One of the families I've had the pleasure of interviewing touched me in a particularly special way. I'll leave their names confidential, but share a photo they gave permission for me to have for personal use. But first, the back-story.
Water availability has come up this year over and over again as the number one concern of most families in the slums surrounding Hyderabad. The delayed monsoon has amplified the difficulty of the situation. Women spend hours every day waiting in lines and carrying water on their shoulders home - only to find it's not quite enough and that they have to use the same water they cooked with for cleaning those dishes. They only have the time and energy to get enough water to bathe once a week. And the water isn't clean enough to drink anyways, so they have to spend a big chunk of their income on safe water that comes only every-other day in big water trucks.
Hopefully that gives you a brief sketch of the picture here. Usually the challenge of getting water is such a fiasco, and the water is so heavy, that families reserve this chore for adults. Kids can't really handle it. At least, for most families, besides this particular one. There's four girls - a Mom with three daughters. The mother happens to have some physical and mental handicaps that make it near impossible for her to fetch the water. The task has fallen to her three adolescent daughters. They're the bravest girls I've met here.
Every day after school they start the trek to find the water. For a long time they had to beg others in neighboring slums for permission to use their pump wells. When they finally get permission to use the water, they start pumping (which is no easy task for a child when the water has to be coerced from 400 feet below ground). By the time they carry the water home, they are already late into their homework and hopefully finish before the sun's down (since there's no reliable power for light in their little shanty for light).
Their mom does what she can, and relies on her daughters to do what they can. The best part is that they smile and laugh (except in photos... the get real serious!), and then the way they worked together to help answer my questions... You could see they're close, and that they're a trusting team. Being with them made me grateful for many things. For family, for what I have, and mostly for being here to do what I can for them.
Evaluators don't get to build new borewells. That's the other hard part about my responsibilities here. But, hopefully HELP will get four borewells drilled nearby this family's little home this summer. That's the plan, and we find out if it gets funded next week. Either way, I'll have no physical hand in the drillilng but perhaps the lessons I'm learning will benefit those who do. Until then, families like these will just keep holding on.
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