Nashipay's Rain Collector Fund

In June 2017 I was blessed with the opportunity to travel to Tanzania to live in a village and visit their new school, Nashipay Maasai School; a school built by a man who was on a mission to give back to his community by providing a means to education, an opportunity many Maasai children do not have access to. The members of the community made me feel welcome and their kindness changed me in ways I didn't know possible. In an area where most families are surviving off of less than $1 USD a day, there was hope, dreams, joy, strength and faith. A lot of faith. Faith in God. Faith in man. And faith that even though their government didn’t assist them, they would persevere and overcome. Currently, their number one problem is lack of access to clean water and we spoke at length about how to overcome this obstacle. One idea that we all agreed upon was that if the new school was equipped with a gutter system, they would be able to collect enough rain water to support the village throughout most of the dry season; this water could be utilized to not only provide them drinking and bathing water, but also irrigate their crops. At the time I was there, the land was so dry, only grasses were surviving (barely) and their corn crops were not able to reach full maturity, leaving the community worried about food availability throughout the remainder of the dry season. Our plan is to fundraise to provide two 5,000 liter tanks to store water in, 1 for the village and 1 for school use. These cost $800 USD each.  We anticipate the gutter system would be an additional $1000 plus labor costs for the builder and unexpected expenses. For the village to pay for this, it would take them over 8 years to save but I have faith that my family and friends can make this feasible within the year so that by 2019 they will be able to harvest enough rain to sustain their families and crops. Please join me on this endeavor and help provide the essential to life: water.