The well

Paolo Barbieri e Riccardo Russo | 2011 | Italia | 52’

The barren expanses of Oromia, in the south of Ethiopia, hosts the territory of the Borana. This population of semi-nomadic shepherds manages the scarce water resources through a communitarian organization and guarantees access to them to everybody without any exchange of money. Ancient wells known as ‘singing wells’, hand-digged in the rocks and managed through the volunteer work of the shepherds, allow the survival of this population and of their livestocks in the long periods of annual drought, when thousands of people and tens of thousands of animals move closer to the wells to survive. According to an unwritten rule, nobody can be excluded from the use of the wells. As if in this remote region of the planet water worked as an unifying and peacemaking element, even among groups belonging to different ethnic groups, often conflicting with each other.