Maia Project: Clean Water for Children in Gaza

The Maia Project continues to provide clean water each and every day to tens of thousands of children. As the Maia Project Coorinator, I visit every unit regularly to test the water quality and ensure that it is being well maintained.

I went to visit Maghazi Community Rehabilitation Center where MECA installed a water purification unit with funds from ConnectHer earlier last month. I spoke to the director of the center about the impact of the unit on the children in their kindergarten, participants in their programs, and the wider community. Here are her words:

“Before MECA built this water unit in the kindergarten, we were sometimes forced to wait for a private water supplier to buy water, but now we always have the water and we became the water supplier for many people around the association.

“The water unit covers all of the kids in our kindergarten as well as the disabled children who come daily to our center. But the total beneficiaries is even more because we are located next to a school so some of the children stop to fill their water bottles and then go to the school. And we are in the center of the refugee camp so many poor families depend on the unit to drink clean water as well as the participants in the many workshops we organize for the families and women, therapeutic education for people with disabilities, and a lot of activities in the library and computer lab for the universities students.

“The best thing in this units is accessible to children with disabilities they don’t want any help to use the unit because of the height of the unit.”

-Wafaa Abu Mashaikh, Director of Maghazi Community Rehabilitiation Center, Maghazi Refugee Camp, Gaza