Clean water for drinking and cooking

Working with the community to ensure reasonable access to clean water is now our priority. The prolonged dry season has severely reduced Ngunut’s access to clean water. Many of the wells – a vital water source for the community – have dried up, the ones that haven’t have yellowish water.

Wisnu, a volunteer from SGN in Sekaralas, recently helped me do a quality audit of the wells in Ngunut. We found 15 with very low quality water.

We are helping the community make small portable water filters, using a layer of clean bricks, clean sand, followed by a layer of the brown matting-like outer skin of coconuts (your front door mat is probably made of this stuff), and finally a layer of charcoal. Once filtered the water is boiled before drinking.

Once clean and clear, the water is collected into new blue plastic drums – the community have been using small tin buckets to store their houshold water, which was quite inadequate for the purpose. This is why we purchased a number of blue drums and have so far managed to distribute them to around 20 households.

We provide a small subsidy to deepen the wells that have completely dried up. The community provide the labour and some of the materials.

Sari, Manager Subur Gemi Nastiti

Distributing water-filter kits and drums.

To the right is a bucket of yellowish unfiltered water from a Ngunut well, and in the front bucket is the clean and clear filtered water.