Burkina Faso
Banfora Clinic
In 2021 we finished construction of a new clinic which will provide free health-care for the poorest people in the border town of Banfora. The clinic is now very busy with dozens of poor people coming every day for treatment which they would otherwise not be able to afford. Their greatest need now is for a borehole to provide water. The water supply of the town is very poor. Often they go for hours or days without water, which makes running a medical centre very difficult.
Ouagadougou Hospital
In 2018 Jacob’s Well partnered with a Christian clinic in Ouagadougou, the capital city, called “The Source of Life”. This small clinic is endeavouring to offer free or heavily reduced healthcare for the poorest people of the city. A few years ago, they started to build a larger hospital on adjacent land, but then ran out of funds, leaving just a vast empty concrete shell on 2 floors! However Jacob’s Well has been able to raise £30,000 to fund the completion of a complete wing of this new building. Electric cables have been installed, tiles for the floors and some walls have been fitted. Next, the doors, windows and painting will take place before we send beds and equipment to enable them to open the hospital. This new wing will house a fully equipped 30 bed mother and baby unit. Currently, women in labour deliver their babies in a small room in the clinic. There are often 4 women at the same time delivering their babies on the concrete floor in a space that is too small for a double bed! Once the new maternity wing is completed, we would like to be able to help the “Source of Life” gradually complete the rest of the hospital complex. There is room for operating theatres, a surgical ward, radiology and other wards to house patients. The current clinic has just 4 beds, which is completely inadequate for the huge number of people who make use of this invaluable service.
The Hospital is now finished and contains a maternity unity, general medical clinic, operating theatres, outpatients etc. The hospital is currently trying to raise money to extend their building onto a second and third floor to provide room for wards to cover various specialities
Musical Instruments
Jacob’s Well Appeal partners with schools in various African nations, promoting and supporting education by building facilities and sending equipment such as chairs and tables, white and black boards, sports equipment and clothing and computers to our partner schools. Many of the children in these schools live in slum areas and would otherwise be unable to get any decent education, with the state run schools providing very little in the way of quality learning.
For many years we have also been sending musical instruments to our partner schools. Many African children are very gifted at music with a natural sense of rhythm and a flair for creating wonderful new melodies. What they lack are instruments and the opportunity to develop their skills. The better equipped schools might teach their children how to play the Djembe drums and how to sing in a choir, often with wonderful harmonies and breaking out into choreographed dancing as they sing! Guitars are also quite common, often missing a string or two, though none-the-less, excellently played. Some schools might have a little Casio keyboard which always seem to have a few of the notes that either don’t sound or (worse) won’t stop playing!
However thanks to a generous gift from the Hull and the East Riding Music service, we have been able to send dozens of brass instruments to two of our partner schools in Burkina Faso. New music teachers have been hired and now dozens of these children are being instructed in how to play the trombone, the trumpet, cornet, French horn, Euphonium or even the tuba! This is a game changer for the schools, and the highlight of the school week for the children who get to play the instruments. Each year, schools in each city or region are asked to prepare choirs to perform in music festivals, and we are looking forward to receiving videos of our pupils accompanying their choirs with brass bands in the heart of Africa!
If you have any old musical instruments in reasonable condition that you would like to donate to school children in Africa, please contact us. Please note we can’t accept acoustic pianos or large organs.
Well Drilling
In autumn 2023 autumn, our CEO John Beynon visited our existing projects in Burkina Faso, taking along Paul Brown, a retired Engineer who had spent a couple of years buying and refurbishing a second hand well drilling rig. As is often the case when shipping vehicles to Africa, someone in the port had stolen all the diesel and had probably tried to steal the drilling rig itself except they couldn’t manage to start it (there was a hidden immobilizer switch that they
hadn’t found). When they couldn’t start the engine, they took
various parts of the engine to pieces to try and start the truck, but when they still couldn’t start it, they put the pieces back on, in the wrong order, hence damaging the engine! After a couple of days of fixing the drilling rig, Paul was finally able to drill our first bore hole, whilst at the same time teaching a group of Africans how to use the machine, so that they could continue using the machine once Paul was no-longer in the country. As you can see, we successfully drilled down to the water and made our first bore hole. Since returning to the UK, the team have continued to use the machine, recently drilling a bore hole at one of the local hospitals which was previously purchasing all the water it needed from donkey carts! We hope that this machine will enable us to drill many more wells for needy projects and communities. The cost of drilling, now we have our own machine is roughly half of the cost of using commercial drillers.
Jacob’s Well has been partnering with ABC Children’s Aid for many years in Burkina Faso. We have helped to build and equip a school that now educates over 1000 children taken from the slum areas of the city and gives them a free, quality Christian education which includes a good nutritious meal every day. The school has a reputation of being one of the best schools in the city. Children come to the school illiterate and malnourished and leave the school sometimes going on to university or into decent jobs or to work as nurses, teachers civil servants etc.
