Scene from National Geographic

Today we experienced something while drilling that even the drillers were surprised at. It was like being in an episode of National Geographic.
We are currently in this village Luhwaji west of Gairo. Here a village is a collection of several 100 mud houses on dirt roads and trees with maybe 1-2 primary schools. The roads are often poor quality, have no road signs or anything to hint of any money being spent of any official order. Almost no cars, just people walking or maybe on a bicycle. A few water points scattered around with a bunch of women and plastic buckets around them when the water lines are turned on every 3-4th day.
Each village has an chief executive officer who voices that villages affairs to meetings of surrounding villages or to higher up the chain to a ward executive. The CEO will have several executive officers. Then there are some village elders who have respect and can have a say in what goes on. There will be a few essential shops scattered randomly around and usually a pool table on a road side somewhere with a bunch of your males hanging around it.
Luhwaji is relatively flat so I was confident we would find water at 30 to 50 meters deep. The first hole to 30 m was dry so we moved to the next recommended location about 10 m away. The project is having to drill deeper depths everywhere we go. So we are very conscious of drilling extra amounts. At the second site it started out promising then got into hard rock again at about 15 m deep. Ramona and I took one of the village executives with us to go scout out another site (site 5) to drill on in case this current site ends up dry too. We tell this guy that this is no water where we are currently at and we may try this other site.

When we get back the drillers are at 21 m and still dry as a bone. So we stop to take yet another rethink. The executive office who had just been in our car comes over to talk to Jacob the local engineer we are working with who also had just arrived on his motor bike. They go back and join a bunch of others and you could tell they wanted a conference on something. A lot of fast Swahili talking and pointing. We have a crowd of over 300 watching us now and looking at this little conference going on. I make this joke to Ramona that as long as they are not sharpening up their spears we are OK.

Jacob comes back and tells us that the reason we have not found water is that the village elders did not get together and pray for water at this well. They need to pray to their gods and make a blood sacrifice to ensure there will be water for them. So sure enough we all stop working and a group of elders come up to the back of the drill rig with a chicken. We walk a good distance away. They start praying then slaughter the chicken and drip the blood around the well head somewhat. Then we go back and carry on!

The well was still dry however at 60 m where we stopped.