Liz takes charity trip to Zambia

In September Liz Lake spent two weeks in Zambia water divining with the charity Village Water and experienced a very different world.

I was taught to dowse over twenty five years ago by a man from the electricity board who I met on site trying to find live underground cables. For years I have used dowsing to find underground services and lost objects but when I decided to find out more about water divining it was soon clear that with the high cost of drilling a borehole in the UK no one was going to trust a beginner. I decided I had to work beside an experienced diviner and when the opportunity came through the British Society of Dowsers to join professional water diviners on a trip to Zambia I jumped at the chance.

Village Water is known in Zambia as the ‘Little Giant' because of their achievements. Since 2004 they have refurbished 40 wells, constructed 109 new wells and have another 40 planned for this season. With Village Water's local field workers we spent nine days based around Kaoma and Mongu in Western Province in three teams visiting four or five villages a day. Our time was spilt between dowsing for the best well position in new villages, inspecting villages that had been dowsed last year and were enjoying a new well and looking at wells built under previous aid schemes that had failed.

A village that wants a well has to sign up to a sanitation regime that has to be in place before the well is constructed. Each household must have a latrine with washing facilities as well as a plate rack and mortar rack. This is to get utensils off the ground away from dogs and chickens. They have to be willing to form a committee of five men and five women who organise the work for the less able and collect the required contribution of about £40 for each village. The villagers are expected to help build the well - this is done by a contractor but all work is by hand and many of the well diggers and well engineers are women.

There are 570 derelict wells in Western Province and lack of follow up maintenance is one of the main causes of failure. Just building a well is not enough. The village have to agree that two people will be trained to maintain the new well and for about £8 the village has a part share in a toolbox which is pooled with neighbouring villages.

Once the talking was over it was time to start dowsing. I worked with three professional dowsers who each had very different techniques. I use rods but they had a mix of rods and pendulums of all shapes and sizes. We compiled our data separately answering a set list of questions about depth, flow, quality etc and then we compared notes. This was always very interesting as the professional dowsers frequently had similar results. I improved as the time went by but there is still a lot to learn.

For those of you reading this with a degree of scepticism I can report that those sites dowsed last year are making a lot of people very happy. Inspecting villages with new wells was a very rewarding experience. The infant death rate in Zambia is 37%. Without fresh water and good hygiene babies and toddlers that suffer diarrhoea and vomiting often die because their immune system is so weak. With clean water and improved sanitation the health of the children is transformed. For the women it means less walking carrying water long distances and the opportunity to improve their family's health. For the village it is an achievement. The buzz word in government is ‘capacity building' and the project brings a village together and hopefully onwards to other schemes for the community's benefit.

Almost every village had us singing and dancing. It was their gift with their thanks. For me I felt very humbled. They had been given fresh water that we take for granted and squander every day. Those villages that had achieved their goals were rewarded with a football donated by the charity Alive and Kicking. Zambians are very keen on football and to be in the middle of the remote bush in a village of mud huts discussing the Premier League will stay with me for a long time.

I suspect I had the easy bit finding water. The hard work is in motivating people to change their habits and to keep up the new regime as well as the physical work of well construction and maintenance. We just flew in for two weeks and went away again but the long term success comes from the commitment of the Zambian field workers to change hearts and minds.

It costs £2300 to build a new well and £1000 to refurbish a derelict well. If you would like to support Village Water visit their website at www.villagewater.org. If football is your passion why not support Alive and Kicking at www.aliveandkicking.org.uk.