Depressing Stories from the Field

Buyaya water on the right

In my last blog, I wrote about how hard it can be to actually "do good" in a developing country.

Here's another rather depressing story from the field.

We all know that access to clean water can have tremendous benefits.  The lives of the people in Buyaya (where Meaningful Volunteer is based) would be vastly improved in their water didn't have wriggly worms in it.

One enterprising Kiwi lass thought she would help out a local school by installing a rain-fed water system.   The drinkable water would gather on the roof and trickle through the guttering into a large water tank.

(This is what we are doing with our solar powered school in Uganda, by the way.)

Stop for a minute and try to think what could possibly go wrong with this scenario. I'll give you a moment.

...

Did you come up with anything?

The school buildings were being rented.  The landlord saw the improvement to to school, figured the value of his buildings had gone up and promptly increased the rent.

Hooray!