Water Of Life

By Liv Stecker

Digging for water is her bread and butter, but after more than a decade as a hydrologist with the US Forest Service, Jenn Hickenbottom was looking for a way to give back to the global community. There are no shortages of opportunities to donate money to large non-profit organizations and movements, but Jenn wanted to use the other resources she had available – her education and her natural talents as a problem solver with a lot of mechanical common sense. Jenn has worked for the Colville National Forest for the last 7 years, after spending time on the Lolo National Forest and the Idaho Panhandle. Studying hydrology first at Standford, and then Missoula State, she also spent time living in Africa in college. Jenn is fluent in Spanish, Japanese and Swahili, and rather than funneling money into an inefficient machine with vague accountability, she wanted to roll up her sleeves and get involved.

Her research led her to an organization based out of South Carolina, called Hydromissions. Started by husband and wife team Steve and Jennifer Lorch, Hydromissions began as an LLC out to create “appropriate, village level technology”, using nothing that couldn’t be repaired or replaced in a remote village without power or hardware stores. Hydromissions is now a non-profit with a unique function – all of the volunteers are professional hydrologists, geologists, and engineers, who are sent out in teams of two in cooperation with other sponsoring non-profit groups to specific locations around the world. The two volunteers pack everything they need to drill a low-tech well in any environment inside of two 50 pound pieces of checked luggage. All of their personal gear for the 3-6 week trip has to fit into a carryon bag.

For Hickenbottom, Hydromissions was the perfect fit. Traveling into remote and primitive locations with only a backpack and an auger has been the challenge that she was looking for. To date, Jenn has visited Sudan, Nepal, where her Hispanic heritage helped her pass for a native Nepalese, Senegal, Papa New Guinea, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Rwanda and Tanzania. In every location she and her travel partners have stayed in village huts, or sometimes tents, and helped the villagers drill their new well with the tools fabricated by Hydromissions. The volunteers live with the villagers, sharing their meals and observing their customs while they are implementing the project. After the well is completed, the drill is gifted to trustworthy local citizens for future well drilling.

In every case, they have been met with success, except Zimbabwe, where recent fires had scorched the ground, and the dehydrated and heat-hardened rock would not yield to the human-powered drilling efforts.  Some projects have been quick and easy, with more local resources and educated help, others have been a fight against the natural landscape, cultural stigmas and even playful children who fill the partially dug wells with small rocks. According to Hickenbottom, water sources with broken pumps and wells, expensive installations and lavish sites litter these underdeveloped countries, where relief groups have come in and drilled high tech wells that cannot be maintained by the remote villagers with their limited resources. Jenn says the focus of Hydromissions is to leave the villages equipped with everything they need to keep their well running. Rudimentary pump setups are crafted entirely from what is on hand in the village. In a Sudanese village, after much brainstorming and scouring the village the only pump materials they found consisted of rope and rubber material, so Hickenbottom taught the villagers how to construct and operate a rope pump with rubber gaskets that carry fresh water upward as the rope is pulled. Ingenuity and self-reliance are the most important tools that the volunteers leave with the villages.

Specific work sites are chosen based on project requests by other non-profit groups, usually faith-based ministries with connections to villages or regions in a country. One of Jenn’s most recent trips, to Rwanda, lasted just over two weeks and cost a total of $375 US dollars in supplies, a relatively expensive project for Hydromissions. The average cost is less than $200, with some that are well under $100. Travel expenses are raised by the individual volunteers, and all of their time is donated. The Rwanda project, in a village still reeling from a decade of genocide, was done in cooperation with Nazarene Missions International. Two local village teachers were in charge of coordinating the well project, and also remained the  “well keepers” after the project was completed. In many villages, this duty is delegated to young, educated leaders who are then tasked with maintaining and repairing the well as well as training new well keepers.

Jenn Hickenbottom says that Hydromissions has changed the way that she looks at many of our cultural “norms”. The abundance of water that we have access to and take for granted has become a constant reminder of those who walk for miles to haul a few gallons of dirty water, or go without. For Jenn, the worth of clean drinking water can’t really be calculated in numbers, and while buying bottled water that is actually less closely monitored for cleanliness than our municipal waters seems almost absurd in our culture, she says that she appreciates the value that it puts on water, and perhaps reminds us of the importance of water to our survival as humans.

In addition to learning the many distinctions in work practices and sanitation from country to country, Jenn and the other volunteers have experienced the complete day-to-day culture of a mosaic of lifestyles, careful to observe religious and moral customs, such as wearing dresses and covering their heads. In some villages, Jenn says that the men are eager to perform all of the manual labor instead of allowing the visiting women to dig, but the male volunteers are usually allowed to do the drilling. She sees this as an advantage to the villagers who will ultimately be maintaining and using the well, as they do the work from the first divot in the ground. In one visit, Jenn and her partner were provided with protection in the form of men with guns by the village, due to local unrest. Every visit has provided a new and different experience, none of which Hickenbottom regrets.

Hydromissions is a unique organization as it fabricates low tech drilling tools that are portable, usable and fixable with a little bit of common sense and ingenuity. Hickenbottom and the other professional volunteers have found their niche in this common sense approach to a global problem. The organization also provides a unique way to designate donations to any specific project, to tool fabrication or even a certain volunteer, all through their website. Working in cooperation with other non-profits who propose new projects to Hydromissions allows the company to streamline productivity and remain focused on the development and construction of drilling tools. For more information, to donate to Hydromissions or contribute to Jenn’s next trip, please visit hydromissions.org or find them on Facebook.