A Water Blog

How’s your water? Flowing nicely out of your kitchen and bathrooms sinks? Filling and showering nicely in your tub? With a full tank, flushing your toilets? Here in Jumbo #1 it’s a little different. For a population of 1,700 we have 6 boreholes (mechanical water pumps). It lifts water 60+ feet from below ground via the muscle and sweat of women and children. This week in the village 2 of these 6 boreholes were still working. The rest had broken or worn out from overuse, abuse by small children, and an ever-sinking water table. As a result, there was a 2-3 hour wait to fetch a headpan from each of the 2 working boreholes. The average adult needs ½ a head pan a day to drink, cook, and bathe. If you are the workhorse in your house (a 8-10 year old girl), you typically fetch water before going to school in the morning. Now those 2-3 head pans take 6-9 hours to fetch. Forget school. Don’t mind that exams are next week. If you’re the youngest wife in a family, forget going to farm to harvest cassava to sell at market during a season where there is no money in the house. You have an entire day of fetching water ahead of you.

Here’s some American perspective. Imagine that all the BPs and Kwik Trips closed down. Only one or two gas stations are open in your town. You’re gonna be waiting all day to fill your tank. Okay, so the boreholes are too time consuming, is there another option? The stream nearby! Oh wait, that dried up 2 months ago (and never was safe for drinking anyway). Another? The Kpassa river (which flows year-round). Perfect. This water has more taste AND color than boring, “safe to drink” borehole water anyway. It’s only a 4km walk one-way, so within an hour, you can have a head pan of water back at your home. Only 13% of Ghanaians have access to sanitation (a toilet of any kind). So, drinking unfiltered water from the river can lead to dysentery, giardia, and cholera. Fetching water from surface water sources could also being back guinea worm, which Ghana and outside NGOs worked very hard to eradicate several years back.

How did this become a problem in Jumbo in the first place? No one wants to pay for  water. In most places in Ghana, if you fetch a head pan of water, you pay a small fee before you can draw it. That money accumulates and is used for maintenance. In our village people do not consider that boreholes break and wear out and require money for maintenance. Furthermore, people don’t trust each other with money.  They need  to SEE that a borehole is broken before they are moved to action. And all the while everyone is complaining about water. Here’s the latest suggestion from some women: “Extend the piped water in town to the village, then it will not break down.” They feel donating 1GHC (65 cents) every 2-3 months is too much. The math disagrees, however. Piped water costs 0.2 cedi (12 cents) per head pan. If you fetch 3 head pans a day that’s 0.6 cedi…in 30 days that’s 18GHC ($11.25) per month. This, in comparison to at most 1GHC in two months?!

Now, another thing you might be worried about: how’s it affecting us!? Do I lose sleep over water? Yeah, probably, I’m a light sleeper and a worrier to boot. Are we drinking greenish brown river water? No. We are still drinking borehole water, it just comes at a price. We pay some students to fetch us this “clear gold” from one of the remaining stressed boreholes.

If you didn’t win the latest megamillions lottery, here’s something to be thankful for that is easy to take for granted in the US. If you have safe freshwater to drink, cook, and clean with, you’re better off than 1/6 of the world, or almost a billion people.