10. THE PEOPLE OF BOKIAT

I am on probation, without a passport, I cannot leave the city or the country. I can’t go home and I don’t know what the police are preparing behind my back. They never said anything to me. The sick continue to wait for me on the street every morning, but I don’t dare treat them. Tahara cannot let anyone in, health inspectors are waiting to close the hotel.

I continue to give some remedies in secret to people on the street. How can I refuse my help to a mother distraught at her child’s suffering.

I prepare the remedies in my room. During the police inspection they were not able to confiscate all the bottles, as I had hidden some.

However, all my needles were taken away And for most patients I am not able to do much, especially for the older people who are disabled by rheumatism and need acupuncture.

So I set out to find a site for the well. I have decided to extend the scope of my research to the villages around Timbuktu. I was told of a camp of sedentary Arab Tuareg, but they do not work or cultivate. They live on funding from NGOs. Their need for water is great but it is not a real village. The families live in huts hundreds of meters away from each other. The Tuareg do not like to live too close to each other. I would like to find a place where the well would be most useful.

I then visited the village of Bokiat.

Bokiat

Everyone in the village lives from horticulture, even the young imam cultivates the land instead of living off religion.

Their working conditions are terrible, they have a hand pump far from the vegetable gardens. They have to pump the water by hand and after this effort they then have to carry it for 200 meters to the vegetable gardens.

The water pump of the gardens (left)

40 kilos of water. All day long. They also have a hole in the ground. It is even more difficult. They have to climb the stairs with 40 kilos of water for a height of 12 meters.

Their physical condition is pitiful, their knees are worn out and their spinal columns are broken . Wherever I touch their vertebrae they jump in pain. From the neck to the lumbar region. I realize that God did not create the human body to carry 40 kilos all day long, every day. I am reminded of our Italian farmers who constantly complain about the hardness of their work. Yet they only have to turn on a tap.

Although there is a small solar pump as well as a hand pump in the village, the water is insufficient.

I think Bokiat is a possible site to make a well and put a windmill in. The conditions I’m looking for are met. It is a real village where people actually work instead of living on foreign subsidies. The water is insufficient. There is wind for the wind pump and the site is next to the road. In this way, the windmill solution to pump water from the ground will be visible to many people and will inspire emulators.