Week 6 - Let there be water!

Location: Ssese Island
Our trip to Ssese was definitely the highlight of my week!! Since taking a course on infectious diseases, I have been very interested in water and how essential it is in preventing or causing disease. Our wonderful leader Joel took us to the villages water source and after walking through a long stretch of field and trees, when he stopped and said "This is it" I thought he was joking. The "lake" was about 7 feet deep with about a 4 foot radius. When we were walking, everyone was stepping in water and puddles which we didn't realize lead to their water source. During the heavy rains, which we experienced there, everything is practically washed downhill into this lake. I realized that on our way to the lake, I didn't see any pit latrines which meant that everyone would go where it was convenient and unfortunately, that would end up in the water they would consume later. Before we left we were told about the poor conditions but seeing it and inadvertently contributing to it by visiting it made our presence there much more significant. It was made clear that our purpose was to bring water to this village but seeing what they had been dealing with completely changed my whole attitude and thought process. After that visit, we returned back to the site to put everything together. My eyes were glued on the engineered and I sat there and prayed to myself because it had to work. Everyone was tired and hot but after seeing there source, we were all energized and ready to finish this project which is basically an essential human right! At the end of the day when we saw water flowing, we were all so relieved and I was really proud of what we had accomplished and I hope work like this will continue in the future!

Week 6- Sustainability

Each year our program does a community service project in Kalangala, an island that’s a part of the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria.  For the first two years of the program we helped build pit latrines in two different communities where there were few or no pit latrines previously.  This year we worked on a project extending the line of clean water further into the island.  My initial excitement for the project was somewhat quelled when I found out that we were adding a water tap in a place where there had already been a tap.  Robert, our engineer assisting us on the project, explained that each community that received a tap would need to pay a small fee for each jerry can of water.  Apparently, the community we worked with previously had a tap but refused to pay for the water once the initial free-trial period of six months was over. So, the company took out the tap.
    We were now adding back a tap and extending the line further into the center of the island.  While I was excited about getting our hands dirty and doing some real public health work, the idea of sustainability lingered in the back of my mind. Would a community that already once refused to pay for the water now agree to pay? When a new group of NU students comes next year will our project still be operating?  I hope so.  There are signs that it will succeed and signs that it will fail.  Joel, a well respected member of the community, worked on this project to convince the community that it was a worthwhile venture.  He sensitized the villagers, a tactic that might not have previously been successful.  However, we still saw very few villagers assisting us on the project.  We were repeatedly told by several people that more villagers should be helping with the project. So why weren’t they there?
    My fear was and still is that they are not that interested in the water taps.  I wondered if a pit latrine would have been a better investment or would have drawn better community involvement.  How did we decide to work on this project rather than build another pit latrine as the other two groups did?  It’s unclear but I hope that this was not a case of foreigners pushing an agenda on a local people. Water sanitation is a “hot topic” in global health and the office that sponsors our program has made it clear through a variety of new programs that they are interested in water sanitation.  It’s definitely an important topic as we saw the awful, contaminated water source that those villagers were using. However, I wonder if we pushed our agenda of focusing on water sanitation too much at the detriment of providing a product that would actually be accepted by the people in Kalangala.