This place is a desert. The annual rainfall in Senegal is 10 inches, compared to Oregon which this year had almost 50 inches. To put that in perspective, the monthly record for rainfall in Portland is 13.52 inches. That would be a year and four months in Senegal.
However, the ground here in Senegal is pretty fertile. If you add water, then you can grow stuff here. In fact, you can grow almost anything. You just have to get water to it.
The water does not come out of the sky. But surprisingly it’s in the ground, if you drill down for it. Or actually, the best way is to dig for it. Like send guys down into a really deep hole till they hit water. The deepest hand dug well is 50 meters - which equals 164 feet.
The diggers are lowered into the well with a rope, and they dig with a shovel, and the guys on the surface pull up the dirt in a five gallon bucket. Obviously it takes a long time to dig a well, but the good news is - it lasts for a long time. A good hand dug well should last an average of 50 years.
But hold on! Before you head out with a shovel and a five gallon bucket, you need to know where to dig. There’s water down there, but ... where? So there are special people here who, well, they just know.
They walk around and look for tell-tale signs, such as certain plants, or lack thereof. They are pretty much always right.
And once you hit water - life changes. Water in the desert is like magic. However, there are still some challenging ingredients.
For example, how do you get water up out of the well? By hand? It’s down there 164 feet! Pulling up a bucket of water from that deep is hard. A full five gallon bucket weighs about 40 pounds.
You will eventually have arms like Popeye, if you last that long. There must be a better way.
How about a little help here? Can somebody help me get this water out of a really deep hole? It’s not like we have electricity or anything. We’re in the middle of a remote desert. Heck, I’m gonna burn 500 calories just pulling on a dang rope.
Tell you what, how about we put a pump on it and bring the water up? And while we're at it, let's put a solar power system in place to run the pump and take advantage of all that bright sunshine. After that when we get the water up out of the well, let's store it in a big tank, about ten feet up above the ground.
That way we can use the water any time we want, without power, because gravity comes into play and the water drains out of the tank. So we can distribute the water throughout a garden at all the right spots.
And stuff grows. And since it's the tropics, there are no seasons, so stuff grows year round.
All this means that with a little bit of advice and assistance, people in a remote village can thrive, at least in terms of growing healthy food with good nutrition. And then other good things happen, which we will talk about next time.
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