MPONGO PRIMARY SCHOOL,
UGANDA

FUNDED JULY 27, 2022

There is something strange happening in the town of Kiboga in Uganda where the Mpongo Modern Primary School is located.  While the town uses surface water for drinking and they’ve suffered in the past with typhoid and diarrhea, there is a recent outbreak of deaths from a strange new waterborne illness.  The symptoms are swollen stomachs and blood in the urine.  Both children and adults have died.  They are in desperate need of clean water.

Another issue is that they have had children drown when they gathered the water, and they are worried that the children are in danger on the path. The mothers and wives in the village have to carry what is essentially mud 5 km (2.5 there, 2.5 back) every day. If they take too long, there are at high risk of being beaten by their husbands as well, who get angry that other household tasks are not completed. School attendance is impacted through student illness, as well as girls being expected to help in the water carrying tasks. The village is also having issues with watering their livestock from these ponds.

But because of the generosity of a World Changer who made this project possible, the people of Kiboga and the students and teachers at Mpongo Modern Primary School have hope.  Ingomar Living Waters is working with Central East Africa Equatorial Development (CEED) to drill a deep borehole well with a hand pump to make clean water accessible to everyone in the Kiboga area.  CEED has studied projects across Uganda and they experience an average of 70% reduction in illness across the board in communities with access to clean water.  CEED keeps on hand extra parts for pumps and works to form a water committee in the village to maintain the well.  In fact, as part of the overall contract with the village, the husbands must agree to be nice to their wives.

Change is coming to the Mpongo Modern Primary School and Kiboga area and it was made possible by a generous World Changer in the Ingomar Living Waters community.

COMPLETED AUGUST 15, 2022

The well at Mpongo Modern Primary School is finished!  The people are excited to have clean, fresh water easily accessible to them. 

Flow rate: 3800lt/h = 16.73 GPM  (which is the average daily required water intake for 16 adult males per hour)

This well was dug a little early. We had sent Herbert an advance the last week of June for the supplies needed for 4 wells, (2 for Ingomar and 2 for another donor) to try to lock in the prices. We don’t usually do this, but thought with the current market volatility it would help us hold off on having to increase our prices for a little longer. But there was a breakdown in the communication chain about Mpongo, and because the parts were already in Uganda, the team start drilling before the application was approved. While it worked out in the end, it did cause us to overhaul the old method of communicating progress internally from an email chain to a server-based workspace that can be updated in real time for all parts of the communication chain to see (i.e. Herbert, Graham and Kate). This means that we won’t come across the same issue in the future. Thank you for your understanding and thank you for the well!