 What's the situation with regard to water?"Water is a problem. In a country that has two rainy seasons, the short rains and the long, the problem is distribution. In Dar-Es-Salaam there are about 5 million people, and it's grown faster that the infrastructure. So people dig wells in their gardens - well, they don't have many gardens, people are living in a slum - but they dig wells, and there is a system of stand pipes. But some years back, when the British government used to give money and make conditions, which it finally stopped doing, they gave money for the water system in Dar-Es-Salaam to be upgraded and improved, provided it went to a private company. It went to a company called BiWater who completely screwed the whole thing up. Dar-Es-Salaam didn't get water in any kind of efficient manner, and people were paying huge amounts for it. People got very cross, and the government got very cross, and eventually the government ended the contract with BiWater. So BiWater decided to sue the Tanzanian government. The government has now taken over the water system in Dar-Es-Salaam, and they are trying to do something about it.When we first went to the Makete district we started in a village called Bulongwa because we have a friend and colleague in Dar-Es-Salaam who comes from there. It made sense to go somewhere where she had information and relatives. She's wonderful, she's how we source and send money to different bank accounts now. When she first suggested we went there we met with a group of 'the diaspora' - people living in Dar-Es-Salaam who come from that village. They said they need three things: education, the roads, and water. This water system had been put in when Sophia was at primary school, and she's 51 now, by the Danish international development agency Donedo, and it's never worked properly. There are stand pipes all round the village and huge collection tanks, but unless it was really rainy people weren't getting any water. We tried and tried to get to the bottom of this mystery, and we got to know the water department at this district council really well. We listened for hours to people telling us why it won't work, and we even invaded the water offices in the big cities, trying to get somebody to take some action. In the end the district council got a new water engineer and he really listened to us. They produced these plans for us to spend millions and millions of shillings re-doing the whole system for the district, and we said we couldn't afford that, what else could they do? In the end we agreed we had to start small. This new water engineer, Mr Molungu, turned up and drew up a plan. The water comes from an intake higher up in the mountains above Bulongwa and it serves a grid of 14 villages. There've been accusations all along that other villages were tapping into it before it got to Bulongwa. This did turn out to be partially true: the first village was taking an awful lot of it. So we've now funded a new water tank for that first village, and they have agreed they will stop tapping in illegally. We've given some money for repairs down the whole system, to cut off the illegal tapping and make sure the pipes all fit into each other. Last year when we went they took us to see this water tank, and they omitted to tell us what the road was like on the way up. It was one of the most scary roads I've ever been on. We started off at Makete town on this unmade-up road - all the roads are unmade-up - and we got higher and higher, and we saw this road snaking up the mountains. We were thinking, we're not going up there, are we? We were! A lot of it was on a knife edge, and it was really dry because they were waiting for the rain. There was bright red dust and we all came back completely covered in it, clouds and clouds of it. Eventually after about two hours we got to the intake and the water tank was being built, and there was plenty of water left, it was gushing in. This year in June it suddenly started working, and people in Bulongwa were saying 'We've got water!' There is still more to do. We've purchased 2km of pipework to go in. Because of the repairs largely everyone else is getting water except the village at the very end of the system, and that will be getting it once everything's finished. They're only getting it on alternate days at the moment. It's flowing, and people are really pleased about that, but it's taken six years of continuous nagging, and trying to become experts in something, when John's an economist and I'm an English graduate. Water and school toilets were the theme of our visit this time. There was the Bulongwa water which was a real success - we hope - and it'll be completed next summer. By May we hope we'll have some more money to start re-funding them. In Carsi district the District Executive Director asked us to look at this school in a village on the shore of lake Tanganyika, because they hadn't had any water for a year. So we duly went down this horrific road, a bumpy road, to this school 4 kilometres from the village, up a hill, and their pump had given up the ghost. It was last September or October. The kids were supposedly bringing water up the hill from the village, and then they boiled it - supposedly. There was an outbreak of cholera in the village earlier this year. When we went to the village it transpired that none of the village pumps were working either, and they were getting the water out of the lake. Which is beautiful, but lethal. In the village their dispensary, which is their health centre, consisted of the normal room they have for dispensing, and the next building was the cholera isolation ward." How many died?"Only one. But a lot of people were ill. Outbreaks of it happen every year along the coast, because the same thing happens everywhere. Part of the problem is although there's water, pumps require maintenance. Every village has a water committee which people are elected on to, and they raise a tax. Not everyone can pay the tax, they don't have enough money, and then the pump breaks and there's no water, so nobody wants to pay. And the district council which is responsible for water doesn't always have the money to play a supervisory role. It's a major problem.We took the water technicians round with us on this visit. On a dreary, rainy February day we went into this secondary school and we were being taken round by a guy who had been there as a child. We chatted to the headteacher and said 'What are your priorities?' She said, 'I've got 510 students. I've got 5 teachers. They want to run away and so do I.' So we gave her a football we had. But we have supported her and that school has really turned around. They've got solar power. And they've got a 6th form, which is a prestige thing, and it means the government give a lot of extra funding." Why don't people boil water more often to prevent cholera?"It's a cultural thing. They think, 'It looks clean.'"What about the cost of fuel?"There is that. There are huge, huge problems about fuel. On the whole, even in towns, people use charcoal. It's carcinogenic. You sometimes see houses burnt down. And the effect on the environment is disastrous because it means cutting down trees, making them into charcoal and not replacing them. That leads to water supply problems as well as degradation of the land. But it's hard to stop people doing it if you haven't got a replacement. They don't have natural fuels like gas, although calor gas is sometimes used. There are things like sun ovens and sterilising water by putting it in a plastic bottle on your roof, but people just don't do it. We are looking at rainwater harvesting for the school we went to visit, which will not be for the whole year but it'll be better than nothing, because we can't afford to get them a borehole dug. We're doing that in another school in the district. We got a grant for that from a charity called Water For Kids. But we've got to get that up and running before we can ask them for any more money. It costs about £8000 to get a borehole dug, because they have to bring in equipment from miles away."So what's on TRR's wishlist?"Once you've made commitments you have to keep on doing them. One of our big things at the moment is shipping a 40 foot container of medical equipment used by the NHS, but in perfect working order, and what they want. We're being given, well, slightly sold it by a charity called Aid To Hospitals Worldwide who assured us at the time that they knew how to ship it. They've fallen out with their shipping agent, and anyway we didn't have confidence that they knew about getting things to rural Tanzania. We thought they might know about getting things to other ports in the area.So it's been a long saga. John and I are going to London to talk to a Tanzanian shipping agent. It's going to be the most expensive thing we've ever done. But it will provide about £130 000 worth of equipment, and it's going to a government-funded district hospital run by Makete district council. Until we've got that out of the way - our shipping date is the 9th of February - it's hard to allocate money to other things. We do have regular money coming in on standing orders, but it needs to be more. We've got outstanding things, like we need to do something about the water in this village Cabe, where the school is. I spent my birthday visiting a cholera-infested village! I think our next priorities are going to be water, and school toilets, oh my! We're waiting to get the medical equipment out of the way before deciding our future priorities, beyond continuing to support what we're doing. One thing the schools have asked us for this year is supporting school meals. They're all starting it because the government says it's a good idea, but the government haven't given any money as usual. The government are trying, they really are! Primary schools are trying to introduce it because there is a feeling they probably don't get enough food at home. They're not starving, but there's a lot of research about children behaving better and learning better. So some of them provide breakfast or lunch. We are going to fund some of that because we think it's a priority, but again it's making a huge revenue commitment." What about other health issues?The health problems we know about are the cholera and malaria on the coast of Tanganyika. Malaria is a huge child killer. And HIV is a major killer in the Makete district, coupled in Carsi with bronchial problems like asthma and bronchitis. Makete has the highest prevalence of HIV in Tanzania because it's very near Zambia and Malawi and men travel to find work, and people when they're away from their families bring it back. But we've got some anecdotal evidence that the problem is getting better. Not so many people are contracting it. There's more evidence of people finding ways of living with it. We've supported a charity that supports peer education for people suffering from HIV, and they've got a number of projects to do with confidence and self-esteem, and being open and getting tested. The thing that hit us when we first went was the number of orphans. But if you look at primary school figures now, these numbers are going down.The DED, the District Executive Director, in Makete had lost 58 members of his staff to HIV in the preceding year. About 28 of them were teachers. I have got a new measure of development I'd like to tell you about, to do with women. Lots of people, especially around towns, ride bicycles because they're nice and cheap. Lots of people sit on the same bicycle: there'll be a guy cycling at the front, the woman sitting side-saddle, and maybe a baby or a small child in front of the man. But you never ever saw a woman on a bicycle. However, last year I suddenly noticed more women riding bicycles on their own. I've been shouting every time I've seen one, and John and Michael keep saying, 'Oh, that's not a woman, that's a boy,' or 'No, she's only walking next to it, she's holding it for her husband!' and stuff like that. I can actually confirm there are more and more women riding bicycles. So I'm starting a new organisation called WOBBLE: Women On Bicycles Being Liberated and Empowered!" [Lesley laughs] We hear a lot on TV about famines in Africa, crises that come back year after year. It seems ongoing, whereas the impression I get from you is that you're making progress and doing something that has an effect."We're doing things in a very small way. But unless you do things in a small way nothing ever changes.I think the world as a whole doesn't look at development in the right way. For years the West have been trying to turn the third world into models of themselves, with our democratic models and so on. That doesn't work. You've got to have in place systems of preventing war and hunger, and preventing what might become a major crisis, which is a water shortage. You've got to work on preventing these things happening and not trying to clean them up when they do, and that takes national and international governments, and it takes a mindset change. I'm really pleased the Labour government dropped the conditionality clause on giving aid. That was the other arm of what John and I wanted to do: to try and influence the government, and to do things on this small scale with John and Rosemary and Tony. We harangued Hilary Benn an awful lot." Many thanks for this interview, Lesley.To learn more, go to the Tanzania Rural Revival website. Or please look at my book sale in aid of Tanzania Rural RevivalAn Interview With Lesley Koumi: Part 1 |
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