We always begin by delivering clean water, whether by drilling boreholes, mending pumps, providing rainwater harvesting or connecting to the mains water supply. We are enormously helped in this by our sponsors, consulting engineers Arup who make their expert knowledge freely available to us.
Our local staff, led by Nicholas Aboagye, spend a few weeks teaching the villagers about health and hygiene. Getting people to change their habits isn’t easy. Nicholas shows the villagers how to construct latrines, buys in materials which aren’t available locally and helps the villagers make about twenty demonstration models. After that it is down to individual families. We share the cost of the materials needed for one latrine per family, and provide communal latrines and washing facilities for schools.
The difference all this makes is enormous. Traditionally, women might have spent four or five hours a day fetching water: now they have that time free to generate income. They go to the valleys less often, bringing them into less contact with mosquitoes, meaning there’s less malaria around, and their health improves in all sorts of other ways too. At this point it becomes feasible to tackle some of the other water-related diseases which are so prevalent, like worms and conjunctivitis, both of which quickly re-infect where hygiene is poor. It is possible to de-worm whole villages on the same day, we can also bring physiotherapists in to try to free people from some of the muscle pain which results from having carried heavy loads on their heads for long periods of time.
Last but not least, through our help the young men who couldn’t find wives because no woman wanted a life of weight lifting and water carrying can finally look forward to having families of their own.
