In the four months since he moved into his partially completed home at the new Culvert City Housing Scheme, Ovid Hernandez has had to cross the road to get water in a bucket from a deep hand-dug well in another lot in the sparsely settled development under the gaze of the lofty Kanuku Mountains.
These days, with a son recently born, he has to make the trip more often but as the hot sun heralds the dry season in the Rupununi, turning the sprawling grasslands into different shades of brown, the water level in the well has dropped and is only a few inches off the bottom. There are pipelines in the scheme laid four years ago, residents said. But the few who live there have not been connected yet and have to rely on hand-dug wells instead. There is also no electricity at Hernandez’s home, although a few weeks ago the power lines in the scheme were activated.
“Everything is money,” Hernandez said, when Stabroek News visited the Region Nine community close to the border with
