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Photo Date: May 24, 2008

Location: A borehole near the town of Caia, Mozambique. This borehole was hand-drilled… a cooperative effort between the Christian Council of Mozambique and Mennonite Central Committee.

“Clean water for Africa.”

“Help drill wells for people in Africa.”

“Access to safe water is a basic human right.”

In North America, we hear these types of statements often, at least, in the circles I travel in. A close friend of mine who works for a large church in the US has been spearheading a huge campaign to buy well-drilling equipment and other water-related projects in Africa. Our former church in Kitchener is raising funds to drill wells here in Zambia. The Red Cross and dozens of other NGOs in this country and across the region are drilling wells.

It’s all wonderful work, and is very much appreciated by the people who receive the wells. Arja and I have witnessed many times the incredible impact that access to clean and safe water has on a community. And, conversely, the impact when there is a lack of such water.

Lately, we’ve started to catch just a glimpse of this personally. As long as we’ve lived in Macha (going on 9 months now), we’ve had to think differently about our water usage. There is clean water available here, however, not to the same extent as we had in Ontario. While there are clean boreholes (the term used here for a well), there simply isn’t enough supply to meet demand. That means that our water supply gets shut off… randomly. Sometimes we can go for a couple weeks with very little interruption, and other times, we have water for a few hours each day. This means that we think much more about how we use our water and how much we use. It also means that we always store water in buckets – enough to last a few days.  Yes, it’s an inconvenience and it’s frustrating at times, but it’s also an ongoing lesson in consumption and how much we take things for granted.

All of these lessons have hit home a little harder in the last few weeks for us because of a few different circumstances. Let me share these stories…

Theresa’s Borehole

We have become friends with an extended family who live in a village very near to our home. The matriarch of the family is a wonderful, older woman named Theresa. The moment I met her, I immediately felt like family. She has a beautiful smile and a magnetic personality.  Her English is also extremely good (rare for a woman of her generation), which means it’s easy for us to communicate with her since our Tonga is limited.  Over time, we have gotten to know some of her adult children. Petros, one of her sons, lives with his wife and children on the same homestead as Theresa. He is also very likeable and has a dynamic personality. He works as a field officer for the malaria research institute here in Macha. We met Theresa’s daughter, Beauty, when we visited the rural village of Nakeempa where fellow MCCer, Ashley Kraybill, was staying.  Beauty and her husband both teach at the basic school where Ashley was assigned. Beauty recently came to stay with her mother in order to be close to the hospital for the birth of her child. As we have spent time with each of these members of the family, we have grown to care for them and appreciate them immensely.

It was during a recent visit that we learned of their water problems. There is a borehole within about 100 feet of Theresa’s house that was drilled a few years ago by an NGO. It is estimated that this borehole supplies water to approximately 50 households. During our visit, we learned that the amount of water coming from the hand pump was much lower than it had been and that it had become very difficult to pump. If suddenly one was without water at home, one would simply call a repairman in to diagnose the problem and have it fixed. The money to pay for the repair could be drawn from a savings account, charged to a credit card or maybe even borrowed from a friend. After all, one must have water, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple here. One of the recurring problems is that boreholes are often drilled by well-meaning NGOs but then no system is put into place to manage and maintain that borehole. The reality is that boreholes do break down. In the case of the borehole at Theresa’s, there was no money available to hire a repairman. Since this is a community borehole (that’s right, technically nobody owns it), who should be responsible to provide the necessary funds?

This story could be drawn out and told in much more detail, but I’ll cut to the chase. Petros took ownership of the situation. He started collecting funds to repair the borehole but he wasn’t having much success. People simply didn’t have the funds and/or weren’t willing to contribute to the repair, although they expected to be able to use the borehole, all the same. Eventually, he put a lock on the pump and only allowed people to draw water once they had paid the required amount.

After a few weeks, Petros had collected enough money to fix the immediate problem AND put some aside for future repairs. He has formed a committee to manage the funds and to oversee the borehole. The committee has decided to start collecting an annual fee from each household that uses the borehole in order to fund future repairs.  Now that, my friends, is development!

MICS

Our girls attend MICS - Macha Innovative Christian School. It’s in a new area of development about 2.5 kms from the hospital compound. There is a borehole with an electric pump which supplies the housing, school and building projects in the area. Some weeks ago, the pump burnt out.  No pump, no water.

I’m not sure why, but it took over 3 weeks for them to get this electric pump repaired. During that time, the school had no clean water. The American couple who run the school and live in the boarding house had no clean water, nor did the families who live in the surrounding housing. Occasionally, a truck would come around and collect water jugs from the people, take them somewhere to be filled, and return them. This gave them enough water to drink, cook and bathe… very sparingly.

Everything seems to be back to “normal” now, which means they might have water half the day, depending on how much of the water in the storage tower is used by the construction guys in the brick-making process. So, even on a “normal” day, they have to use water very sparingly.

Our House

The issue of water recently hit home, literally. We had a period of 5 days where we either had no water or the water we had was EXTREMELY dirty. Dirty water means the water is coming from the local dam.  Because it hasn’t rained for more than 5 months, the water level is very low and the water is too dirty to be useful in the house. I learned later that the problem was in a valve buried along the waterlines. It had failed and somehow was allowing dam water (which is piped around the campus for gardening use) into the borehole water system. As I mentioned earlier, we always store water in buckets for the almost daily water-rationing shutoffs, but we certainly didn’t have enough to carry us through 5 days. Thankfully, on day 4, as we were running out of our supply of water, the pump had been fixed at MICS and a friend drove us over there with our containers to refill them. (Those of you who are friends of Arja’s on Facebook may remember that the laundry she had planned to do on Monday sat, neatly sorted, in our bedroom for 5 days.)

The Bottom Line

Through these and many other daily experiences with water, we have learned to think very differently about water consumption. Please let me leave you with a few random thoughts in reflection.

Be thankful! If you live in North America, be incredibly thankful that you can turn on a tap and, 99.9% of the time, clean and safe water will flow out.

Think twice before you support the bottled water industry in North America. Granted, there are times when you may need to grab a bottle of water at the local gas station. After all, it’s a healthier choice than pop! However, going to Costco or Sam’s Club to buy a case of water bottles to put in your fridge may not be the wisest choice, considering that, in most cases, the water from your tap is perfectly safe. If you think your tap water tastes a bit funny, perhaps you could invest in a filter system, rather than wasting huge amounts of money on supposed spring water and plastic bottles. Consider turning this whole thing on its head – use tap water and give the money that you previously spent on bottled water to a clean water initiative in Africa.

If you are donating money to water projects in Africa and/or you are the one raising the funds, let me say a huge THANK YOU! You are exemplifying Christ’s teaching of “giving a cup of water”. Let me encourage you, however, to look into how that money is used. Is it simply drilling a well for someone and then walking away from it saying, “Enjoy your well!” with no thought given to the future of that well? (I know I sound harsh, but trust me when I say that it happens here… a lot!) People need “development” as much as (or more than) they need “aid”. Drilling a well is aid… teaching a community how to manage and care for that well is development. It takes a bigger commitment, in time and resources, but it’s critically important.