For more than thirteen years, families in Al-Kashwer village have been getting their water from a governmental well 2 kilometers away or from rainwater harvesting ponds, which are contaminated and unsafe. While a water pump exists in the village, it has been damaged due to the conflict and it cannot be repaired due to the village’s lack of resources. And since village traditions dictate that women are not allow to approach places where men are present, children have been left responsible for fetching water from the wellAs a consequence, boys and girls have lost a lot: some have dropped out of school due to their repeated absences for fetching water, while others have put their lives at risk due to bombing near the well.
Professor Mohammad Mishli al-Ruwaishan, the director of the Kashawar school, comments: "There are dozens of students who dropped out of school because their parents rely mainly on them to bring water. They often ask the school’s permission for their children to leave the classroom to go fetch water on the backs of donkeys, which has led to a severe drop in these students’ school progress and performance."
As such, in mid-2017, the National Development for Humanitarian Response Foundation (NFDHR), in partnership with ZOA, began rehabilitating a Kashawar water project as part of an integrated project for food, water, sanitation and shelter. They supplied and installed a generator and a pump head to raise water from the well and maintained the pump and tank room. NFDHR changed the rusted water pipes, and trained a community committee on project management, operations and maintenance of the water pump.
In early November 2017, NFDHR alongside ZOA completed the rehabilitation of the project, and officially resumed pumping water to the Al-Kashwer population. This resulted in improved access to safe and clean water on a daily-basis for 1200 people. Additionally, the project contributed to dispensing water transfers from the pond, and most importantly, it helped put dozens of students back in school.
The children of the village of Al-Kashawer were very happy to see the rehabilitation of the water project. During the installation, they often asked the engineering team about when the project would run, eagerly awaiting the new pump. And the day the pump was up and running, with water flowing, the children’s’ smiles shown bright as they rushed to fill their buckets and shower themselves in the excess water from the collection tank.
Raad Ahmadi al-Najjar, a 10-year-old boy who had been out of school since he was in third grade, says he left school in order to fetch water from the well, but he will now go back to school because his mother can bring water from the village project near his home.
By the end of the project, a huge happiness was felt by women, men and children for the first time in 13 years. Women were seen rushing to the pump to fetch as much water as possible all while the children were seen spontaneously celebrating filling the reservoir and drinking water, playing and bathing. It was like a festival in the village.
