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