God's Water

This programme uses the medium of digital video to share the experience of African villagers working together to address water and sanitation issues threatening their health and well-being. The one-hour programme takes an intimate journey along with Tom Logan - African missionary, entrepreneur and social radical - across the east-African country of Malawi. Logan is working with Malawian villagers to bring a sustainable supply of safe drinking water and key educational and medical services to areas that in some places have no paved roads or electrical power. As part of Logan's strategy, village residents supply the primary labour to build shallow wells; as villagers dig wells, crush stone, and mold bricks, MMM provides the cement, pipe, and pump (MMM makes a US$300 investment in expertise and materials). With an eye toward self-sufficiency and a sense of community ownership, groups of villages select one or two individuals to be trained in the maintenance of each well. Logan and his associates describe themselves as committed to working with villagers in a way that values their culture, ideas, feelings, and hopes.

Recently MMM and Logan conducted training sessions for volunteers in the United States who will be traveling to Malawi later in 2005 to participate in the shallow well programme. Cross-cultural collaboration is a project theme; the USA-based independent filmmaker working on this project will join Logan as he travels to Malawi and Tanzania in October 2005 to motivate and support additional shallow well initiatives.

The documentary itself combines location video and interviews with Logan, his associates, and his Malawian friends, along with archival images and an original indigenous musical soundtrack.

Clean Water.

Organisers are convinced that this story is especially timely; in 2005 United Nations declared the next ten years as the "Water for Life" Decade, with the goal of greatly increasing the availability of safe drinking water to the world's economically poorest people.

The independent filmmaker working on God's Water suggests that "the viewer will gain hope in the human spirit through the collaborative efforts of people of different countries and cultures working together in a way that empowers communities by creating their own safe water supply, and giving them the collective courage to seek solutions to other critical community issues. It will show Americans accomplishing good deeds, working hand-in-hand with Africans who are willing and capable of improving their lives through hard work and cooperation. Hopefully, the viewers will be inspired to work on challenging issues for positive change in their own neighborhoods and around the world."

Organisers assert that "cholera - once rampant in these villages - has disappeared everywhere a shallow well has been built."