It’s just past midnight on a hot, dry night in Kwai, a rural village in Nigeria’s Plateau State. Rebecca Emmanuel (pictured) wakes instinctively, despite having been asleep for just two hours.
She rises from bed, a foam mattress on the floor of her hut, shakes her two sons awake and kisses her sleeping toddler.
Outside, an old worn trolley is stacked with assorted buckets, pots and plastic containers. Rebecca and her boys take turns to push it over the rough ground between their home and the village pump, trekking the familiar journey in silence.
At the water tap, a queue of about 60 women has already formed. Rebecca joins the line wearily. It will be sunrise before she reaches the front. “We do this trip every night,” she says. “My life has become a constant search for water.”
A group of women nearby murmur in agreement: “In the dry season, the tap drips so slowly,” says one. “All I do is sit and wait.”
A woman with a baby on her back shows me a rash on the child’s arms. “This is from washing her in the dam. Now I come to this tap for drinking and bathing water.”
The water shortage in this 8,000-strong community has reached crisis point. Water-borne diseases are rife, particularly among children and the elderly.
During the dry season, people leave in hordes when the village dam dries up. The school closes when shortages reach their peak, and the medical clinic is empty – trained staff come and go, unable to cope with the living conditions.
Rebecca knows the dangers better than most. Last year she almost died from typhoid, and is still paying off the medical bills that stacked up during her month in hospital.
Her oldest son, 15-year-old Bitrus, is thin and feverish. Rebecca suspects he may have hepatitis but she can’t afford to have him tested.
“The government turns a blind eye to our problems,” she says. “They ignore our needs until something dramatic happens, like an outbreak of cholera, then they promise to do something… but that something never happens.”
Her despair is understandable. In Nigeria, corruption and embezzlement go largely unchecked, with poor rural communities some of the worst affected.
“Our anger gets us nowhere,” remarks Rebecca. “We have no voice, nobody listens to us.”
Despite the frustration and sadness I feel at the plight of Rebecca and her neighbours, just five minutes in the company of Sister Esther Shibi is the perfect antidote.
Her enthusiasm is utterly infectious. “Look at this,” she says with a big smile, holding two glasses of water aloft. “This is – literally – the difference that our project makes.”
One glass contains water straight from the dam; the main water supply for most villagers. It is brownish and murky-looking, full of sediments that have floated to the bottom of the glass. The second is dam water that has been filtered. Crystal clear, it looks like mineral water.
Sister Esther is director of the Catholic Archdiocesan Rural and Urban Development Programme which has been working in Kwai for the last five years providing people with filters to ensure the water they drink is clean and disease-free. CAFOD is a core funder of this local, highly effective charity.
The filter she shows me belongs to 42-year-old Bosco, a taxi driver who can’t believe the difference clean water has made to his family’s health.
“My wife has had cholera three times,” he says. “But since the filter she’s been well. This year she started a college course in agriculture. I am amazed by her new strength.”
The water filters are ingenious contraptions which rely on sand, charcoal and gravel. Unlike other filtration methods they use biological processes to clean the water, and do not require chemicals or electricity to operate.
Cheap to buy and easy to maintain, they are ideal for poor communities such as Kwai.
The programme also helps alleviate water shortages in hard hit areas of Nigeria by harvesting rainwater. So far, rainwater catchment tanks have been fitted to the church, the mosque and the primary school in Kwai as well as to a handful of houses.
During the rainy season, water runs from the roof of these buildings into gutters which channel the water into a huge drum.
Each drum is fitted with a lock and key so that water use can be managed by a designated person in the community at the height of the dry season.
“The work we do is not a solution to the water problems,” says Sister Esther. “But our project has brought hope to people who felt hopeless.
“For those who have benefited, life is never the same again.”
Posted by SarahD
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