Money raised for 'Water for Dixie'

[Aquila (Admin)]

Money raised for 'Water for Dixie'

It has been brought to my attention that many of you are concerned about
the money raised in donations for the 'Water for Dixie' project. Many
of you will remember that we won $5000 from Amazee for this project and
on top of that our viewers raised $1130, so altogether $6130. Once again
thank you to all those people that contributed to this, it was a
fantastic effort and something that you should all be proud of.

WE planned to use this money to get water into each and every home in
the village (approx 300 homes). Once we had finished raising the money
we drew up plans and looked into the cost of this and realised that a
proper water reticulation system to every home in the village was going
to cost in excess of $30,000. It was a mistake on WE's behalf. We should
have drawn up these plans in advance of raising the money and made it
very clear to our donors that unless we raised this money ($30,000) then
we would need to work with another body to get to this amount. Graham
then set about talking to people such as the Buffelshoek Trust and a
large NGO to help with this. After many discussions with them WE
realised that they could not and would not move forward on this without
the relevant permissions in place. This would take time as there are a
lot of politics within the community that needed to be resolved. Grahams
blog explains more about this and also what has been done in trying to
sort this out.

What I want to communicate to you in this blog is what has happened to
the money that was raised by yourselves and by Amazee whilst these
problems within the village have been being resolved. As many of you
know in May of this year the old pump that has been supplying water to
the village of Dixie for many years broke. Now this pump did not give
each and every household water to their stand but it did provide water
to a number of taps around the village which people could go to and
collect water for use within their house. So as you can imagine this was
absolutely awful. They did not have drinking water, cooking water,
bathing water........nothing at all. WE knew we had to do something and
so decided to use some of the money that was donated to make sure that
the village of Dixie had access to water again.

Rexon and I set about sourcing a new pump. I spent many many days on the
phone to Rex, the water department and suppliers to try and work out
what was wrong and what was needed to resolve the problem. Rex finally
managed to get someone from the water department, apparently someone who
knew a lot about these old mono pumps and together they went to various
suppliers to see if they could get a new one. They believed that the
pump that was needed was a Mono pump BP30H. We were told by the
suppliers that this needed to be especially manufactured for us in
Johannesburg and sent to Mpumulanga. I can't remember exactly how long
this took but I think it was around two weeks. Laeveld Bou (supplier in
Hoedspruit) finally delivered it to Djuma which is where it was stored
for a few days until Chris Dreyer could come and put it in the ground.
Chris Dreyer has a company called 'The Drain Surgeon' and he lives in
Hoedspruit and does a lot of building work at lodges within the Sabi
Sands. He is well respected in the area and happens to know a huge
amount about pumps. He arrived at the site and quickly realised we had
the wrong pump. It was too big and too strong and although we still
needed a mono pump, a smaller one was necessary. As you can imagine
Rexon and I were devastated. We had spent a long time sourcing the first
one and it had been made especially for this purpose and now it was
useless. Whilst Chris Dreyer set about sourcing a new one I contacted
Laeveld Bou to see if we could have our money back.

Within a week Chris had fitted the new pump (I am not sure what the spec
is on this one but I have contacted Chris and will update you as soon
as he phones me back) and new pipes that had been broken and the water
was flowing again. Eventually after about a month WE received most of
the money back from the first pump but not all of it.

Once again thanks to absolutely everyone who made this possible. It was a
real crisis when the community had no access to water at all and so
your money saved this situation and got the water to the taps again.
Below is a break down of money received and money spent so far. I would
like to apologise that we have not done this earlier. Communication has
not been as it should be and from now on WE will publish every cent that
gets spent on keeping the water flowing in Dixie.

Money raised
$6130
Money spent
Mono pump(BP30H) - R15912.15
Chris Dreyer invoice:-
Mono pump - R6578.95
Cost of installing bore hole pump including all pipes, fittings, labour and travel costs - R8333.33
VAT - R2087.72
Money back
Money back on pump (BP30H) = R13500.06 (received from Laeveld Bou).

Total spent - R15912.15 + R6578.95 + R8333.33 + R2087.72 = R32912.15
Total spent after money back from pump - R32912.15 - R13500.06 (money back from pump) = R19412.09
Total spent in USD - R19412.09 = $2791.45

Money left over - $6130 (money raised) - $2791.45 (money spent) = $3338.55

The money left is $3338.55.

Written by Emily Wallington

[Lynn Barker]

So glad Dixie has at least some fresh water flowing to the village!