Clean Drinking Water for 2000 Mbororos in Cameroon

There is a path on the way to the river that has been walked for so long, nobody can remember who carved it. It’s too narrow for a vehicle. Too winding for an oxcart. It was made by feet, bare feet, mostly small ones carrying water on the head.

The path doesn’t know it’s becoming a relic. It still curves through the brush the way it always has, dipping past the shrubs, threading between two anthills, descending finally to the riverbank where the Mbororos children of Koupamatapid community have drawn water for as long as anyone in the village can remember.

A trail like this isn’t a feature of the landscape. It is a record of labor. Every depression in its dust was made by a foot. Every smooth patch was polished by years of children passing in the same direction at the same time of morning. The roots that cross it are the roots that survived the foot traffic; the ones that didn’t are gone. The bend by the second tree is there because somebody, decades ago, decided it was easier to walk around the boulder than over it, and everyone since has agreed.

Children in this community wake up before the path is light. They lift their containers, step onto the trail, and follow it through the soft early air to the river. They know where their foot would land before they put it down.

The river itself is never a clean source. Children who fetch water from rivers and streams across Foumban-Cameroon know this. They know what the water tastes like in the dry months when it stagnates, what it smells like when livestock have been upstream. They know it carries cholera and diarrhea the way a careful container carries water: invisibly, faithfully, every day.

The path remembers all of this. The children who came back walking slower, with fevers. The mothers who walked it not for water but to fetch a sick child home. The long evenings when the line at the riverbank stretched and stretched, and the sun went down on small girls still waiting to fill their containers.

What Integrated Agricultural Association (IAA) aims to achieve; A well will be installed in Koupamatapid Community near Foumban,The water will come cleanly, and quickly, and close.“More convenient and stress-free,” that is the change we seek.

Children's schoolwork will get easier. Families will wash their utensils more consistently. Children's evenings belong to them. These are the changes that get measured, the changes that fit on a spreadsheet.

The change to the path doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet. It is a slower, quieter change, and at first it looks like nothing at all.

Where once a hundred trips were made along it each day, will go down to ten. Then five. Then sometimes none. The dust on it stays loose longer. The smooth patches start to grow over. The roots that the foot traffic kept down begin to push back up through the surface.

This is what a community will look like when clean water finally reaches it. Not a ribbon-cutting. A path going quiet.

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With gratitude!