The Price of Water

Most people in America have never thought about thid vital liquid much. You can take a warm shower pretty much whenever you want, run fancy little machines to do laundry and dishes with the push of a button, drink water that has been tested and treated right from the tap, make vegetables grow with the turn of a knob and with one little flush forget about any undesireable substances that might come out of your body. All the wastewater magically disappears into a place that is somebody else's concern. Yes there are water bills, but they are usually such a small portion of total living costs that they don't make you blink.

Since rainy season ended, Scott and I have been thinking a LOT about water lately. We think about it every time we take a 20 L jerry can of drinking water on the back of our bikes over 1km to our house from the backwoods spring, re-use every drop of dish and bathing water to feed our thirsty vegetables, or carefully measure out drops of chlorin to make sure we don't get skin infections when we bathe. We think about it when we drag it from the house washing basin to the outdoor dishwashing station and let the drops from the dishes land in a basin to keep our thirsty chickens healthy.

Before January, we were drawing our drinking and bathing water from a bore hole about 300 meters from our house. It's basically a little cement structure with a pump that the community gathers around and pumps water from a pipe that runs to the groundwater source. Sure, there was crazy floating orange substance that the district health office was unable to test ("we can only test for bacterial contamination"), but our Peace Corps issued water filter got that out really well. Others in our area have a very high iron content in their groundwater, so we're pretty sure that what it was. Even with the extra iron, there was no dirt and debris and little risk of bacterial contamination since the bore hole was an enclosed space. Even better, since the whole community gathered at the bore hole, it was always easy to find someone willing to help pump or strap the large jug onto the back of our bikes so we could take it back to the house easily. They can nonchalantly carry the same amount on the top of their heads!

One thing we noticed is that from when we moved to our village in late September until December the pump became increasingly hard to pump, and eventually it took the equivalent of a full-body workout to fill just one jerry can as the water coming out decreased to a dribble. Because it was rainy season and we got at least one torrential downpour per day, we slowly switched from daily bore hole trips to catching most of our water in buckets off our grass roof when it rained. Scott even made a nifty rain gutter out of trees, sticks and trash bag material and it worked really well.

After we got back from a January workshop we got the bad news. The bore hole had completely stopped working. No one in the village seemed to be too upset about it, as most of them had their favorite little streams and springs for bathing and drinking anyway. But with rainy season coming to an end, not only would Scott and I have to give up our bucket method, we knew that we and the villagers would have to walk about 5 times the distance in search of clean water. Even though many of them didn't see that as a problem, it would mean less water in the long run for large families to wash their dishes and hands at their homes.

I asked the district health office what they could do in terms of repair, and they said that they didn't have the money to repair it, and that because the community agreed to get a bore hole in the first place, they were supposed to have a committee set up to collect money regularly for repair and maintenance of the bore hole. I asked the district official for an estimate of how much it would cost and including the government workers' "lunch fees" of $10 each plus an exhorbitant fee of getting a 4WD vehicle up our road, it would cost over 300,000 Zambian kwatcha, close to $80 USD. Doesn't sound like too much, but worth a small fortune in village standards. Great . . . I thought, very practical to have a committee seeing as how most people in our community don't have more than an 8th grade education and make far less than a dollar a day. So we kept collecting rain water off the roof and waited for this supposed committee to meet so we could actually get the darn thing fixed.

The meeting was scheduled several times (once because of a public hearing by the headman regarding witchcraft) before it actually happened in a local church building after a Sunday service. The men sat on one side and the women on another, and the appointing of the water committee consisted of a few men discussing in Lunda which men and women should be on it. They discussed the need of building a grass fence around the bore hole and locking it during certain hours so children didn't misuse the pump and cause it to break again. They discussed everyone's need to pay, but in the end collected only 120,000 Zambian kwatcha, less than half the needed amount to fix the bore hole. Since an NGO put the thing in for free a year and a half ago, many figured that same NGO could just maintain it for eternity. Other households refused to pay on the count that they had started going back to their traditional open streams, so why would they bother paying for something they could get for free anyway. Some people said they would pay when they harvested and sold their beans but never did. Some people said they would pay when the bore hole actually got fixed. Some didn't vocalize this, but I think they were a little leery of fixing a device that spews out water topped with orange floaties, even though it was tested as biologically uncontaminated.

So in the meantime, Scott and I are getting drinking water from a little spring over a kilometer away, and our garden and bathing water from a hole in the ground about 250 meters from our house that is covered by sticks and twigs and has endless amounts of dirt, wood and grass floaties in it . . . no iron deposits though. We use a rope attached to a bucket and gradually lower the bucket. The whole ordeal takes a minimum of 3 people to uncover the hole of all its branches and have one person lower the bucket while the other fills the containers. The community-collected funds are sitting at one of the committee member's houses, unused. We'll probably have to encourage the makeshift water committee to meet yet again to discuss the importance of using a closed water source and all the available options, which are:

1) Do nothing and keep using open water sources (putting children at risk of diarrhea and skin infections) hoping that some day an NGO will come and fix the bore hole.

2) Actively pursue the NGO who put the bore hole in to fix it for free (although Scott and I have already tried this with no luck).

3) Let the village finish raising the needed 300,000 kwatcha the district requires to fix the bore hole.

4) Open up the pump with a large wrench and try to see what it is wrong and let the villagers try to fix it themselves, as they're very good at fixing things.

5) Use the collected funds to put a cement liner and lid over the hole-in-the ground well and use that as a covered water source instead of the bore hole, which is at risk of breaking again.

The whole thing is a conundrum, since on the one hand I fundamentally believe that every person on this planet should have access to clean water. On the other hand, how can people be accountable for resources that they use when they don't put money or effort into those resources? A larger question (which reaches beyond water to education and healthcare in Zambia as well) is how do you fund these public systems and make public servants accountable to the people they serve when the majority of the population does not pay taxes because they are not formally employed (which is 100% of our villagers)? Questions to ponder.

Even though it would be an easy solution, the last thing that Scott and I want to do is pay to fix the bore hole ourselves. Then we would be known as the nice chindellis (white people) who came to live in the village and fixed it. Every subsequent Peace Corps volunteer would be pressured to pay for it if it broke, when their job is supposed to be to educate people rather than give them material goods. Our next step is to hold yet another meeting with the makeshift water committee and probably the whole villagers explaining the pros and cons of the five options listed above. So the water saga continues and will probably continue until the rains start again.

Just some food for the thought the next time you lift a finger to flush the toilet :).