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Your typical blockbuster movie opens with what’s called “an establishing shot”: a broad prairie, maybe, beneath a wide sky. Then the focus is brought in to a steam train snaking across the plains. Focus tightened again, we see into one of the carriages. Finally we zoom right in to a close-up of the face of a key player in the drama to follow.

I could do likewise. The continent of Africa. The country of Malawi. Me landing there last week. Hot sky and wide plain. A poor village in the middle of the plain. Some African villagers and their ragged children gathered excitedly round. Around what? Let’s take a closer look . . .

But no, we’ll try it the other way round. Start with a detail, then widen from the particular to the general.

Letter from the Editor

The global financial crisis means charities are struggling as never before to raise funds and meet a sudden surge in demand for their services

Multimedia

• Video: Corinne Bailey Rae on why she supports Pump Aid

• Video: Dermot Murnaghan on why he supports Action for Children

• Video: Sally Brampton explains why she supports Thrive

BACKGROUND

• Arrival of elephant pump trumpets a great day

• Green shoots of recovery

• Support three charities in our Christmas Appeal

• Who cares? I do

Related Links

• Support three charities in our Christmas Appeal

Multimedia

• Pump Aid website

Because in a sense that is what the story of Pump Aid, chosen for this year’s Times Christmas Appeal, is all about: start small and let it spread. How it is spreading I began to learn in the past week as I followed this small British-based charity through Malawi.

So start with a simple black plastic washer, about twice the diameter of your thumbnail. There’s a hole in the middle just big enough to pull a light rope through. Then feed the other end of the rope through a length of plastic pipe. Sink the end of the pipe with the washer hanging out into a tub of water. From the other end pull the rope, dragging the washer all the way through. Water will be sucked behind the washer and up the pipe.

We may now widen our shot to include me, in a tiny village on the Ma-lawian plain, watching the first water to flow out of a new “elephant pump”. I am spending a day observing the Pump Aid team, helped by the villagers, installing one for the benefit of the tiny community of Paulo, in the district of Salima.

Let me set the scene. Frankly, pretty abject. A dry, stick-strewn plain, thinly scattered with struggling bushes. A few goats doing their best to destroy them. A raw, dry, stark feeling. Some huts, randomly placed, the air of desolation relieved by a couple of shady trees alongside the huts. One mango tree. One pawpaw tree. A heat haze. The temperature rising 33C (90F).

Sweating hard, we are all standing – there isn’t a chair in this desperately poor village – and some of us are working: working through the heat of the day to help this scattering of square mud huts with ragged straw roofs to achieve the prize for which their head man had successfully approached the local chief, whose nominations had been invited by the district commissioner, whose advice had been sought by Pump Aid: the chance to be among Pump Aid’s first ten demonstration projects in the area. The idea, I learn from Elizabeth Maneya, in charge of Pump Aid’s Malawi operations, is to pick a few communities, show them what a difference a clean, efficient, almost costless way of drawing water can make – then wait for word to spread, and demand to rocket.

And it’s happening. Across central Malawi, villages that have heard how cheap and reliable this invention is, are clamouring for elephant pumps. The reason is simple. Dropping buckets into a well (in Paulo they didn’t even have buckets, just discarded, broken, plastic containers) is not only a back-breakingly inefficient way of drawing water, but it knocks debris into the well and stirs up muck at the bottom. And it leaves the wellhead open to flies, birds, vermin, rubbish, dust and the sunlight that grows algae. Disease and diarrhoea, especially among the numerous children here, are the inevitable result. Diarrhoea is the third-biggest killer of under5s in Malawi because more than a quarter of the rural population have no clean water.

As we climbed from our Ford pickup early in the day, a villager called Wilson Sani was being hauled from a hole in the ground by his mates – sent down to clear out decades of junk from their flyblown open well. The Pump Aid team of six – Nelson, Itai, Lazarus, Ernest, Constantine and John – had arrived with the components supplied by the charity; villagers with hoes were mixing mud for the construction as 20 children in rags and a state of vast excitement ran this way and that, getting in the way, or stared in wonder. The team was there not only to assemble and install the elephant pump, but also to direct the enclosing and sealing of the well.

The sealing of a well is as important as the supplying of the pump, but a sealed well needs a pump. Piston hand pumps have a long pedigree in Africa, excellent machines, but not for poor and remote places: expensive precision instruments that amateurs can’t fix. The beauty of the elephant pump is that it is built from just a few commonplace components: a forgiving device that is hard to break beyond repair, requiring little more than two strong posts, a bag of cement and half a ton of mud, some cheap plastic piping, a two-handed crank, a home-welded pulley wheel, a length of rope, a few dozen plastic washers and a breeze-block-sized concrete anchor that lies at the bottom of the well, receives the down-rope, slips it round a stainless steel rod and sends it back up the pipe. These components cost Pump Aid about $250, the labour of their paid worker-instructors about the same; and village labour is free. An adequate piston pump costs as much as 16 times that sum and about half are broken at any one time, with devastating results when the next well is miles away. Elephant pumps rarely break and, if they do, are easy to fix.

None of this will have meant much to the assembled villagers, who could never have dreamed of buying a pump. Some of the kids hardly had trousers. Nobody had shoes. This was a self-respecting and ordered community, scratching subsistence from the soil and trying to survive. Not all the children looked well and some of the women looked exhausted but their spirit was strong. Elizabeth (a hands-on, no-nonsense director whose detailed knowledge of every aspect of the operation astonished me) told me that there’s a clinic if they walk, “but often women don’t go because they are ashamed of their clothes”.

But African merriment is infectious. As the sun climbed, the team-spirited joshing of the villagers and Pump Aid workers – mostly from Zimbabwe, where the charity has been installing elephant pumps for ten years – brought screams of laughter and hand-claps as mud was mixed, mud bricks made by villagers laid in place, and the wellhead began to take shape around what had been just a hole. “Supplying their own bricks and labour, and feeding our workers – as they cannot pay them – helps communities feel ownership of their pump,” Elizabeth said. Now a six-year-old girl with a baby brother on her back was adding her brick to the pile.

Seeing I had finished a plastic bottle of water, all the children begged me to give them the empty. Scores of little hands stretched out. I hesitated, then chose an especially small boy with a rash around his mouth, no shirt and disintegrating trousers, who didn’t look too strong. But whenever I tried to give him the bottle, other hands thrust in front of his. Finally, I put the bottle firmly into his grasp, and the other kids respected that. He hugged it to his chest with a shy smile. For the rest of the day he tottered around, clutching his bottle and admiring it. I think it was his only possession.

All the while the men were busy and the new well and elephant pump took shape. The “ears” are the wellhead platform. The “trunk” the long channel curving away from beneath the spout, distancing waste water from the well’s catchment. Near the end of this trunk, the Paulo community hopes to plant a stand of banana trees that it could irrigate.

A single bag of cement is the rule, so to conserve it, the structures are of mud with a thin mix of cement, but the surfaces are skimmed with pure cement powder sprinkled on to the wet then trowelled smooth. The finish was good and hard.

Now it was time to lift on the precast, padlockable concrete cap. The sun was on its way down again as five men heaved it on to the top of the new brick wellhead. All that was left to do was render the sides in mud plaster, for painting when dry, and the stencilled attribution to Pump Aid. The charity hopes the crest of The Times will adorn a host of future pumps.

And then into a hut for a meal prepared for us by the village. Everyone remained respectfully outside as we sat on the mud-and-dung floor eating sadza (almost solid cornmeal porridge) with bits of a roast chicken, and a small bowl of tiny fish with our fingers. “They have killed one of their chickens for us,” said Elizabeth. “They don’t have many chickens.”

I learnt a lot last Saturday from Pump Aid. The importance of keeping it small, manageable; keeping it within the grasp and ownership of real communities. The importance of simplicity. The importance of ingenuity rather than scale. The importance not just of goodwill, organisation, and money: but of an idea that will make a practical difference to people’s lives.

But as we bounced off down the track to lengthening shadows and the smiles, shouts and waves of the village of Paulo, the memory I will keep closest to heart is of the little torn-trousered boy, unable to wave because, with a kind of desperation, he was still clutching his plastic bottle.

For every £1 donated to Pump Aid through our appeal, AquAid, the water-cooler supplier, will donate a further £2