Blake Ellis/The Independent

Myles Vanni says the Alvinston community has been very supportive of Lambton Scouts building water wells in Uganda. 

Vanni was the guest speaker at the Canada Day Ecumenical church service held at the Brooke-Alvinston-Inwood community centre. Vanni has made five trips to Uganda where Scouts helped to give villages clean drinking water.

“Fresh water is so critical in these communities,” said Vanni. Sixty percent of Uganda does not have access to clean drinking water. 

The mission works with the Ugandan Scouts, which identifies villages that need water wells help the group to make a smooth transition into the communities. 

The villages have an existing water source –  often an open outside pool with a natural spring. These water sources will become contaminated quickly, as animals will walk through it, people will do their laundry or wash their dishes in it. “It becomes just horrible,” said Vanni. Disease and sickness are rampant in villages with contaminated water.

In a five day process, Scouts built a retaining wall to hold the pond. A pipe is placed in the pond and rocks, stones and gravel is used to create a filtration system. It is then capped with clay and soil so that nothing can feed into it. This leads to a constant flow of clear water out of the well, says Vanni. A ditch is then dug from the well, so the fields can be irrigated. The irrigated fields allow for the village to better feed itself and leads to more income as people sell vegetables at market.

The rate of sickness drops dramatically, said Vanni, so children can attend school on a more regular basis. Parents are then able to work without having to miss time because of illness.

Clean water can also protect a village against landslides. When a village has a dirty water source, people have to boil their water to purify it, Vanni says. Villagers cut trees to boil water. That can lead to the deforestation of areas around a village leading to landslides since there are no trees to hold a hillside in place in rainy seasons.

Vanni has been involved with these mission trips for the past 20 years, with the first one being to Belize. During a 21-day trip, a Scout group will build two or three water wells. 

“Alvinston was a community that was very supportive in undertaking this,” said Vanni. Pastafest was held at the community centre complex and various local organizations supported the trip including the Alvinston and District Optimist Club.

These trips are helping to build life skills among the youth, making them into future leaders, said Vanni. There is a lot of physical work, as the young people are only using shovels, machetes and hoes.

It is not all work, as the group went white water rafting and went on safari in a national park seeing lions, giraffes and elephants in the wild. 

The Scouts also went to two schools to play soccer and a parachute game with the children, leaving behind the soccer balls, parachute as well as school supplies. 

Vanni said life for the Scouts is vastly different than in Canada. Two teenagers stayed in one room at a guest house and have to share a bed. A lot of times, a toilet was just a hole in the floor. Electricity didn’t work and hot water was sporadic. 

“The youth ate more goat in two weeks than they have had in their life time,” said Vanni. He hopes to organize another trip in two years and involve youth from Brooke-Alvinston.