Favorite scenes from training

Over the past week we have been in the villages discussing the water situation, hearing about villagers' concerns and helping them develop their own strategies to find lasting solutions. It is a balance between training, conversing, convincing and ultimately, when done well, empowering. It is a process that does not last one day. It takes many.
Guiding people to find the best solution, not just putting a hole in the ground, is far more complex than you might imagine. But assisting people with the capacity solve their own problems is far more successful than coming in with the answers. We will address this more in future posts and through future reports. Below are some of our favorite moments over the past week.

Similarities in a far away land

Sunday likes to law down the law. Before our country director begins a training session in the villages where we may install a water point, he asks the community for rules of the session. He likes to keep the sessions participatory and the rules give the villagers a sense that they also help set the agenda.

It was a slow process at Amoninonu Village this morning. My mind wandered as I checked out the surroundings -- over 100 of us sat in the center of the village under the shade of an oak tree (Ok, it wasn’t an oak, but I know little African flora). A slight breeze blew caused our flip chart papers to flutter about, making it difficult for Sunday to write the suggestions down.

A chicken with a purple string tied around its leg clucked through the space separating Sunday and the adult villagers, who were attentively watching. Elementary school students in sun bleached, but yet still dirt tinged pink and blue tattered uniforms , checked out the curiosities of a morning large meeting and the white man in an over sized sun hat from a distance.

It was rural. It was remote. But it was yet, still so connected. And it wasn't just the satellite drilled into a mud-brick building.

Some of the basic rules that Sunday wrote down could have come from sessions in the states. My translator told them to me: respect for others views, no interrupting. The rules continued and focused more on personal responsibility: no smoking and no drinking of alcohol during the sessions. It was oddly comforting to hear rules with which I was familiar, albeit not always so explicit. As my eyes caught the large horn cow passing by, my translator leaned over and whispered and all too familiar rule, “turn your mobile phones to vibrate.”

What?

Not only have mobile phones penetrated, so have apparent bad manners. Now, I must say, not everyone has cell phones, I only saw a few. And those with them were proud to show them off. But apparently the rings are a distraction.

When I related the story to a western colleague who has spent some time in country, she was dumbfounded. She couldn’t believe that the villagers would have thought of such a rule because in Uganda it seemed to her that one is almost expected to answer a cell phone call regardless of where one is. However, I was surprised about the rule too. After all, I wouldn’t think we would discuss cell phone etiquette in a village without fresh water.

The Ice Man of Africa

Several years ago Denis had an idea: Ice. The orphaned boy, then in his very late teens, was able to get access to a freezer in the town of Lira and started selling the stuff to fisherman. They put it in coolers so they could bring their catch back to town to sell it at the market and at restaurants.

Denis tells me through his gapped tooth smile that he had earned enough money to expand his business to rent the public water kiosk two years ago. He now also charges 100 shilling, or about 5 cents, for 20 liters of water. However, his big business is still ice. At 1,000 shilling for roughly a two-liter block, he does well, though far better in the dry season when the need for ice triples his business. His biggest constraints are the size of his freezer and time, as it takes about a day for the blocks to freeze. And, of course, the constant loss of power, which melts his profits.

Denis did well enough that people far wealthier have begun encroaching on his business, lowering the market price of ice. But he still does well selling the blocks as demand in town for ice has expanded. The sustained business has allowed Denis to put his three younger siblings through school. He had previously moved his brothers and sisters down to the city from his small village for a “a better life than I had.” Since the rebels killed his parents, adulthood came early to Denis. Fortunately, so did his entrepreneurial skills.

At the kiosk, he also grinds up peanuts, or g-nuts, into peanut butter for roughly a 20% mark up, less electricity costs, which he laments for eating into his margins. The grinder chews up electricity, and spits up peanut chunks, making his kiosk door and adjacent wall look like the back of a 4-wd that spent the day off-roading.

He has tried to expand beyond his kiosk and bought a bike which he rented out to a motorcycle taxi driver. But he found the driver unreliable, he liked to drink a bit too much and work a bit too little, so the bike sat idle just beyond his kiosk.

The Ice Man of Africa? Maybe that's a bit rich. After all his margins are too small to hire an employee (although he pays someone to trim the overgrown grass around his kiosk). But at 23, the Ice Man of Lira is sure a hard worker. And his skills are helping provide sustainable clean water and fresh fish to Lira.

The importance of zoning

My favorite restaurant in Uganda is Car Washing Bay and Restaurant in Lira. Fantastic Indian food -- proper naan, savory chicken tikka masala. They do it right. Uganda, due to its relationship with the British Empire has a fair number of Indians who are often shopkeepers, and in this case, restaurant owners.

As I sit here, eating my palak paneer, I survey the restaurant -- a basketball court sized area of chairs and tables under two giant green tents. I am entranced by the men washing two blue Nissan sedans less than thirty feet from me. Instead of a parking lot outside the restaurant, there is a car washing facility—a car washing bay if you will. It is convenient, for sure, not necessarily sanitary with the water run off so close to the cooking area, but it is definitely an inventive combination of two unlike activities, like the phone and camera.

Beyond the restaurant and over the fence, men were welding steel boxes in a metalworking shop. I could also smell the pungent odor of burning plastic wafting from the piles of refuse smoldering in the vacant lot behind the building. The smell settled in the air, filling the void after the sweet aroma of sauteed garlic and coriander had dissipated from the naan and fish masala served to the table next to me. Thin strips of black plastic, once part of bags, danced like snowflakes before eventually falling to the ground. The sensory experience made me appreciate the little respected practice of zoning.

Life without zoning can reduce your daily commute. A cement factory employee could live literally next to his job. He could eat at a restaurant adjacent to the gas station which is next to the welder's shop adjacent to a cassava field. This is all kitty-corner to the bus station. He could live in a city and never have to leave a few block radius. It's like the convenience of living in New York, but without the safety benefits that zoning provides.

At the Gulu bus station, there is a shallow well right in the middle of the station. Not in a public waiting area -- which doesn’t exist in Gulu -- but right next to parked buses. Convenient, yes, but contaminated by the traffic that surrounds it the leaking oil and allowing for other contaminates into the water point. Still people were dutifully pumping to fill their jerry cans full of water.

Proper zoning should prevent the contamination of water in instances like this. A gas station should not be near a water source and a dump should not be next to a restaurant. Without a government outlining the risks or without education, the population might not understand how dangerous such scenarios can be. Without leadership, uncoordinated development just happens. And in many countries, especially those in post conflict, it can be dangerous.

Some know the true risks of contaminated water such as this; others know that there is a risk, but not how great. We have seen women collecting water from contaminated sites because it was the easiest source for them; many times because it was the only. A brutal combination of a lack of education, the realities of living with inadequate infrastructure and resources as well as ignorance forces people to act. Our role is not just to put water points in the ground, but to educate on the importance and the definition of clean water, to ensure that people don’t build a bus station on top of a well, or a well in a bus station.

Getting it right...the water committee

The hardest part is the follow-up visit. $1,000, $2,500, $4,000 might not seem like a lot of money, but in these villages where a house costs around $150, the price of a borehole repair or protected spring is far above what these villages can afford in one lump sum. So when we put projects together, we know the importance of creating a village water committee to maintain the project after construction. A good committee will collect enough funds to cover maintenance costs, ensure the area around the project remains clean and conduct minor follow-up maintenance (dredging the canal, repairing a broken fence, etc.).

The bad ones, well, don't. Animals roam in, out and around the water source contaminating it; drainage canals stagnate, forming algae; and women wash their clothes near the water source. Simply what was once a source of life has become the breeding grounds for diarrhea, worms and snails that carry bilharzia. Disease is all to quick to come.

When you arrive upon a site that gets it -- that understands that the spring or well is theirs and it must be maintained -- its comforting. We have spent the past few days visiting our sites as well as projects developed by other NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Getting it right, working with the local community in everything from site selection to water committee follow-up is just as important as getting a hole in the ground. That hole needs little follow-up to maintain it, clean water that comes from it, however, does.

Pictures by Jake, words by Dave. (Apookeni, Oboko and Eyame Villages, Lira District)