Mission Uganda

AFN Superstation Sembach
Story by Staff Sgt. Nancy Kasberg

Date: 07.18.2016
Posted: 07.25.2016 02:04
News ID: 204895

Nat Sound - Birds chirping, cows mooing
I’ve always been amazed by it. I mean you see it on tv like human planet some of those documentaries on National Geographic, people caring their water for a like a half hour sometimes and you come here and they’re caring it up like a mountain and they’ll do it two to three times a day every day.
You just kind of think about the fact that they do it over and over and over again and that’s just what’s mind boggling and it’s still like and it’s still not even clean.
Nat Sound - “Hey what did you use”
So it’s just crazy. It’s ridiculous.
I’m Andrew Fenner. I’m a second lieutenant in the Air Force and I came out here to work on a water project. I’ve done previous water projects in other countries and this one caught my eye and I got to get on the project.
Nat Sound - Water running
So this trip started out with basically testing. Just trying to figure out how much chlorine do we need to add to the water for it to still be safe but not be too much chlorine. So we take these samples. We test them every hour to see if there’s bacteria still present and then we also test it to see how much chlorine is still in the water.
Nat Sound - “It splits the salt. Salt is sodium and chlorine. “
You don’t feel like you’re doing a lot sometimes. You might test the water for ten minutes and then the other hour; you’re just talking to people.
Nat Sound - “So that’s good, yeah. It’s at that line, yeah. “
The people you know, they don’t just want charity. They want help, but they want to know who’s helping them. They want to talk to people and you get the full story when you talk to the kids, when you talk to the adults. You really get a good understanding of why they need this and the fact that they’re people. They’re not these statistics that we see on a board.
For me, it drives me more to make it, it’s more important for me when you get to talk to people and you build these relationships and know, it’s not just this guy’s water that’s dirty. Its Julies water, it’s Johnnie’s water that’s dirty and it brings it home more and I think it gives you the drive to work harder.
We’re only at four houses right now, you know maybe serving a total of 300 people at the most, but there are obviously a lot more than 300 people that need drinking water
So I hope when we leave that there’s enough of a notice that this is working. So that when we come back in a year this is going to be something that everyone is going to want to be in on.