Gift of the Givers to drill for water at Rahima Moosa

The ongoing water outages in the city has left patients at Rahima Moosa and Helen Joseph Hospital, as well as surrounding areas, reeling over past week.

The NGO was approached by hospital staff and management requesting bottled water, portable toilets and any practical assistance to augment the water tankers provided by the city.

Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman says bottled water alone is not a sustainable solution.

“Hospitals need to be sustainable, with load shedding happening so often water pumps don’t function well. That could have a long term effect on the hospital especially with the crisis we are in with the Covid-19 third wave.

“In any case, a hospital should always have a back-up water system be it a generative electricity or a  borehole those are critical on a hospital.

“We decided that bottled water is not going to be sustainable in this situation,” says Sooliman.

“The crisis couldn't have come at a more inopportune time with rapidly rising Covid-19 numbers in the third wave in Gauteng and Rahima Moosa being one of the feeder hospital's for the temporarily shut Charlotte Maxeke Hospital.

“Healthcare workers are trying to catch-up with non-Covid conditions between the second and third wave and add to that a desperate community in the vicinity of the hospital thronging to the hospital in search of drinking water, clearly exacerbating Covid-19 risk.”

Sooliman says the teams have been granted permission by the management and infrastructure team to drill for water.

“Our geologist, Dr Gideon Groenewald, has identified the drilling site. Existing, defunct boreholes will be assessed with a view to resuscitate them, whilst drilling for new boreholes then pumping water directly into the hospital infrastructure using booster pumps and setting up taps outside the hospital for community usage once the water has been tested and approved for human consumption.”

 ALSO READ