Day 3 - we visit the projects at last - first stop Hiwane

Posted by Sadie - Thursday, April 17, 2008

Up at 5.30am again to get going at 6am for the boys to get good shots before the sun gets too high. We had breakfast en route – omelette sandwich, a boiled potato and an egg. Mark’s already been filming me and Serge about how we’re feeling. It’s hard to say yet...

We arrived first at a market which had an unprotected water source nearby, so we started to walk down to get some case studies and pictures. I was feeling really nervous at this stage. Up til then we’d been fairly sheltered and been driven almost everywhere so it was sort of a shock to be walking amongst everyone. As we walked down the path from the market I was struggling already to keep it together – I couldn’t believe my eyes as really young kids were walking the opposite direction with big jerry cans on their backs.

When we reached the stream, we saw a group of children and some older ladies filling up their water containers. In comparison with everyone else we’d seen in the town they just looked so poor and quite unhealthy in some cases. We met a little girl who was 11 , collecting water for her whole family. The 2 containers were lifted onto a donkey and also 1 carried on her back. I then lifted one of the containers onto the donkey and the children put one onto my back and wrapped it round with a blanket. The containers are 25 litres – the same size as our refill drums and all I could think was ‘I know how heavy this is going to be.’ I only stood there for a minute but it was so heavy and awkward to carry I could hardly straighten up. It made me realise what those little children had to go through every day just to survive, and that tipped my emotions over the edge. I felt horrible crying in front of them because that was just their life...but feeling the physical effort that they have to go through to collect water which is contaminated and going to make them ill anyway really shocked me.

Amazingly when we asked the translator to ask if they were ever ill from drinking the water, at first they all said no. We tried phrasing it differently: ‘are you ever sick in your stomach?’ as apparently they all thought that being ill was something serious that you would die from. Stomach upsets were something that they were so used to it didn’t register that this meant being ill too, and they hadn’t thought to tell us!