Five times a day, Agnes Munthali hikes barefoot half a mile from a grass-roofed hut to fetch water for her thirsty children, balancing a sloshing 5-gallon bucket on her head. Corn barely sprouts from surrounding fields. Nearly half of Malawi’s 12 million people face starvation.
But water needs gnaw most urgently here and across rural Africa, where 303 million villagers lack access to a safe source. Waterborne disease kills thousands every day.
Munthali and others carry the buckets, weighing up to 45 pounds, using bone, muscle and sheer will, while the gray Zombwe Mountains loom in the distance.
On a recent clear morning, Munthali, a vivacious 35-year-old whose smile reveals a missing front tooth, shrieked with laughter at an outsider’s suggestion that the government will address water woes.
For villagers, government “doesn’t work,” Munthali said. Villagers can’t even approach politicians, she said. If one did, politicians “would turn him down.”
As it is, Munthali and her water- carrying neighbors consider themselves lucky.
For the first time in years, the water they haul is clean – not because Malawi’s government helped, but because Engucwini connected with a private group of Americans half a world away.
The villagers teamed up with Water for People, a Denver-based group that funds self-help projects. This year, the group arranged for installation of a 150-foot-deep well within a mile of Munthali’s mud-brick hut.
“I’m very happy about this,” she said.
More than 2,000 villagers a day flock to this well for clean water. Previously, they had no choice but to drink contaminated water from hand-dug pits.
Americans may assume the world’s poorest people suffer silently, but more and more are able to ask for help using cellphones, e-mail and other connections, circumventing corrupt or cumbersome governments, said Solomon Nkiwane, a Zimbabwean political scientist at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.
Villagers increasingly form committees and pursue their interests anywhere they can find help, Nkiwane said.
“This people-to-people thing is beginning. It may be a drop in the bucket. But maybe this is the approach we should take,” he said.
Malawian life expectancy has fallen from 42 years in the 1970s to 39 in recent years because of AIDS and diseases caused by contaminated water. And income is falling. Farmers in this area earn about $8 a month.
The project began a few years ago when the local doctor, Steven Chavinda, 65, called chiefs together and asked: “What are your greatest needs?” All the chiefs said the same thing: clean water. One chief, Mishek Ndzima, had lost his son to cholera, spread by feces in water.
Chavinda told a U.S. Peace Corps worker posted nearby, who informed a Malawian who worked as regional coordinator for Water for People. That led to installation over the past 18 months of two wells at a cost of $25,000. Denver-based supervisors lined up a local crew to drill the holes and oversee maintenance training.
“The best solutions come from sitting down as close to the problem as possible and talking with the people,” said Steve Werner, executive director of Water for People, at his headquarters in Denver.
Villagers worldwide propose dozens of projects each month, often learning of the group through the Internet. Werner and 20 staffers in five countries review all proposals. Sponsored by the American Waterworks Association trade group, they fund what they can on an annual budget of around $2.8 million: about 80 projects, including 40 wells from Bolivia to Vietnam.
In Malawi, the first of the two wells helped revive the local health clinic. The clinic, built in 1984, for years offered only limited services because of a lack of water. Government officials never supplied medicine as they do at other rural clinics. Radios for emergency communications weren’t maintained. A 10-bed maternity wing never opened.
This year, villagers notified health officials that the clinic has water from a foreign-funded well with a solar-powered pump. And health-ministry crews delivered mattresses for maternity beds, said Manford Nyirenda, 49, chairman of the village water committee.
“We pushed them into action,” Nyirenda said, smiling, finger on the pump power switch.
At the other well, Munthali gripped a hand pump and pushed up and down as the noon sun beat down. Clear water gushed from the tap.
Women and girls took turns filling blue and orange buckets, chattering. Between buckets, girls jockeyed to drink from the tap, including Munthali’s pride and joy, Memory, 8, in a torn red dress.
Last year, Memory got sick after drinking contaminated water from a shallow well. “Very bad for her,” Munthali said. Purifying water by boiling was impractical, given limited wood in the area.
Most of the 18,000 villagers around Engucwini still rely on water drawn from hand-dug pits. Cloudy, stagnant pools in the pits contain bacteria that cause cholera and diarrhea, known locally as “open bowels.”
Malarial mosquitoes breed in mud around the pools. Women wash clothes close by.
At the health clinic, the doctor Chavinda recently faced Ester Chiumia, 32, cradling her dehydrated month-old son, Samuel. She had walked since sunrise to reach Chavinda in his concrete building without electricity. Now it was noon.
Gazing down at her baby, Chi umia said Samuel had bloody diarrhea and no appetite.
Chavinda looked at her silently at first. At that moment, he lacked the right medication. He saw Chiumia practically shaking with fear. He gave her a folded piece of paper containing a couple tablets of an adult antibiotic – the closest substitute he could find – with instructions to cut each pill in half.
Chiumia nodded, still worried. She told the doctor the water she hauls “looks dark. … We have no choice.”
At least 150 villagers die around Engucwini each year from easily preventable sickness from contaminated water, Chavinda said. Deaths decreased a bit recently in the area around Engucwini’s two new wells, he said, “but we’ve got a lot more work to do.” He reckoned Engucwini needs at least 20 wells.
Today, girls skip school to join the stoic parade of women hauling water. And mothers are resigned that contaminated water will kill kids.
“We do take chances here,” one woman said, watching her granddaughter, Tiyese Chirwa, climb down a log into a muddy pit and dip her bucket into a plate-sized milky pool of water.
Some villagers here struggle to find water at all. At an outlying area called Chileda, there are no wells within 5 miles for an estimated 5,000 people. For them, even marginal water is precious.
Barefoot boys in raggedy clothes were there, some with bellies bloated from malnourishment, crouched around a drying water hole. They had been digging it out a bit trying to coax more water from the ground. A saucer-sized cloudy white pool of water only grew more opaque.
Desperate, Chileda chiefs recently dispatched Frank Kumwenda, 29, to go to the regional capital, Mzuzu, for help.
He set out by bicycle at 4 a.m., bouncing down a dirt road. He pedaled furiously, crossed the sewage-contaminated Kasitu River before anybody was up and reached the pavement of Malawi’s main north-south road.
Then, moving along faster, he noticed some roadside villages had wells. “I compared them to us,” Kumwenda said. “We are still behind.”
Kumwenda drank from one well, savoring the water on his journey.
He reached Mzuzu and its government offices by 9 a.m.
“I found the secretary,” Kumwenda said.
He announced that he had come to get help for his village.
“The secretary said, ‘The boss is not in the office,”‘ he said.
When he rode home that afternoon after a fruitless wait and told what had happened, the chiefs were angry.
Kumwenda planned to try again soon.
Meanwhile, Munthali, sitting with relatives at their tidy farm compound, said she wants to be part of a local maintenance team to make sure the new wells work properly.
Men had assumed they would travel for maintenance training, but Munthali said, “We’ll need a good mix.” After all, women haul most of the water.
And while acknowledging the pressing needs of villagers at Chileda, she also proposed drilling a new well closer to her home.
Today, even with a clean water source a half mile away, she and Memory still must devote much of each day to trekking back and forth.
In America, “people have a much easier life,” Munthali said. “How can that happen here?”
hikes barefoot half a mile from a grass-roofed hut to fetch water
for her thirsty children, balancing a sloshing 5-gallon bucket on her head.
Corn barely sprouts from surrounding fields. Nearly half of Malawi’s 12 million people face starvation.
