Notes from Sodo

I want to update you all on our progress in the last day or so.  

Yalew met me at 1am in Addis yesterday and we were back on the road by 6:30 after a quick sleep. The first driver and vehicle he organised were sequestered by the police to help out at a landslide tragedy in a neighbouring zone.

Yalew managed to organise someone else at extremely short notice which is not easy here - drivers and vehicles are not plentiful. Monday was spent driving from Addis to Sodo - about 300km but an 8 hour drive due to so many people, donkeys, children, pot holes and extremely slow and old trucks.    

Today, we spent the entire day talking to the staff at a water office near Sodo and we found out that things are very different here. The water office has much more experience working with isolated communities and they have an excellent system established to ensure that the community is supported to take ownership and care of their water source, thereby ensuring its sustainability. As an example, they also have a very well established method of gathering a fee for using the water source from each household per annum (it is very affordable) and a considered system to effectively maintain the water source that sees an escalation in the people involved as the maintenance and money required increases.  

The government and water office have also introduced very large fines for anyone who damages a water source in any way. If a water source is damaged, the community usually knows who did it and they basically get dobbed in.

The system of construction here does not pay the community to provide labour: instead, they figure that because it is the community’s water source,  they should  provide most of the labour and the fencing materials which are locally grown eucalypt saplings.

This is very different from what we are used to. Yalew and I  talked about this and have decided that we will fit in with the local system particularly as in the community we visited today, as soon as we started measuring water flow from a spring, some of the local men turned up and started clearing the area with their hands and the  tools they had available.  

We just have a problem with the choice of contractor that was made by the water office because in a short conversation this evening,  he halved his price for the work on the site we saw today.  

Yalew and I are not impressed and have changed our plans for how tomorrow will progress - instead of heading straight to additional sites, we will talk to the head of the water office and talk about decency and good business and cooperation.

In service,

Catherine