Water Projects

One of the things my dad and I spent a few days doing while he was here was visiting different water projects. For those of you weren’t aware, my dad has spent the better part of the last decade working in the water industry as a regional manager for a national water utility company. He is also involved in at an NFP that tackles water issues and works to distribute water to those without access in developing countries. I guess you could say water is near and dear to his heart. Therefore, his one special request was for me to arrange to tour the Arusha water facilities / projects over the duration of his stay.

As it turned out, two such opportunities presented themselves. The first was a tour of an ongoing water project that involved building a water main from Arusha to several villages located 10 to 25km outside of Arusha. The first phase of the project had recently been completed, which brought water to three of the five villages, and they were currently in the process of obtaining funding for the second phase, which will bring water to the remaining two villages.

The second opportunity was to head out to a village at the base of Mt. Longido, an area about 80km northwest of Arusha, to attend the kick off meeting for a project aiming to build a water main from the village’s current water source up on the mountain back down to the village. This specific meeting was to inform the villagers of the project, lay out the responsibilities and expectations of each party, and begin the process of electing a ‘water committee’, which would represent the 1,000+ villagers in any major decisions concerning the project.

While both of these experiences proved to be interesting on a number of levels, one aspect that particularly stuck with me was being awoken to the reality that for a number of people in this world, water is still a rare and precious commodity. Before even embarking on either of these trips, I already fully realized that, like most other things, access to water is not nearly at the level of that in the U.S. For instance, when walking on the path back toward the hostel, I often see farmers working in their small fields. However, rather than using sprinklers and other modern technology that we employ to water our yards and fields, they use irrigation ditches to carry the water around the fields, and then bucket the water out of the ditches and throw it onto the different areas of the field. On a smaller but more personal level, it’s not uncommon to lose water pressure several times a day here at the hostel, which prevents anyone from taking showers for a few hours until adequate pressure returns. As a third example, I'll use a story Caroline told me about an Umoja Centre student which had to do with water. Apparently, he was falling asleep in class one afternoon, so the teacher asked him to leave and go report to Caroline. When Caroline asked why he was having so much trouble staying awake, he told her that water in his village only comes through the water pipes at off-peak times in the early hours of the morning. It was his turn to get the water the previous night, and therefore he had to get up at 3am and then wait for an hour at the community access point before he was able to get a bucket of water for his family (How’s that for a reason to be sleeping in class? Needless to say, he didn’t get in trouble).

In my opinion, however, all of these experiences pale in comparison to what those living in the remote villages outside of Arusha and in Longido (along with virtually every other remote village in Tanzania, and I’m assuming much of the rest of the developing world as well) must do to obtain water in the absence of a water main. The villagers in Longido, who as I mentioned are only in the process of beginning to build a water main, have to walk an hour and a half up the mountain just to reach their water source. They are then limited to taking back only what they can carry on the 1.5 hour return journey. I can’t remember exactly what those living in the villagers around Arusha had to do before their water main was built, but I know that it was little better, and probably even worse. In addition to the shear difficulty of walking these long distance, half of which carrying heavy buckets of water, this also puts a tremendous dent in the productivity of the villagers themselves, as they have to dedicate so much time to obtaining water when they could otherwise spend it doing much more productive work if a water main carried it to them instead

These villagers are mostly poor rural dwellers who depend on agriculture and animal domestication for their livelihood, and they therefore have a higher than normal demand for water on a per person basis in comparison to most city dwellers. This, along with the distance of the villages from major cities with developed water distribution infrastructure, makes for a huge challenge in providing these remote villages with water. First, an adequate water supply within close proximity must actually exist around these villages, which isn’t a given. If such a source has been found, the challenge is then in building an adequate distribution system. In addition to the normal geographic challenges that exist in building such a distribution system,engineers must also take into account the practical challenges of building a pipe that carries such a precious resource. For instance, when the NGO first started building the water main from Arusha to the surrounding villages, it didn't think about creating access points for cattle. However, the surrounding villagers who depend on cattle for their livelihood couldn't afford to refrain from having their cattle drink from the water being distributed by the main when no other source was available. Therefore, on several occasions they broke the main to allow their cattle access to the water, spilling tens of thousands of gallons in the process. The NGO did learn from the process, and has since installed cattle access points at reasonable intervals along the water main, but this serves as a perfect example of how the challenge is made more complex by the fact that a severe water shortage already exists.

How to go about eventually resolving the problems associated with providing poor, remote areas with access to water, I don't know, especially given that many developed areas are experiencing water rationing themselves (e.g., Australia, parts of the Western U.S.). However, I imagine that it, along with finding alternative energy sources and reducing pollution, will be at the forefront of the challenges facing our world in the century to come.