EDITOR’S NOTE: Rachel Osborn, a LaPorte native and a 2014 graduate of Michigan State University, left LaPorte in October 2014 to serve as a missionary in Chad, north central Africa, for six months. Rachel, a 2011 LaPorte High School graduate, majored in Global and Area Studies–International Development at MSU. She is the daughter of Drummond and Sue Osborn of LaPorte. Rachel sends occasional columns to WNLP; here is her latest. You can also follow Rachel’s adventures at http://rachelinchad.wordpress.com.
“Clean water” is a humanitarian aid buzzword these days, and for good reason: access to clean drinking water can reduce illnesses by staggering percentages, and water is necessary for effective hygiene and agricultural practices. You’ve seen the fundraising campaigns for building wells in Third World countries; perhaps you’ve donated, perhaps you’ve even spearheaded a campaign yourself; and if you’ve never even bothered to turn an eye to the plight of those around the world without clean water access, you still know the truth intuitively: Water is life.
But there’s a second truth that you know just as intuitively, though perhaps have never contemplated: Water is death.
And a third truth that arises from the previous two: Water is complicated.
I grew up in the Great Lakes region with no concept of water scarcity, where “drought” means simply that corn might be more expensive that year. In my mind, lack of access to clean water was synonymous with lack of access to a sanitary well. No clean water? Drill a well. Easy. Of course there are always issues with wells that are donated versus paid for by the community, and wisdom is needed to handle financing and training so that the community takes ownership of the maintenance and administration of the well. But there are many published discussions that speak to that problem, and many viable solutions for well ownership, and I won’t get into all of that here. In essence, I believed that water problems could be solved with money and a community involvement plan.
Turns out that’s false, as anyone from a dry part of the world already knows. Money and community involvement work in places where water exists, but needs to be accessed more effectively — but then there’s the rest of the world.
In Goz Beida, the problem is a lack of fractures. Ask your neighborhood hydrologist to explain it to you more accurately, but basically there is not an accessible groundwater supply, and when it is accessible, it’s accessible only by deep boreholes that need motorized pumps in order to draw water. And motorized pumps break or run out of fuel, and to fix a pump or buy new fuel requires responsible budgeting, which is never a guarantee here. So when the deep boreholes shut down, people turn to shallow, hand-drawn wells, which are scarce and dirty. I have a heavy-duty water filter, but most Chadians don’t, and typhoid is as common as the flu.
Out of town, in the rural communities, the situation is worse. NGOs generally don’t have the equipment to dig deep enough boreholes, and even if they did the necessary motor maintenance and fuel consumption (fuel is easily accessible in Goz Beida, but not so much in the rural villages) make upkeep implausible. The nearest viable manual pump well site may be miles from a community. During dry season, entire villages shut down — the residents pack up and move to Goz Beida or another town with viable wells, because they cannot survive in their home villages.
Water is life. No water, no life.
And then come the rains. Rainy season brings water, of course — the crop fields get their annual soaking, and everyone puts out their buckets and basins to catch the life that falls from the sky. But the ground is too dry, and so instead of being soaked deep into an underground reservoir that could then be tapped during dry season, the water puddles and runs off; and where it puddles, it breeds malaria vectors (otherwise known as mosquitoes) and infectious disease; and where it runs off, it forms formidable seasonal rivers, called wadis, that isolate villages from each other and from the rest of the world.
Treatable maladies, particularly those involving pregnant women and women giving birth, become deadly, because there are too many uncrossable wadis between the village and the nearest health clinic. Economic activity stalls because trade routes are severed. The bigger towns, like Goz Beida, have airstrips — but plane privileges are reserved for NGO workers or for medical evacuation emergencies as deemed by certain NGOs. And if you have a medical evacuation emergency outside of Goz Beida, you’re out of luck.
So water is death, and water is life, and water is complicated.
Environmental experts say that the future offers no reprieve. Pending global climate change is linked to increased desertification for the borderlands of the Sahara.
But there’s hope. You’ve been waiting 724 words to read that “but,” and I’ve been waiting 724 words to write it. There’s no easy road out, but there is a road. A government group is studying water usage in the Middle East, looking to import appropriate methods and technologies, such as drip irrigation. An NGO is in the area experimenting with sand dam construction, which would slow down wadi runoff enough to allow some of the rains to be absorbed into an underground reservoir for use during dry season. Education has been on the upswing for several decades in Chad — first in the South, and now it’s spreading to the North, and that education is finding the intellectuals and turning them into engineers, and those engineers are searching for solutions. Infrastructure is being rebuilt and newly built, slooooowly but surely.
I have no “donate here! Do something!” call to action at this end of this article — just a call to awareness, and an attempt to untangle for you a small part of a really large and broken world. The easy solutions to today’s problems have been for the most part accomplished, and yet the problems persist; and though there is nothing impossible about feeding the hungry and hydrating the thirsty, there’s plenty about it that’s complicated. It’s easy to donate some money and then turn away; it’s hard to lean into the confusion and realize that people are suffering and we don’t have the right answers yet. But it’s necessary.
It’s only after we dive headfirst into the hopelessness, after we suck it deep into our lungs and exhale it with a sputter, that we can emerge on the other side and taste the sweet breeze of hope.