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