David, Goliath, the Research Team and the Spiritual Workshop Teacher:
People-Powered Percussion Well Drilling in Dano, Burkina Faso
January 1-24, 2004
In the bright African sun, next to the ancient mud brick House of Bakhye, stands a modern yellow drill rig fifteen feet high. Its gas motor blasts noise into the hot, sand-colored plane, while four or five Africans and one European crowd round the behemoth, fussing with its levers and shouting. Its head is buried in a wet hole in the yellow earth. You notice how the endless agitating of the engine rattles your thoughts—until you longer notice, but it continues to rattle them.
A quarter mile away, a railroad tie hangs vertically on a rope and pulley, suspended from a tripod of three tree trunks leaning together. On the bottom of the railroad tie are four metal teeth, which strike the earth as the railroad tie drops. Two young Americans hold the other end of the rope, heave-ho-ing like sailors. When they pull, the tie jumps up, and when they release it falls; rises, falls, rises, falls. The men stop to pour water into the hole, making mud, then resume pulling. This method of drilling works by simply making mud.
Soon a small crowd of village children appears from nowhere. They are laughing at the strange foreigners and their contraption, but they decide to help anyway. In no time, a dozen have joined the rope line--pulling too vigorously so they need to be asked to slow down, but helping nevertheless. Very gradually, the small pit of mud is getting larger.
This tableau captures the essence of my experience of well drilling in Dano, Burkina Faso, West Africa. (I was one of the crazy Americans in the second scenario.) The serious, grown-up, gas-powered rig got all the serious attention, while the gentle hand-powered percussion drill got was an object of merriment for the children. But who will win this race, the tortoise or the hare?
I am the least experienced person on this project. The percussion drill is my pet idea. I discovered it myself--with Google™. I like it on aesthetic grounds, it’s simple and you can put it together yourself. Any Dagara villager could find the materials--and, even easier, the labor--to dig a borehole through the laterite and rocky soil of Subsaharan West Africa. I like the idea of being able to recycle scrap metals to make something useful. Best of all, it’s tried and true: the technology comes from ancient China. Cliff Missen, who rediscovered and applies this ancient technique to modern well drilling needs in West Africa, writes that the Chinese once dug to a depth of 3,000 feet this way . Finally, the motorized drill rig just seems overly complicated and cumbersome to my eye, and, unable to be of much help with it when the project started by repairing it, I felt left out.
But more than this, I have a dream, inspired by Cliff Missen and prompted by a talk I heard at the Water Conference at The Omega Institute in 2003 about how bottled water companies threaten to privatize the water supplies, and suck up the aquifers, of Fourth World countries like Dagara Land. My dream is that if everyone knew how to make wells, if the methodology could be widely disseminated, then there would be an empowering, democratically distributed means of production of wells. As I put it to young Bepouo in my bad French, If everyone can build a well, one man can’t steal all the water.
Donated to the Water Project by an Amercican and shipped from America at considerable cost, the drill rig sat in the “Water Shed” (as it’s called) near the House of Bakhye for some years, and since our arrival has been receiving extensive repairs. First, no one could find the key to the tool box, so it had to be beaten open. Next, parts had to be ordered from Ouagadougou, the capital, to replace broken ones. Then, because the rig is American, and so built with English Standard measurements, the mechanics had to fudge the sizes on the ball bearings from Ouagadougou. It has taken a week now to get it up and running.
The percussion drill by contrast took two days--of our precious time here--thanks to the exhaustive efforts of Mark Bockley in America to get most of the parts (pulleys, ropes, easy-release hook; the four teeth welded and cut). The trees a young man happily chopped down for us from the village with someone’s machete, the railroad tie we found at the blacksmith/auto mechanic in town. It was propping up a goat shed, but he found another, bent one to take its place and sold us the straight one for a few CFA’s. (He also sold us a thick pipe which, being too long, he sawed in half—with a hand saw.) Labor is readily available—in fact, it’s harder to prevent people from helping around here. If the villagers decided to do percussion drilling, they would have little trouble getting people to do the pulling. However, the percussion drill has had a handicap, since the person giving it attention—myself—has been sick for a while, and I don’t have much experience leading projects like this in foreign countries. I’m 25.
But now it is set up and being tested at least. And even Johnathan Kemp, who’s been working tirelessly to repair the drill rig, is beginning to like the idea of it more and more. Two decades older than me, Jonathan, a serious, wiry British man with gray hair and certain fierceness, has been up at dawn every day working while I was still groaning in my sleeping bag. He’s now observing to me that the percussion drilling is “appropriate technology”—it’s cheap, it’s easy, there are no screws to replace or ball bearings, no mud pump, no gasoil. Just patience, which people here have had plenty of with the water projects that come from abroad. If the townsfolk were somehow absolutely certain they would hit water by pulling a rope for four years, they’d do it. Three weeks, the maximum required according to Cliff Missen, should be a piece of cake.
Still, on some level, I’ve never stopped assuming the drill rig will work in the end. It’s hit obstacles, but how can something that noisy fail? I am young, so when it gets stuck one evening, under the copper sky, and the momentum of our project is sunk in quickly hardening mud, it’s a real shock. I’m sad. The old rig stands there in the evening light like Goliath, grumbling, while David waits uncertainly in its empty field. In such a serious situation, it feels awful to be right.
In the end neither method wins the race. The drill rig gets remains stuck, or broken, or both, and the percussion drilling doesn’t get a full try for reasons that will be made clear now.
It turns out there are already wells all over Dano-Bagan, pumps broken, infested, covered over. Lea and Palma make contact with an organization called Water Aid, which thoroughly researches a given area before they even put in a single well. They tell us %30 of wells in Burkina Faso are broken because of this lack of research, and many more than that must be infested. Their work is to place the wells--and time their completion—so that no well is left serving too large an area for too long a time, thus preventing overuse. They also educate people about well maintenance and sanitation, so that people, who are imperfect in Burkina Faso as well as anywhere else—will not undo the efforts of the well builders. So what’s truly needed is something much subtler than a new drilling method: research. To drill another borehole, with any method, would be wasted effort.
We travel with Water Aid’s researcher to several different compounds around Dano. In one, a woman greets us with four kisses, an old man greets us and plays his jyil (xylophone) for us. They are keeping the old ways, though they are just a few kilometers from the House of Bakhye and the truck stop of Dano.
The women in this compound know that the waste water outside their house is noxious, but they don’t have anything to do about it. There’s so much more to this situation than drilling holes in the ground. The Water Aid researcher tells us this is what the two researchers for Water Aid will do—visit many compounds and ask many questions. Water Aid is smart about its way of working: they hire two villagers, one maole and one female, from the villages they are going to work for, to do much of the research themselves. That way the questions will be asked in a proper, culturally aware way. That way no one will try to put a well too close to someone’s burial plot, or a shrine, which would render it unusable. Only after months of research will they even begin planning where to put the wells.
I strongly believe that the project is in better shape for its “failures” in the field. In fact, they are only failures from the perspective of someone whose goal is merely to put a hole in the ground. Physically being there ourselves accomplished many things beyond what comes of simply paying someone to go in to drill a well (as we finally did after leaving). If we had not physically been there in Africa we might never have discovered the disused wells, or discovered Water Aid, an organization run by Africans, or figured out that an imported drill rig can be more of an obstacle than a help. If so many well projects have failed before and not learned from the mistakes, littering the landscape with unusable boreholes, then it is all the more important that our project has taken the care to figure this out. Our general orientation, being friends with the villagers rather than saviors, coming and spending time here rather than paying someone else to travel for us, has allowed us hope of solving the practical problems more lastingly. Even Water Aid cannot be a substitute for our physical presence there.
And I still believe in the dream of percussion drilling, and that, if Goliath had not been the focus of our project, if we had dared from the start to take a more maverick approach, if we changed our thinking, then David might have started a trend in well drilling that could have caught on, or something even better.
Postscript—two years later:
In looking again at this article after two years, I have seen some naïvete in my understanding of matters at the time--but I am not ready to dream any smaller. Instead, I dream bigger than before. I have feel anew a passion for the use of percussion drilling. But even more powerfully, I have been led—by Spirit perhaps--to an entirely new way to envision our whole project. Cliff Missen’s brilliant solution, by being so affordable and accessible, paves the way for an even greater change to be made.
There is a whole social Water Project that may be, and perhaps needs to be, embarked upon, and which our work so far has been pointing towards. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime, the saying goes. I think it is the time that we in the West who want to give back to Dano must become teachers, not givers.
In the West, Malidoma Some’s work has been so successful because he has not given us indigenous medicine, he has taught us how to make our own—however clumsy we may be in making it. He has given us room to make mistakes and learn from them, and to bring our individual genius to the work. That is why, recently, Malidoma and our “village” initiated ten elders in the Dagara tradition, a project that was the culmination of years of work, and which required that we have a functioning social and spiritual village with five living shrines and keepers of each, an ancestor house the whole community could stand on top of, and the will, motivation, and inspiration to stick it out for two weeks in the woods cooking and washing and swatting flies. Only a group of people who recognize their investment in a project will show up to get a job like this done, and people who are merely given treasures don’t have an investment. People who instead are taught how to create them know the depth of what they’ve created in a visceral way.
What if we turned that around, and led workshops in Burkina Faso in well-building the way Malidoma has led workshops in making medicine? What if we did the hard, slow work of creating a community of Dagara villagers who are really dedicated to solving physical technology problems?--to learning Western (and other) physical technologies, adapting them to an African context, and teaching them to others? What if we engaged the considerable technical expertise and inventiveness of Lucas Hien and Souleyman and other young people in the village, as well as the social and spiritual technologies of the elders?
Reciprocity has always been a hallmark of our Water Project: they gave us their medicine, we wanted to give them wells. This new idea is an extension of the same principle, and is more precise: they taught us medicine, we can reciprocate best by teaching them ours. What we’ve done so far--trying to give wells—has been only moderately successful. After leaving Dano in 2004, we paid a contractor to go and drill the well we had promised at the House of Bakhye. A few more wells have been put in since then, and Water Aid has done its work—but we have the potential for something much larger and more tailored to the actual, complex needs of Dano: we have personal relationships with the people in the village there.
Granted, well building classes are not going to attract everybody, and some will only show up for the food. There is something more needed than simply giving the instructions away. I left a copy of the basic directions with the mechanic in town—he seemed interested in telling me about how Africa is hurting, and wanted to know about the drilling methods. I made a special trip to the internet café to get the pages copied, and left them for him, but I haven’t heard that he has done anything with them since. I believe it’s harder for people to make change than would appear on the surface—there is a lot of fear. And even though the mechanic could have made himself a small amount of money, I suspect he was hoping in the immediate for another person to rescue him rather than a way to empower himself. He could probably use some support. In a community that is focused on the goal of well-drilling, people could face such fears together and feel less alone.
In the West we’ve had a real forming of a community of people who understand the need for doing the work, who are responsible and are doing it not for themselves but for the larger community. I’m sure such a thing can be found in Dano, and especially will be seen once an avenue for action is made visible to those with a desire to act. I believe it is a matter of inspiring people, the way Malidoma’s books and speaking have inspired us. I believe it is a matter of finding those few people, those who have the desire to do the work, those who feel it is their calling to make wells happen.
But isn’t community already there in Dagara culture? Yes, we know that there is a kind of vast interconnectedness in the Dagara village that Westerners can only begin to imagine. This does not mean however that all villagers are the same, all equally interested in learning well drilling. There may be some, like ten-year-old B_____ perhaps, who will have a special passion for it, others who have talents for organizing people or communicating. When these people come together to make wells, there can be a real group energy behind the effort. There needs to be a group movement for things to change from the present culture; the call must also come from the ancestors for any real change to occur in the Dagara context.
It’s very likely that there are many people working in nearby parts of Africa on similar projects, stimulating entrepreneurial efforts through micro-loans and trainings. We could connect with people who are already doing this kind of work, as well as Cliff Missen and Wellspring Africa.
And what if we had the donors on board with this teach-fishing project from the start? Wouldn’t that feel a lot better than the usual guilt-tinged request to pour tens of thousands of dollars into starving Africa?
In advocating teaching, I am inevitably conjuring an unpleasant image: the missionary who knows best, who destroys the delicate social and spiritual fabric of indigenous people’s lives. But it really depends on your attitude—a take-it-or-leave-it, humble, approach can at least prevent us from doing harm. The call for wells came from the Dagara ancestors originally, and not from a foreign agenda (). In talking about teaching and forming a community, am I talking about trying to change Dano? Yes, Dano would be changed. But I believe, and Malidoma often has said, that Dano is changing anyway. The inevitable process of modernization is visible everywhere, from the internet café in town to the absence of young folk, who’ve left for the capital. We—Americans and Dagara--have an opportunity in Dano to bring good technologies in before bad ones can take up all the space, we have an opportunity to do things that legal restrictions in the U.S. prevent and oil subsidies make unprofitable: solar panels, sustainable practices, and the like. We ought to take this opportunity before unhelpful people do.
