first but didn’t help then we took them to Sharshar health centre and got the medicine but now again they have diarrhoea because the water is very dirty”.
He was not the only family suffering from lack of access to clean drinking water but most of the people specially the children are suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting.
The water is a lot and clean at the start, high up in the mountain, 2 Kilometre far from village but it is absorbed and get dirty when reaches to the village.
The spring
As I am a health worker and don’t know much about the water ,so I went to the Balkh Irrigation Department, the local office of Ministry of Agriculture of Afghanistan, and asked for technical help.
The Balkh Irrigation Department agreed to help technically, and then we travelled to the villages and surveyed the springs
After surveying the spring we decided to pipe the water to the village and also to build a tank to reserve the water.
The water will not be used only for drinking and the villagers will also have enough water for their apple trees which is the only fruit in the village.
Qand Agha one of the villagers was saying “ It is three years that I have planted the 7 apple trees and two of them bore fruit and most of them will bear the fruit next year I will lose these apple trees if the water is not piped”
The above picture shows Najmodin the headman of Shashkhana village thumb-printing the contract to provide labour and materials found locally to pipe the water and build a tank
The above two pictures shows we were marking the ground to dig to build the water tank.
I have bought the pipes and send them to the village to finish the work as soon as possible because more of the children are getting diarrhoea and the apple trees are also about to be lost.
The money I am going to spend on piping the water and building tank in Shashkhana village, are paid by Overseas Aid Commission of Guernsey.
I am very much thankful to Guernsey for paying this money to save the lives of many poor and marginalized people specially the children in my country.
