Alive & Well: Clean Water for Villages in Barrie Chiefdom, Pujehun

Alive & Well is our sister charity, and was founded in Jan 2009 by 12 like-minded individuals who want to make a difference and take practical action on the ground in Africa to save lives….

Our purpose is to drill wells in villages in the Pujehun District of Sierra Leone, West Africa, providing clean safe water supplies for some of the poorest communities on the planet. The provision of water will enable the communities to not only become healthy but also develop the stability they need to develop enterprises and move out of poverty.

We train local crews to drill using Dando 2000 specialist, highly robust drilling rigs. We loan them rigs and pay them a good wage for drilling wells in communities so impoverished that they cannot contribute to the cost of drilling and have been passed over by other initiatives. Each rig provides a livelihood for years to come for three young men and their families as well as life-giving water.

Our role is to find new and innovative ways of funding the provision of wells in Sierra Leone. WTN provide eco-sanitation, water storage, education, small enterprise start up projects that are made possible once the basics are in place… basics like water. That’s where we come in. We provide the means for local people to drill their own water bore-holes and fabricate their own easy maintenance water hand pumps.

The way we are going about it, with your help, is to get groups of people in the UK to form a crew and raise funds to buy more 4x4s and rigs and take them to Sierra Leone, train local crews… and so on – providing a conveyor belt of rigs over the coming years to provide water for hundreds of thousands of people.

Your donations enabled us to meet our first target in October 2010 when we reached £45,000 raised and purchased our first rig. We subsequently took the rig to Sierra Leone, drilled wells and trained our first crew ‘Orange Crew’ as they are known (the rig is Orange!).

We now need help to pay the crew’s salary and the cost of each pump and the materials for each well. We also need funds to spread the word in the UK to generate new groups who want to mount an expedition, fund raise and take the next rig out to Africa… Your donation will contribute directly to these aims. Thank you.