Sin Ji Town

Dear Sir/Madame, We want to congratulate you on executing such a wonderful workshop for our village. It was well done and we learned a lot. It brought home to us the seriousness of the health threat that COVID has for all of us and yet it brought lifegiving lessons on how we can protect ourselves. Please help us know more. The new well has been an answer to many prayers, we have struggled with sickness over the recent past and this will make our lives so much better. All the time we save having a well so close to everyone, money we can put to better use than buying bagged water and medicine.. We will always remember you in our prayers and give thanks for your act of kindness to us. Kindly Burphy Massaquoi Secretary

Sinje Community is located within the rural Montserrado county exactly within the Commonwealth District of Liberia. Like most communities across Liberia, access to clean water and better sanitation has been very poor. This is mainly due to extreme poverty and the lack of infrastructure development in the community. The targeted locals fetch water from unprotected rivers, springs, ponds and traditional hand dug wells respectively. Surface water resources are not safe for human consumption, especially during the dry season from January to May. Disease outbreaks are a common occurrence especially during these times. Water fetching is the sole responsibility of women and girls and in the group discussion during the Health and Hygiene Workshop, it was revealed that women spent time in long travel and queuing period. They spent on average a total of 25-30 minutes for round trip travel including queuing time when they go to fetch water from the creek. Women and girls fetch water two to three times a day. Since they loss their energy and time for water fetching, women are not doing their house management in time and have insufficient time to perform productive activities and get rest. Similarly, pre COVID-19, girls were not following their education properly and they drop out of school and failing. In critical water scarce period, women were forced to stay half of the midnight at the existing water sources.Besides the use of unsafe water, the extremely poor sanitation conditions and very low level of hygiene education further exposed the communities to a variety of diseases including malaria, intestinal parasites, and skin infections, eye diseases, and upper respiratory throat infections etc. Those diseases led them to high medical costs, an increased rate of mortality as well as a negative impact on the ability to work due to poor health.