Johannesburg - Two weeks ago, the people of Vaal Bank village had had enough. They had been without water for 17 days. The local municipal dam had completely dried out. Every attempt by the municipality to fix the village water supply was being repeatedly sabotaged by entrepreneurs fetching water to sell to the community of 39 000 people.
So, the villagers turned to Lesley Bradburn. The doctor and former HIV paediatrician has been involved in the greater Libangeni district in Mpumalanga, which is home to almost 100 000 people across the villages of Vaal Bank and Alleman’s Drift A, B and C since 2018. That was the year when she moved into her former housekeeper Lydia Mashapa’s house after Mashapa had asked her to come and help the community out.
Bradburn spent two and a half years there attending to the medical needs of the community, especially during the lockdown that followed, but her biggest job was getting her global network of friends to contribute to a borehole for the Alleman’s Drift community. This time, she approached the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the Angel Network.
“The community was getting desperate, and some people had started digging wells themselves,” she explained this week. “This is problematic because the walls of the well collapse in on each other, the water gets stagnant, and if it stays like that, they can get typhoid.
“I sent an email to Wendy Kahn on Monday, January 30. The money was in the drilling company’s account the next day.”
The borehole was drilled, piped, plumbed, and the pump was installed in the yard of Ephraim Mashapa, Lydia’s son. On the night of Saturday, February 4, five days after the email was sent, the job was finished, and by Sunday, when it became operational, the queue in Vaal Bank village stretched six kilometres around his house.
“It’s life-changing,” said Wendy Kahn, SAJBD national director. “It’s iniquitous that the people of Vaal Bank don’t have water. Now, more than 20 000 people will have access to water without having to pay for it. This will change their lives. What’s phenomenal about this is both the quality and volume of water here.”
Thebe Maepa agreed.
Thebe Maepa’s family company, Qedukoma Drilling from the nearby Pietskraal B village, drilled the borehole and installed the pump and the plumbing.
“Normally, in cases like this, we would drill down to 200m to hit the water table. Here it was only 100m. I estimate that there’s 25l of water per second here, enough to supply almost 10 000 houses from one borehole.”
In his home village, Maepa’s company drilled a borehole and then ran a tap system to every street corner. It’s something that Bradburn wants to do at Vaal Bank, with taps down the main arterial road to the police station and then up and across to the nearby primary school to allow the villagers easy access without having to wake up Ephraim Mashapa at night if they need to fill up their bottles.
The borehole cost R94 500 to sink and then pipe.
“They had to drill through the substrate because there is lots of hard rock,” explained Bradburn. “There had to be a steel pipe inserted to prevent the borehole from collapsing on itself, then a PVC inner.”
The borehole is totally automatic, filling a 5 000 litre JoJo tank, which the villagers can then access. There is a generator, too, as back up for when there is load shedding.
“This was a great project for us to get involved with,” said Kahn, “because Lesley is so specific in her needs. We have been working with her for a while now. They needed land to be levelled so that they could develop it. We helped with that. Then at the beginning of the year, she needed school shoes but sent through an entire list by size and the numbers of each.”
Paying for the installation of a borehole was new for the SAJBD and the Angel Network, Kahn said. “We normally work with food gardens, but you can’t have food gardens if there’s no water. Once again, Lesley identified the specific need right down to the house where it would be situated and could be protected.”
The problem, said Bradburn, was that when the municipality did try to resolve the situation by laying down new pipes, unknown people would destroy them so that the villagers would be forced to continue buying from the water entrepreneurs.
“They can’t damage this one,” she said.
Mashapa wants to use some of the borehole water to create a vegetable garden.
“I love gardening, and we used to rely on rain that we would harvest from the gutters,” he said. “But you can’t when there is no rain.”
He intends to grow enough to supply the nearby school and the clinic.
“I want to help where there is a need.”
And there is a huge need in Vaal Bank.
“Most of the people here are unemployed. They are either very old or very young. Before this borehole was put in, they were spending their grants on buying water. Now they don’t have to anymore.”