The Berked

Water is life.

In Iowa, where I’m from, we have thousands of lakes, ponds, rivers and streams. In Somaliland, which is nearly the exact same geographic size as Iowa, we have none. I’m truly amazed at how Somalis and their herds survive with so little water – and sometimes no water at all. Besides a few sporadic bore holes, the only water in Somaliland is the precious water that falls from the heavens.

Historically, during the dry season Somalis would migrate to areas where water could be found and then in the rainy season, when water became more abundant, they would migrate so their animals could graze other areas that now had tall grasses (due to being inaccessible during the dry season). But today the landscape is littered with “berkeds”. Berkeds are cement water cisterns built into the ground to collect water. Rainwater flow is diverted into the berked and it quickly fills up after one or two strong rains. Berkeds have been great in providing water that would otherwise not be available. They have also (as a side note) caused livestock to be nearly constantly present on the land – which means much of the land never gets a rest. But I digress…

Bottom line: a berked has become the standard Somali solution for not enough water and that’s exactly how we were going to do it. Especially considering that we are innovating on so many other components of our project.

Our first step was to determine how much water we needed to water our livestock. We calculated maximum daily water needs. We considered the maximum times between rains over the dry season. Finally we accounted for Somaliland’s high evaporation rates – which is more than 3 meters (almost 10 feet) per year! In the end, we landed on 1 million liters (more than a quarter million gallons) of water – it would hold about 125 fifty-barrel water trucks of water. This meant it would need to be about 30 feet (almost 10 meters) wide, almost 100 feet (around 30 meters) long, and more than 12 feet (almost 4 meters) deep.

The next step was to excavate the site we had selected for the berked. We contracted an excavator to dig out the soil rock from the site. This took about a month to do. After this we hired day-laborers from the area to level the floor and straighten out the walls – which also took about a month. When they were done we had a big square hole in the ground.

Finally, we needed to construct the actual berked. We had thought hiring an engineer to manage the whole construction process would make this part easier… though to make a long story short: the project that was contracted to be finished within 6 weeks ended up taking more than 7 months and didn’t finish until May of the following year… In the end though, we had our berked and we had demonstrated grace, forgiveness and that poor decisions have consequences.

We had our first rain just as the berked was being completed - filling it a third full. Not long later a second rain would fill it the rest of the way.

Now that we had water, we were ready to get some animals on our land! 😊