Housing development, sanitation and spring protection in the villages

HOUSING Traditionally houses in Uganda were built from basic materials like mud, wood and banana leaves but as these buildings age they become unstable and unsafe.

One of the initiatives within the Kanyike Project is to encourage people to build safer houses from locally made brick.  Brick making is heavy work, but the resulting buildings are not only safer but longer lasting. 

Since people cannot all afford to simply build a new house they often save up to buy enough bricks to lay a few rows at a time adjacent to the house they are actually living in.  Elders in the Kanyike Project Villages will allow no more traditional style houses to be built.

There is no electricity in the villages.

SANITATION Simple changes to people's everyday lifestyle can reduce disease dramatically, and these changes start in the home.

Some changes implemented by the Community Based Healthcare include:

• Boiling drinking water to eliminate many water-born diseases 
• Washing cooking utensils carefully in a specific area away from the house where dirty water can drain rather than collect and stagnate 
• Digging proper pit latrines away from the house rather than using a convenient bush

SPRING PROTECTION Clean water is essential to life.  A few years ago most of the people in the Kanyike Project villages would have had to walk for miles several times a day to bring water back to the family home - often the job of women and children.

People often used springs  not only to collect water but also to wash themselves and their clothes, and to water their cattle. This prevented the need to carry it the long distances but contaminated the water source for other users.

There are nine springs within the Kanyike Project area. Of these nine, seven have now been improved so that the place where water is collected is clean, and those using the various springs have been educated to prevent the sources from becoming polluted.  A borehole has been drilled near Magejjo Primary School so children do not lose time from their studies in collecting water.

COMMUNITY BASED HEALTH CARE  CBHC volunteers, who are supervised by a member of the Healthcare team, visit the different villages on foot or by bicycle as an offshoot of the Dispensary and report to their leader of anything detrimental to community e.g. protected springs which are damaged or pit latrines not being used properly.  The volunteers stress the need for hygiene to families as a means of disease prevention.