“...safe and clean drinking water and sanitation [is] a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life...”
Villagers at Tuidimjang rejoice over their new concrete well, the first of its kind in their village.
“Before our new well, our families and children were fighting over water. Now there is peace in the village.”
A well worker refreshing himself with the cool, clean water from sixty feet down
Would you want to drink this water?
This is the daily reality for many families in Myanmar.
We believe access to safe and clean water is a basic human right. However, many poor villages and families still do not have access to such, and whenever we can we attempt to remedy that situation with clean water wells and other water projects.
With the help of partner organization and individual donations, MyHope has installed dozens of new wells and funded many other clean water projects. There are currently many villages and churches who still need access to clean water.
The Story of Hope Well
Our very first official project in the summer of 2007 was a new well for Bokkan Village. During dry season all of the nearby wells would dry up, and the stream was dirty and polluted with human and animal waste. The people were desperately thirsty but were too poor to pay for a new well. We only had enough in our account for a 20’ deep well, but we sent what we had and prayed for the results.
The workers began digging immediately, but the soil was hard and dry, and it was slow going. At a little over twenty feet deep the well was still bone dry. We received a call in the middle of the night, asking what to do. “Keep digging,” we said. We knew that God would provide the additional funds needed.
The workers would dig down in two-foot increments, which is the height of a single concrete sleeve that lined the well. At twenty-three feet, no water. Twenty-five feet, still bone dry. They called again, saying that the workers were concerned about going deeper, as it was hard to breath down in the hole and, besides, they thought that there was no water anyway.
We asked them to try digging one more two-foot section, down to twenty-seven feet. If they didn’t hit water then we would stop and just chalk it up as a loss. We also asked them to have everyone pray for water, and we contacted all of our friends and asked them to pray, too.
The next morning they called us with the news.
Hope Well is still producing clean, fresh water to this day.
“You won’t believe what happened!” they said excitedly. “The diggers got down to almost twenty-seven feet, and the dirt was starting to get wet. Then they dug just a little deeper, and water started gushing up in three different places! The water was coming in so fast the worker barely had time to get out!”
After a few days the well had settled and the water was clean enough to drink. They said it was the best water they had ever tasted. The villagers named their new well, “Hope Well”, and it is still providing fresh, clean, cold water for the community to this day.
In another village, the water from their existing well had the appearance of dirty tea. One man told us that when they were so thirsty they just had to drink, they would close their eyes and pretend they were drinking tea.
One village was using a hollowed out log for a water storage tank.
One village high in the mountains had no way to store water from the small stream higher up the mountain, so they used an old hollowed out log as a sort of reservoir and ran rubber hoses down from the stream to fill it.
At yet another village, the only access to water was a local watering hole, which was used by over two hundred families for all of their drinking, cooking, and bathing needs. This same watering hole was also used by local livestock.
These are just a few examples of what life is like for many families and villages in rural northwest Myanmar. When we become aware of specific situations, either because the people have reached out to us for help, or one of our volunteers have witnessed it, we do what we can to help.
With the help of our ministry partner International Disaster Emergency Services (IDES), and from individual donations from people like you, we are able to address many of these needs.
It costs anywhere from $750 to $1,500 USD to put in a hand-dug, concrete-lined well, and this is the type of well that we typically install. A machine-drilled, deep-water well is much more expensive but is sometimes necessary.
Other projects, such as concrete water reservoirs, vary in cost depending on the location and amount of materials and labor required. Note that we always hire local people and local businesses to do the work of digging and installation.