Digging a Well - African Style

Digging a well African style is not like drilling a well in the U.S. In the isolated Belle forest in Liberia, we had no electricity, no power tools, no fuels, and the only transportation was by foot. The villagers carried the tools and materials on their heads for about a 7 hr walk from the end of the road. We hired a well technician named Koko to plan and supervise the well installation and to monitor it after completion. Koko had a crew, including John, Justine, Mambu, and Morris. My last posting had a photo of the crew posing by the well culverts in Lowuma.

The well is dug by hand with a pick and a "digger" or "pingaling". The digger has a sharp, flat surface to smooth the side of the hole. The dirt is shoveled into a bucket and hauled to the surface with a rope. Usually, the hole is 40 inches in diameter, and the crew climb up and down the sides of the hole, using small dugouts for toe-holds. In Lowuma, Mambu started the hole before we arrived, and he made the hole with a 40 inch radius, instead of diameter, so it was too wide to climb with toe-holds. They used a ladder or they pulled each other out with a rope.

In the photos, you can see the tools used for digging. The pingaling has a long handle and looks like the ice breaker we used in Alaska. There is another long piece of bamboo standing up next to the pingaling; we used this to measure the hole diameter. You can see Mambu's back in the photo. It's back-breaking work!

Another photo shows John coming out of the well on the ladder. The ladder is home-made from native materials. The people are very capable in making things from their native materials.

Justine is coming out of the hole with a rope, after we reached the limit of the ladders. There wasn't any OSHA representative on site, so I just tried to keep people alive. It is risky work.

Morris is a villager from Lowuma who volunteered to help by pulling the dirt out of the hole. He then joined us in going to the next village of Gbeleyankei. I think he learned something from the experience, and we enjoyed his company.

The hole was dug until we reached water, and then we tried to get another 6 feet. When the water was coming in too fast to keep up by bailing it out by hand with 2 buckets, we had to call it quits. At the end, Justine and Mambu were digging in waist-deep water. The Lowuma well was dug to a depth of 35 ft, with about 4 ft of water depth on March 17. During the rainy season, the water depth will be more, and at the end of the dry season, it may be less. We bailed the well and got more than 100 buckets of water (about 300 gallons) in an hour, so the water influx was strong. I believe that it will be sufficient for the village. At any rate, we had worked for 3 days to deepen the well and were unable to, with the tools at hand.

That's all for now. I'll continue with more details on how the wells were installed.

Please give me some comments / feedback about the photos or questions about what we did. Are the photos too large and causing delays in loading? I know that not everyone has the good internet capabilities that I now have. Later!