Published in The Times of Malta June 25, 2009
Women in colourful headscarves are out in the scorching sun on the rim of the quarry, sitting among mounds of granite rubble, lost in the rhythmic motion of hammering. Their young babies are next to them, oblivious to the danger posed by flying shards of granite as the women smash the rubble stones into smaller pieces using crude mallets.
Condemned by fate and circumstances to a life of hard labour, these are the Acholi tribe people who have fled their homes over the last twenty years because of the civil war raging in the north of the country.
For close to two decades, the cult-like Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda has carried out civilian massacres and mutilations on a horrifying scale. Its enigmatic leader Joseph Kony wants to run the country on the lines of the biblical Ten Commandments, yet his methods could hardly be more evil.
The United Nations estimates that over 20,000 children have been abducted by the LRA to serve as child soldiers or sex slaves. More than 1.6 million people have been displaced and ten of thousands of civilians have been killed.
To date, a comprehensive peace agreement remains elusive.
The internally displaced people's camp, the Acholi tribe quarters in Mbuya, on a hill on the outskirts of the Ugandan capital, Kampala, is dominated by two granite quarries on either side. The land belongs to king of Buganda, one of the traditional but politically impotent kings in Uganda, and is now home to over 5000 people who were forced to flee their villages in the north.
The densely populated slum, much like any other slum around the country, is a haven for diseases such as malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis, HIV, scabies. Sanitation is poor, drainage facilities are virtually non-existent.
The quarries are huge gashes in the side of the hill – what were in themselves hills ten years ago are now deep gorges, providing what for several years was the only way of earning some sort of livelihood for the people in the camp. On a good day, a woman might fill twenty jerry cans with the small stones, for which she’ll be paid 2000 shillings, equivalent to around 60 euro cents, barely enough to feed herself and her family.
Haggard looking men, their features worn by long hours in the sun and the sheer hardship of working in the quarry, carry sacks of rocks from the bottom of the gorge. Others perch perilously on the side of the steep slope, yielding sledgehammers to smash the rocks off the cliff face into smaller manageable pieces.
The heat from burning tyres is used to crack large rocks, making the quarrying process moderately easier.
It’s the sort of place where there’s no such thing as health and safety. The job is extremely dangerous. Accidents ranging from a smashed hand or finger because of a mis-aimed mallet, to rock falls which leave workers buried with every bone in their bodies pulverized, are a frequent fact of life and one the workers have become fatalistic about.
“You never know if you will return home in the evening,” says one woman in between shoveling stones into her jerry can. “We don’t quarrel or fight because we’re all working in a dangerous place together; when the stones fall on you, then you die together.”
There is an alternative.
Recently, many residents have found a safer work, making cosmetic jewellery out of paper, glue and varnishing. A traditional handicraft of the Acholi tribe, the beads are hand-rolled using scraps of paper, usually from old magazines, glued and handpainted with a layer of protective lacquer. Each piece of jewellery is unique as they are all handmade and individually designed by the makers.
The beaders got organized into a cooperative through BeadforLife, instigated by three American women - Torkin Wakefield, Ginny Jordan, and Devin Hibbard – who, while on a visit to Uganda, stopped to admire the beads being made a Ugandan woman named Millie and learned that there was no market for her jewellery, and that Millie worked for a dollar a day in the rock quarry crushing stones.
Sensing a business opportunity, they set about training the women to improve the quality of the beads, come up with several styles of necklaces and bracelets, as well as develop a marketing strategy. It had now grown into a cottage industry, complete with beads parties in the US, along the lines of Tupperware parties, and all profits go back into the community projects aimed at helping people work their way out of poverty. The beads have come to mean income, health, dignity, education and hope, in a place where hope is so desperately needed.
This is the fourth in a series of reports from Uganda raising awareness about the UN Millennium Development Goals with the cooperation of SOS Malta.
BEADS OF HOPE - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
A TOWN CALLED DIRT
Published in The Times of Malta, June 16, 2009
The buzzing of flies, the whining drone of crying children, a cacophonic humdrum of sound of people going about what I imagine must be their miserable lives, numbs my mind. A child, no more than two years old, squats all alone in the mud next to a puddle of stagnant murky water, crying for his mother who is nowhere to be seen.
The overriding stench of urine mingling with frying of fish and other cooking are nauseating. Open sewers crisscross the village, their filthy effluent trickling through. Smoke from cooking fires lazily wafts through the air, catching the sunlight, creating a sense of drama where there is none.
Heavily laden clothes lines traverse the streets, creating a kaleidoscope of colours, unintentionally giving the place a surreal festive air. Cows, pigs and hens mingle freely with people, as though out for an evening stroll.
I’m in the sub county of Nyendo Senyange, in the Masaka district of south western Uganda, in a slum known to the locals as Kachuf. Kachuf is also a word in Luganda, the Ugandan language. It means "dirt" – enough said.
People coyly peer out of their homes from behind curtains, most very quick to vanish back into the shadows the moment they see a camera. Among the mud brick houses are some that have been painted in a variety of bright colours, others have their facades tiled. Many are housed by prostitutes, women forced by dire circumstances to sell their bodies, as a consequence of which most are now HIV positive.
Some see the arrival of Europeans in the midst as an opportunity to get new clients. Two simply but strikingly dressed women follow me as I wander through narrow alleys, catching up with me and ask me to take their picture. Another strikes a dignified pose in her doorway as I lift my camera while her naked baby walks gingerly on a fly-infested piece of sackcloth. Yet another invites me into her tiny shack of a home, on the façade of which hang skewers of dried fish. I politely refuse.
Outside her house are more racks with skewered fish from the nearby Lake Victoria and Lake Nabugabo. Meals meant for humans, but the flies have got there first in full force.
On the main street of the village, a man stands besides a small wooden stall, meat hanging from rusty hooks. Parts of the meat appear black, moving and alive - It’s the hundreds of flies crawling over it.
A drunken man, soaked in sweat, roams through the village, shadowing me, trying to attract my attention with unintelligible ravings. He’s clutching a dirty beer mug, drinking potent alcohol derived from fermented pineapples. The heat is intense, yet he wears a thick cardigan.
It’s overwhelming but intoxicating.
Vincent Ssempijja, Chairman of Masaka District, seems out of place as he walks around the slum. A tall imposing man in a smart suit, he is passionate about wanting to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants.
“We have problems of children who are malnourished, who don’t go to school,” he laments. The parents cannot afford to send them to school, to buy books, even though there is universal primary education in Uganda.
In addition, most people in the densely populated slum live in makeshift homes with no sanitation. The lack of latrines and safe water is acute.
“We have managed to extend piped water to the area,” explains Ssempijja. “People take water home in a jerry can. A 20 litre jerry can may have to serve ten people in a single home for a day, so that’s a severe lack of water, but that’s all they can afford - water is sold, not given free.”
In the hills outside the town, in a small nameless hamlet, a young widow whose husband was killed in the civil war lives in a small simple two-roomed brick building in a field of mud with her four children and her elderly mother-in-law. The inside is sparsely furnished with dusty straw mats on the mud floor and a couple of wooden stools. The children are barefoot, runny-nosed and dressed in mud covered clothes. A small black piglet is tied to a stake outside the house.
They survive on the little income they get from the surplus from the tiny banana plantation they have round the house, using the money for medicine when the children go down with malaria. If they have no surplus, they remain without money to buy anything. Their situation is dire - they cannot afford to pay for transport, usually provided by the boda-boda motorbikes taxis, to go to a hospital, even if their lives depend on it.
Yet, I remain impressed by the resilience of the people. Could it be that their lives are not so miserable after all? The children might be walking barefoot, and yet they’re still smiling.
The buzzing of flies, the whining drone of crying children, a cacophonic humdrum of sound of people going about what I imagine must be their miserable lives, numbs my mind. A child, no more than two years old, squats all alone in the mud next to a puddle of stagnant murky water, crying for his mother who is nowhere to be seen.
The overriding stench of urine mingling with frying of fish and other cooking are nauseating. Open sewers crisscross the village, their filthy effluent trickling through. Smoke from cooking fires lazily wafts through the air, catching the sunlight, creating a sense of drama where there is none.
Heavily laden clothes lines traverse the streets, creating a kaleidoscope of colours, unintentionally giving the place a surreal festive air. Cows, pigs and hens mingle freely with people, as though out for an evening stroll.
I’m in the sub county of Nyendo Senyange, in the Masaka district of south western Uganda, in a slum known to the locals as Kachuf. Kachuf is also a word in Luganda, the Ugandan language. It means "dirt" – enough said.
People coyly peer out of their homes from behind curtains, most very quick to vanish back into the shadows the moment they see a camera. Among the mud brick houses are some that have been painted in a variety of bright colours, others have their facades tiled. Many are housed by prostitutes, women forced by dire circumstances to sell their bodies, as a consequence of which most are now HIV positive.
Some see the arrival of Europeans in the midst as an opportunity to get new clients. Two simply but strikingly dressed women follow me as I wander through narrow alleys, catching up with me and ask me to take their picture. Another strikes a dignified pose in her doorway as I lift my camera while her naked baby walks gingerly on a fly-infested piece of sackcloth. Yet another invites me into her tiny shack of a home, on the façade of which hang skewers of dried fish. I politely refuse.
Outside her house are more racks with skewered fish from the nearby Lake Victoria and Lake Nabugabo. Meals meant for humans, but the flies have got there first in full force.
On the main street of the village, a man stands besides a small wooden stall, meat hanging from rusty hooks. Parts of the meat appear black, moving and alive - It’s the hundreds of flies crawling over it.
A drunken man, soaked in sweat, roams through the village, shadowing me, trying to attract my attention with unintelligible ravings. He’s clutching a dirty beer mug, drinking potent alcohol derived from fermented pineapples. The heat is intense, yet he wears a thick cardigan.
It’s overwhelming but intoxicating.
Vincent Ssempijja, Chairman of Masaka District, seems out of place as he walks around the slum. A tall imposing man in a smart suit, he is passionate about wanting to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants.
“We have problems of children who are malnourished, who don’t go to school,” he laments. The parents cannot afford to send them to school, to buy books, even though there is universal primary education in Uganda.
In addition, most people in the densely populated slum live in makeshift homes with no sanitation. The lack of latrines and safe water is acute.
“We have managed to extend piped water to the area,” explains Ssempijja. “People take water home in a jerry can. A 20 litre jerry can may have to serve ten people in a single home for a day, so that’s a severe lack of water, but that’s all they can afford - water is sold, not given free.”
In the hills outside the town, in a small nameless hamlet, a young widow whose husband was killed in the civil war lives in a small simple two-roomed brick building in a field of mud with her four children and her elderly mother-in-law. The inside is sparsely furnished with dusty straw mats on the mud floor and a couple of wooden stools. The children are barefoot, runny-nosed and dressed in mud covered clothes. A small black piglet is tied to a stake outside the house.
They survive on the little income they get from the surplus from the tiny banana plantation they have round the house, using the money for medicine when the children go down with malaria. If they have no surplus, they remain without money to buy anything. Their situation is dire - they cannot afford to pay for transport, usually provided by the boda-boda motorbikes taxis, to go to a hospital, even if their lives depend on it.
Yet, I remain impressed by the resilience of the people. Could it be that their lives are not so miserable after all? The children might be walking barefoot, and yet they’re still smiling.
Monday, June 15, 2009
REJECTED GIRLS AND THEIR UNWANTED BABIES
Published in The Times of Malta - June 15, 2009
11 year old Jacinta Kayemba (not her real name) was walking back home through the fields with some friends, carefully balancing a bright yellow jerry can of water on her head which she had just filled at the village water borehole. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a totally inebriated man jumped out of the bushes, terrifying the girls who broke into a frantic run away from the area. Jacinta ran as fast as she could, all the while trying not to drop her can of water. She looked back to see if the man was chasing them and tripped. She crashed to the ground, looked up from the dust, and saw with horror that her precious cargo was pouring out of the jerry can as the cap had come off with the fall.
It was a slight relief to see that the drunkard didn’t seem to be following her, but she now gripped by a greater fear – returning home without water would surely incur the wrath of her parents. Her friends had disappeared from sight. After some moments of hesitation, Jacinta decided to return to the borehole and refill the jerry can. Keeping her eyes peeled for any sign of movement in the bushes, she cautiously made her way back, placed her can under the spout, grabbed the large handle and started operating the pump handle, soon getting distracted by the rhythmic movement. She never saw the drunken man approach her from behind till he was pushing her to the ground, ripping her clothes and violently raping her.
Jacinta was too young to have ever had her period, yet it wasn’t long before she and her family realised she’d become pregnant. Despite the circumstances of the pregnancy, her parents disowned her and threw her out into the streets. It made no difference that she was pregnant through no fault of her own - she had dishonoured the family. In a sense, she was lucky. Many girls in similar predicaments over the years have been thrown off high cliffs by their parents.
Many girls have no-one to turn to, nowhere to go. Some lucky ones may have relatives who may take them in, but with abortion being illegal unless the pregnancy endangers a woman's life, many resort to back street abortions, often with devastating results. Unsafe abortion, often from untrained personnel using unsafe methods, is a leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality in the country. There are reports of poor women in villages resorting to desperate measures ranging from poisonous remedies from traditional healers to drinking detergents or inserting sharp sticks into their vaginas.
A 1993 study in Kampala hospitals found that 21% of maternal deaths were due to abortion-related complications, the second leading cause of death. A 1988 survey among women aged 15-24 years found that 23 per cent of all the women that had ever been pregnant had had one or more abortions. There appears to be little indication that things have changed much - a 2005 study by the Guttmacher Institute in New York and doctors at Kampala's Makerere University found that a staggering 85,000 Ugandan women are treated for abortion-related health complications each year.
The Wakisa Ministries institute was set up by Vivian Kityo Wakisa to combat this trend. Funded by friends in the USA and Australia, as well as some benefactors in Uganda itself, it receives no funding from NGOs. Primarily a crisis pregnancy counselling centre, it also serves as temporary shelter for pregnant girls who have decided to go ahead with their pregnancy and have been rejected by their parents. It provides vocational training and the girls take care of household chores such as cooking, cleaning and gardening.
Several pregnant teenage girls sat under a canopy in the spacious front garden as I walked in, weaving baskets and knitting colourful blankets, all part of the handcrafts they do in order to raise funds for the ministry. In the dormitory, a young mother, 17 year old Sylvia sat on her bed cradling her newborn child, aptly named Faith. Soon she would have to leave the institute and go and stay at an aunt’s place as both her parents are dead. Sylvia wants to go back to school, so her aunt will look after Faith, a beautiful child born out of a mistake made one fateful night. She may do as many like her have done before her, return to Wakisa Ministries to help run the centre and provide support to others who find themselves in a similar predicament.
Ms Kityo Wakisa contributes to regular columns and supplements in newspapers aimed at young people on the dangers of early sex, and what to do if it does happen to you or members of your family. A strict Christian, she doesn’t believe the solution to the promiscuity that appears rampant in the country and the unwanted pregnancies is the wider use of condoms. Most of the condoms distributed are old and expired; they tear easily so provide little if no protection against AIDS and other diseases as well as pregnancy. Coupled with the fact that so many unwanted pregnancies are due to rape, particularly in the north of the country which has been ravaged by civil war since the early 1980s, the scale of the problem comes as no surprise.
REJECTED GIRLS AND THEIR UNWANTED BABIES - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
11 year old Jacinta Kayemba (not her real name) was walking back home through the fields with some friends, carefully balancing a bright yellow jerry can of water on her head which she had just filled at the village water borehole. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a totally inebriated man jumped out of the bushes, terrifying the girls who broke into a frantic run away from the area. Jacinta ran as fast as she could, all the while trying not to drop her can of water. She looked back to see if the man was chasing them and tripped. She crashed to the ground, looked up from the dust, and saw with horror that her precious cargo was pouring out of the jerry can as the cap had come off with the fall.
It was a slight relief to see that the drunkard didn’t seem to be following her, but she now gripped by a greater fear – returning home without water would surely incur the wrath of her parents. Her friends had disappeared from sight. After some moments of hesitation, Jacinta decided to return to the borehole and refill the jerry can. Keeping her eyes peeled for any sign of movement in the bushes, she cautiously made her way back, placed her can under the spout, grabbed the large handle and started operating the pump handle, soon getting distracted by the rhythmic movement. She never saw the drunken man approach her from behind till he was pushing her to the ground, ripping her clothes and violently raping her.
Jacinta was too young to have ever had her period, yet it wasn’t long before she and her family realised she’d become pregnant. Despite the circumstances of the pregnancy, her parents disowned her and threw her out into the streets. It made no difference that she was pregnant through no fault of her own - she had dishonoured the family. In a sense, she was lucky. Many girls in similar predicaments over the years have been thrown off high cliffs by their parents.
Many girls have no-one to turn to, nowhere to go. Some lucky ones may have relatives who may take them in, but with abortion being illegal unless the pregnancy endangers a woman's life, many resort to back street abortions, often with devastating results. Unsafe abortion, often from untrained personnel using unsafe methods, is a leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality in the country. There are reports of poor women in villages resorting to desperate measures ranging from poisonous remedies from traditional healers to drinking detergents or inserting sharp sticks into their vaginas.
A 1993 study in Kampala hospitals found that 21% of maternal deaths were due to abortion-related complications, the second leading cause of death. A 1988 survey among women aged 15-24 years found that 23 per cent of all the women that had ever been pregnant had had one or more abortions. There appears to be little indication that things have changed much - a 2005 study by the Guttmacher Institute in New York and doctors at Kampala's Makerere University found that a staggering 85,000 Ugandan women are treated for abortion-related health complications each year.
The Wakisa Ministries institute was set up by Vivian Kityo Wakisa to combat this trend. Funded by friends in the USA and Australia, as well as some benefactors in Uganda itself, it receives no funding from NGOs. Primarily a crisis pregnancy counselling centre, it also serves as temporary shelter for pregnant girls who have decided to go ahead with their pregnancy and have been rejected by their parents. It provides vocational training and the girls take care of household chores such as cooking, cleaning and gardening.
Several pregnant teenage girls sat under a canopy in the spacious front garden as I walked in, weaving baskets and knitting colourful blankets, all part of the handcrafts they do in order to raise funds for the ministry. In the dormitory, a young mother, 17 year old Sylvia sat on her bed cradling her newborn child, aptly named Faith. Soon she would have to leave the institute and go and stay at an aunt’s place as both her parents are dead. Sylvia wants to go back to school, so her aunt will look after Faith, a beautiful child born out of a mistake made one fateful night. She may do as many like her have done before her, return to Wakisa Ministries to help run the centre and provide support to others who find themselves in a similar predicament.
Ms Kityo Wakisa contributes to regular columns and supplements in newspapers aimed at young people on the dangers of early sex, and what to do if it does happen to you or members of your family. A strict Christian, she doesn’t believe the solution to the promiscuity that appears rampant in the country and the unwanted pregnancies is the wider use of condoms. Most of the condoms distributed are old and expired; they tear easily so provide little if no protection against AIDS and other diseases as well as pregnancy. Coupled with the fact that so many unwanted pregnancies are due to rape, particularly in the north of the country which has been ravaged by civil war since the early 1980s, the scale of the problem comes as no surprise.
REJECTED GIRLS AND THEIR UNWANTED BABIES - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
Saturday, June 13, 2009
WHEN THE SOURCE OF LIFE DRIES UP
Published in The Times of Malta - June 13, 2009
The widow has been queuing to fill her three jerry cans with water in the village of Namungalwe in eastern Uganda for two days. She's tired and very frustrated. Her children are home alone waiting for her to return. Suddenly, her patience runs out, she roughly bulldozes her way to the front of the queue, knocking over other people's water containers, and shoves her jerrycan under the water spout. People shout, hair is pulled, the fallen cans spew their precious contents into the mud. She clutches the hand-operated pump and resolutely refuses to budge as two other women try to drag her away.
It's a common occurrence. The single water pump from a borehole is the only source of clean water for over two thousand people in the area, about half of whom live in the village. Queues are always long. Hours spent queuing feel even longer.
Similar scenarios are repeated all over the country. Water boreholes, and to a lesser extent springs, are the main source of water throughout most rural areas of Uganda. When they dry out or fall out of action for one reason or another, the community finds itself in deep trouble. There is a mammoth problem of water shortages in the country. Rain water harvesting hasn't really been exploited on a large effective scale, especially in water stressed areas.
One major problem with springs is that they don’t always provide a source of clean water. Springs are not protected – they are often contaminated by people and cattle bathing, and then that same water is collected to drink and cook with.
More water points are an urgent necessity for communities throughout rural Uganda. Because of the long distances to walk to waterholes, young girls, who are often the ones responsible for collecting water, end up missing school, or worse – several have been attacked and defiled on the miles-long lonely walks.
It’s not enough for foreign NGOs to come into the country and drill boreholes or build reservoirs. At the Katoosa Primary School in Kyenjonjo in western Uganda, a reservoir with a capacity for 80,000 litres of water is bone dry. There are no gutters on the roof to harvest water and feed it into the reservoir. Built in 2002 by the German federally-owned Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), it was then left with no maintenance, nor was any instruction given to the community as to how to maintain it. Nor were any funds for maintenance available. Consequently, a mere seven years later, it doesn’t hold a single drop of water, while the community continues to suffer from a chronic water shortage.
Catherine Amal, the Chief Administrative Officer of the Kyenjonjo district, laments that foreign aid has too many conditions attached and the time has come to relax those restrictions. “You’ve taught me how to fish, but you haven’t given me a fishing rod,” she complained.
“We would like more infrastructure development because when you look around the community and district, the area is full of poor people and poverty can only be removed by improving infrastructure services such as roads, water, electricity, better hospitals, better schools. Most of the aid given to us through donors and NGOs is for training. What is needed is money to address the gaps in our infrastructure. The government and donors should change from giving us money for training to money for infrastructure development - the people have been empowered, they know what they can do, they just lack the money to do it.”
In fairness, this has already started happening. Development Consultant Christina Roberts explained “Originally, all aid was directed towards infrastructure and nothing was left for training or maintenance. However, because things would need to be rebuilt from scratch after falling into disrepair, donors went to the other extreme and only funded training and skills development and didn’t give them anything to play with. But now they’re beginning to find a balance.”
Meanwhile, people are forced to improvise. In a small hamlet outside Masaka in southern Uganda, a young widow in a small brick hut she shares with her four children and her mother-in-law uses a single strip of corrugated iron perched on a stick tilting into a battered jerry can as a rudimentary form of water harvesting.
Without water, there can be no life, and it appears clear that the lack of clean safe water is one of the root problems in the country. From it stem the problems of poverty, lack of sanitation, disease coupled with poor health care, infant mortality.
The United Nation’s 7th Millennium Development Goal, that of ensuring environmental sustainability, speaks of halving by 2015, the proportion of the world’s population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The latest progress report indicates that Uganda will probably achieve that goal.
According to the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2007/2008, the number of Ugandans accessing improved water sources shot from 44% in 1990 to 60% in 2004, but there are fears the trend may be reversed if urgent measures are not taken to address the challenges of population growth, increased urbanization and industrialization. Uncontrolled environmental degradation and pollution also threatens the quality and sustainability of the country’s fresh water resources.
The Times photojournalist Darrin Zammit Lupi was recently in Uganda accompanying a field-trip which was part of an EU-funded project entitled Media Engagement in Development Issues and Promotion (MEDIP). The project, led by SOS Malta, aims at promoting awareness among policy makers and the public, through the media, in six of the new EU Member States about development issues and the eight Millennium Development Goals.
The Times will carry a series of reportages over the coming weeks.
When the Source of Life Dries Up - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
The widow has been queuing to fill her three jerry cans with water in the village of Namungalwe in eastern Uganda for two days. She's tired and very frustrated. Her children are home alone waiting for her to return. Suddenly, her patience runs out, she roughly bulldozes her way to the front of the queue, knocking over other people's water containers, and shoves her jerrycan under the water spout. People shout, hair is pulled, the fallen cans spew their precious contents into the mud. She clutches the hand-operated pump and resolutely refuses to budge as two other women try to drag her away.
It's a common occurrence. The single water pump from a borehole is the only source of clean water for over two thousand people in the area, about half of whom live in the village. Queues are always long. Hours spent queuing feel even longer.
Similar scenarios are repeated all over the country. Water boreholes, and to a lesser extent springs, are the main source of water throughout most rural areas of Uganda. When they dry out or fall out of action for one reason or another, the community finds itself in deep trouble. There is a mammoth problem of water shortages in the country. Rain water harvesting hasn't really been exploited on a large effective scale, especially in water stressed areas.
One major problem with springs is that they don’t always provide a source of clean water. Springs are not protected – they are often contaminated by people and cattle bathing, and then that same water is collected to drink and cook with.
More water points are an urgent necessity for communities throughout rural Uganda. Because of the long distances to walk to waterholes, young girls, who are often the ones responsible for collecting water, end up missing school, or worse – several have been attacked and defiled on the miles-long lonely walks.
It’s not enough for foreign NGOs to come into the country and drill boreholes or build reservoirs. At the Katoosa Primary School in Kyenjonjo in western Uganda, a reservoir with a capacity for 80,000 litres of water is bone dry. There are no gutters on the roof to harvest water and feed it into the reservoir. Built in 2002 by the German federally-owned Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), it was then left with no maintenance, nor was any instruction given to the community as to how to maintain it. Nor were any funds for maintenance available. Consequently, a mere seven years later, it doesn’t hold a single drop of water, while the community continues to suffer from a chronic water shortage.
Catherine Amal, the Chief Administrative Officer of the Kyenjonjo district, laments that foreign aid has too many conditions attached and the time has come to relax those restrictions. “You’ve taught me how to fish, but you haven’t given me a fishing rod,” she complained.
“We would like more infrastructure development because when you look around the community and district, the area is full of poor people and poverty can only be removed by improving infrastructure services such as roads, water, electricity, better hospitals, better schools. Most of the aid given to us through donors and NGOs is for training. What is needed is money to address the gaps in our infrastructure. The government and donors should change from giving us money for training to money for infrastructure development - the people have been empowered, they know what they can do, they just lack the money to do it.”
In fairness, this has already started happening. Development Consultant Christina Roberts explained “Originally, all aid was directed towards infrastructure and nothing was left for training or maintenance. However, because things would need to be rebuilt from scratch after falling into disrepair, donors went to the other extreme and only funded training and skills development and didn’t give them anything to play with. But now they’re beginning to find a balance.”
Meanwhile, people are forced to improvise. In a small hamlet outside Masaka in southern Uganda, a young widow in a small brick hut she shares with her four children and her mother-in-law uses a single strip of corrugated iron perched on a stick tilting into a battered jerry can as a rudimentary form of water harvesting.
Without water, there can be no life, and it appears clear that the lack of clean safe water is one of the root problems in the country. From it stem the problems of poverty, lack of sanitation, disease coupled with poor health care, infant mortality.
The United Nation’s 7th Millennium Development Goal, that of ensuring environmental sustainability, speaks of halving by 2015, the proportion of the world’s population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The latest progress report indicates that Uganda will probably achieve that goal.
According to the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2007/2008, the number of Ugandans accessing improved water sources shot from 44% in 1990 to 60% in 2004, but there are fears the trend may be reversed if urgent measures are not taken to address the challenges of population growth, increased urbanization and industrialization. Uncontrolled environmental degradation and pollution also threatens the quality and sustainability of the country’s fresh water resources.
The Times photojournalist Darrin Zammit Lupi was recently in Uganda accompanying a field-trip which was part of an EU-funded project entitled Media Engagement in Development Issues and Promotion (MEDIP). The project, led by SOS Malta, aims at promoting awareness among policy makers and the public, through the media, in six of the new EU Member States about development issues and the eight Millennium Development Goals.
The Times will carry a series of reportages over the coming weeks.
When the Source of Life Dries Up - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
Thursday, June 11, 2009
SHOOTING GSSE 2009
I got back from the Games of the Small States of Europe in Cyprus a few days ago. It was an exhausting week, but well worth it. The overall performance of the Maltese team may have been disappointing, but I'm pretty happy with the photos. I wouldn't have minded having more time shooting athletics and swimming, and I missed the gymnastics events completely, but that's what happens when you have several events to cover which are huge distances apart. Don't know if I've ever worked so hard all my life actually - never managed more than 3 or 4 hours sleep a night for the whole week. We'd meet for breakfast at 7 or 7.30 in the morning, travel from Larnaca to Nicosia or Limassol, and not be back at the hotel before half midnight, and only then start thinking about dinner (or maybe I could say a very late lunch?).
But on the whole, in retrospect, no complaints (apart from the lousy organisation and wifi that wasn't working half the time at the venues) - only thing still irking me is that my two favourite pictures from the games don't show Maltese athletes, hence rendering them somewhat useless for the paper.
Games of the Small States of Europe, Cyprus, 2009 - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
But on the whole, in retrospect, no complaints (apart from the lousy organisation and wifi that wasn't working half the time at the venues) - only thing still irking me is that my two favourite pictures from the games don't show Maltese athletes, hence rendering them somewhat useless for the paper.
Games of the Small States of Europe, Cyprus, 2009 - Images by Darrin Zammit Lupi
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