We Hit Water!
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
I feel like every sentence in this blog post is going to have an exclamation point at the end!!!!!! It's just that we've been waiting impatiently for weeks. It was like one disaster after another in the series of "The Well Saga." The story went something like this– first a failed attempt after weeks of digging a 50 foot hole by hand, and making the cement rings from scratch. Months later we miraculously found a well rig from India. We negotiated and bargained and pled our case. Tope and my Uncle worked their magic to get us pushed up to the front of the list. Then there was the Nepali festival, then a national petrol shortage, then a broken pipe on the rig that took 2 weeks to fix...
Krishna B. came running into my room first thing on Christmas morning. "Mom! You got your wish on Christmas!" she said. Sure enough, the team turned up to start drilling on Christmas Day, in the midst of planning our biggest school production of the year and organizing a gift exchange and Christmas for 60+ with a terrible head cold and a teething baby.
But today it was all worth it because we hit water!!! Cha-ching!!! And all of the struggle that we've been through these past 5 years seems to make it all the more special. Water in Nepal is gold. As I write this, it's squirting and churning and splattering here and there and everywhere. We had to break the front gate to get the truck in and cover as much of the house as we could with plastic tarps and I had to kiss my favorite little front garden goodbye because it is currently covered in inches of water. Kopila Valley Children's Home looks like a disaster area. It's covered with muddy water and muddy little footprints everywhere. The machine is really loud and villagers by the hundreds have been in and out through the front gate to watch the production, trying to figure out what the machine we have parked in front of our house is. "Is that a train?" one of my older neighbors asked me yesterday. "I've never seen a train before." I couldn't help but laugh.
We're in the muddy water right now and have just another 20 or 30 feet to go until we have the good, pure clean and clear stuff! In the picture above I'm jumping up and down for Uncle Ed and Julia. We've all been working, praying, and wishing extremely hard for this. The days of water shortages are over. The days of walking the kids up to the dam and an hour to the spring to wash all their clothes and bathe are over. The days of carrying buckets and buckets of water from the neighbors are over. The days of smelly toilets that can't be flushed, and desperately worrying and searching around for drinking water and buying tanks of water to cook food at the school are over! The days of going a week without a shower are OVER! The first thing I'm going to do when this is all hooked up and up and running and filtered and connected to the tanks is take a long hot ten minute shower and cry.
I really believe more than ever today that wishes do come true. Thanks to all of YOU for helping me with this, donating for this well, and putting our dream for water out there into the universe with me. We did it. We've got ourselves some H20!
More video footage (hopefully tomorrow)