WATER TROUBLE

This was an entry in my December Newsletter. If you don't receive them and wish to, email me at nickjimenez8@gmail.com.

“We need water!! We drink from the same water as our animals. People bath and wash clothes in our water, cows will pass and urinate inside it,” exclaims Faustina on the way to the stream! When February and March come the water will start to dry up and will become green. You should come back during that time and you will see that no human should drink that water!”

Two days earlier I arrived in Nalindo - a very small village about 50km from Saboba. I came to this village to find out more about the people I have come to Ghana to work for, as well as to get their perspective on what the government needs to do better. Through having conversations with them and living as they do, I hoped to gain a better perspective of the majority of people living in Saboba District.

On my first morning in Nalindo, I awoke at about 5:30am as the mist was still lifting from the stark landscape. The rainy season ended three months ago and has given way to the cold winter months of harmattan. In the mornings it is cold. Almost all of the women and small girls in the village start their days by going to fetch water from the local stream 2.5km away, while the men usually start a small fire and huddle around it wearily.

I chose to get a bucket and fetch some water with the women. After a 35min walk I arrive at the stream which I hesitate entering up to my knees. As the women take lead I also take off my sandals and enter to fill my bucket.

By the time I return back to the village with my meagre 20 litres I’m thirsty. I ask my host for some water and she enters a hut and pours me some water. Looking down at it, mildly brown in color, I drink the cup dry. As though the water had undergone some magical transformation in the 35min it took me to walk back to the village, I feel completely indifferent to drinking the same water I hesitated entering barefoot into. For the rest of the three days I stayed in the village I continued to drink and bath with the same water as there is no alternative for this community.

After having the conversation with Faustina two days later, I decided to also ask the men in the community about what they wanted from the government. The same answer came up. They explained to me the problems with the water they are drinking and how they only want a borehole from the government so that they can avoid the problems Faustina already told me about.

“Why?” I asked them after hearing about people bathing in the water. “Why do some people bath in that water when they know you drink from it”

“Years ago those same people drank from the stream themselves,” Faustina tells me in front of the men gathered. “After they received a borehole from an NGO, they now bath and wash in the same water that we drink. We took this matter to the [locally elected] Assembly Person to settle. But after they were instructed to stop bathing and defecating near the stream, they still continue to do so.”

Lacking a response, I switch to the matter of animals. “So why don’t you take your cattle to drink somewhere else instead of from the same stream you fetch your water?” I naively suggest.

“During the dry season all the other water sources dry up. Because of that, the Fulani- [a local tribe who take care of the cattle]- have nowhere else to water the cattle. The problem gets worst however.” At this, they called a small boy forward to show me the magnitude of the implications.

They slowly undress the bandage around his left shin, revealing two large open sores. They are the exit wounds of guinea worm, a horrible parasite that afflicts many rural people in Northern Ghana. Faustina then points to two scars on her legs left from guinea worm she had years ago. “It causes pain that makes you want to die!” she says after telling the boy to redress the wound.

As I’m listening to this I just take in everything they are saying trying to comprehend what living in this village would really feel like. I keep thinking to myself ‘wow! These people need water badly! How could anybody drink that?’ An hour later when I am reflecting on the conversation, I laugh when my mind finally connects two dots: ‘You’ve been drinking that water for the last 2 days!’

For the rest of the meeting I try to move past what the community needs, to what we can do about it. Part of my reasons for coming here was to also get community involvement and advice on the work that I am doing. In terms of what communities need, the answer is pretty easy. Generally people will tell you flat out, and sadly because most people lack access to the three primary public services – education, clean water, and health care – they are the most common answers communities will give.

My work is looking at how to get communities what they want, and more specifically, how to distribute the limited resources there are from the government. I fully understand that they need water, but I try to bring this community to the level of the government. I explain to them that every community I go to, they will all tell me that they need water, and many will describe a similar situation. “How does the government chose who should be first to get the boreholes they can drill this year?” I ask them.

We proceed to discuss different criteria that the government could use to assess who needs the borehole the most. But what I’m most interested in is what the community can control. “What can the community do to show that they want the borehole the most, and are most prepared to maintain one?”

“We can collect money and put it in a bank account,” is what Kunde, chairman of the Water & Sanitation committee in the community says. “We can also request to the District Assembly so they know in paper, that we want a borehole. Following that we can give yams and guinea fowl to the officers at the District Assembly!”

“Now that last one is what we are trying to move away from,” I say in between chuckles. The first two responses were golden because they touch on a community’s readiness to maintain the borehole once it is put in place. The last suggestion touches on favouritism and is something we are trying to reduce. We want the communities that show commitment and need, to get the infrastructure. Not the ones who can be most convincing to a certain government official.

In the end, we generated some great ideas for what criteria could be used to guide community selection. The community closed by saying the following and it has stuck with me. “We need water and are prepared to do anything to get water. Because we have felt the pain of not having water, we will maintain it. What is holding us back is that we don’t know what we have to do to show this commitment. If the government tells us, we will do it.”